Episode Report Card Demian: B- | 0 USERS: N/A YOU GRADE IT Brain Drain
By Demian | Season 4 | Episode 7 | Aired on November 7, 2001
Props to Frenna for explaining the concept of "wild feeds" to everyone on the forums. Also, Cole's back this week. You all know what to do.
The episode opens with the oven cam. For those of you unfamiliar with the concept, this would mean the camera has been placed at the back of the interior of the appliance, the better to capture the action from a "humorous" and "unexpected" angle. I wait for Hedwig to poke his head in to wax poetic on Anne Murray, a Canadian working in the American idiom, and David Bowie, an idiom working in Canada and America. Doesn't happen, needless to say. Instead, I get Piper and Phoebe peering in from the Manor kitchen at a tray of burnt cookies. Piper slides the tray out with a "dammit" and tosses it onto the kitchen island: "I must be losing my touch." Phoebe's fine with that; had Piper remained a world-class chef, Phoebe would be a black dress away from looking like an Italian grandmother. Piper supposes she should whip up another batch of cookies, but Phoebe tells her to ease off. Piper's "obsessing," Phoebe claims. Piper begs to differ. She's not obsessing, she "just want[s] everything to be perfect." "It's a baby shower," Phoebe notes as she crosses to the refrigerator, "not a royal wedding." She chides Piper for putting far too much effort into the affair already when one takes into account the fact that Piper and "Wendy" haven't been close friends in some time. Piper evidently believes it's time to rectify that situation. "In the last couple of years we've vanquished more friendships than demons." So this is going to be yet another episode wherein Piper The Obsessive-Compulsive spends the first fifteen minutes bitching about how she just wants a normal life, the next forty battling the demons who enter to take advantage of her ambivalent attitude towards her "destiny," and the last five learning her Lesson Of The Week? Joy. I can't wait to find out what the B plot is.
Phoebe pulls a carton of milk out of the fridge and rattles it. "Got milk?" she asks. "Somebody forgot to put it on the list again," Piper seethes, barely maintaining her composure while providing the B plot in one sentence. Raige is the Manor's new resident fuck-up, and tonight she will learn something about responsibility. It's going to be a long evening. Phoebe tells Piper to go easy on Raige. It's going to take longer than a week for her to adjust to Manor life. Piper's not having it. "There are common courtesies," she snits. "Common sense. Rules." I know I should sympathize with Piper. I've had more than my share of roommate situations where we simply couldn't adjust to each other's manner of living, to disastrous results. And the best situations were those where we used common sense to recognize common courtesies and arrive at a set of workable, livable rules. But Piper's being an unbearable bitch about it, so no sympathy from me. She orders Phoebe to grab a couple of gauzy party baskets and follow her into the parlor