Episode Report Card Wing Chun: B | Grade It Now! YOU GRADE IT "My Husband's Back And He Phases Through Solid Matter"
By Wing Chun | Season 1 | Episode 6 | Aired on 10.29.2006
ikiN wraps up Niki's options: let D.L. take off with Micah, or do exactly what ikiN says. Niki considers for a second and then asks, "Where's the money?" "Good choice," smirks ikiN. Perish, non! Survive, oui
After the break, a shell-shocked Hiro and Ando trudge back to their car. Hiro's still bumming hard that he didn't save those little bitches at the poker game; Ando's still reminding him that Hiro himself would have been killed. Hiro pouts some more; Ando wisely tells him, "Every hero is on a journey to find his place in the world. But it's a journey. You don't start at the end. Otherwise, they can't make a movie about it later." God, if only Brandon Routh's Superman had started at the end, I could get back the nine hours I spent watching that shit. "What if I'm on the wrong path?" Hiro yells. "What if I was supposed to save those people?" "You can bend time and space," Ando points out. "Maybe when you can do it better, you can come back here and fix things." "Like a do-over?" asks Hiro, nearly placated. "Exactly," says Ando. "A do-over," says Hiro, allowing himself a smile. "I like that." Hiro is not complicated.
In Odessa, Claire is straightening up the great room when Sandra swoops in and asks where Claire's dad is: "I mean, not your biological father but, you know -- your dad." Aw! Sandra is endearingly flustered in this episode. Claire says that Bennett is "walking out the bio-parents." "Is that what you're calling them -- 'the bio-parents'?" drawls Sandra. "Oh, that's so cold and impersonal. And fitting." Hee! Oh, Sandy. If you would just get rid of your hideous purse dog, we could hang.
Outside the Bennett McMansion, Bennett is indeed walking the faux-rents to their cars, thanking them for coming and saying how much their visit meant to Claire. "When I was her age, I had enough weighing on my head," says Faux-Mom. "I'm glad I could help." They all shake hands, and then Faux-Dad exhales that he thinks that went well. Bennett agrees that it did. "If there's anything else you need..." Faux-Dad trails off ominously. "I'll keep you posted," grins Bennett. I don't want to say that the Fauxs here are the least convincing putative biological parents I've ever seen, but Rooster Hannigan and Lily St. Regis should watch their backs.
Inside, Claire and Sandra debrief at the kitchen island, Sandra asking whether the meeting went as Claire had hoped. "Not really," says Claire wistfully, and then amends that to say she doesn't know what she was hoping for: "I guess I just wanted them to tell me who I am. They don't know any better than I do." Sandra platitudes that one has to figure out one's identity on one's own. Claire asks Sandra to throw out the cupcakes before Claire eats them all, and when Sandra takes them to the laundry room to chuck them -- perhaps to douse them with bleach just to make sure Claire doesn't fish them out of the garbage later -- she calls back that she has to hand it to Bennett: "This isn't the first time we've tried to find those bio-parents... When you were a baby, we thought you had something wrong with your chromosomes -- some disease." Claire tenses up, listening. "We needed to screen your parents to see if they were carriers." Sandra comes to the doorway, combing Mr. Muggles and saying, "I was scared to death, and they were nowhere to be found." "What kind of disease?" asks Claire. "How did you know there was something wrong with me?" "Nothing was wrong with you, you were fine!" Sandra protests. Sure, Claire had the kind of chromosomal damage that shows up on test results spelling out "RIGHT AS RAIN" in those little black ovals. "Was I doing anything abnormal?" asks Claire. "You had a cough, Claire," says Sandra, as Mr. Muggles licks her lips -- suggesting, perhaps, that Sandra is not Odessa's leading expert in normalcy. "Don't turn hypochondriac on me!" Sandra adds, breezing past. "Your brother's bad enough." You guys, it had been so long since we'd seen Claire's brother that I swear when Sandra said that, I thought for a second that she was referring to the dog. You know that's how she thinks of him. Bennett comes back inside, fondly asking Claire, "Was that as scary for you as it was for me?" Claire gives him a hug, replying, "You're a very brave man, Dad." He kisses the top of her head as they stand together in the kitchen with all their seeeeeeeeeeeeeeecrets.