Episode Report Card Cate: D | Grade It Now! YOU GRADE IT How do you solve a problem like Mary?
By Cate | Season 5 | Episode 7 | Aired on 11.12.2000
At Ma Camden's Family Feedbag (tm Mr. Stupidhead), Annie is ripping up some lettuce into a bowl. I'll bet it's the same bowl she marinated the chicken in and didn't bother washing afterward. Lucy comes in and starts simpering about how sorry she is that she stayed so long at the library. Please, someone make it stop! She brags about how she writes better if she lets something "sit for a day and then [goes] back for a final polish." I think the people who write the dialogue for this show should consider employing the same technique. Except instead of that "final polish" stuff, they should just highlight ninety per cent of the dialogue they wrote and then hit the Delete key. Yes, that would be a definite improvement. Loser -- I mean Lucy says something about wanting to do her best work for senior year. I've got a news flash for her. Everyone in Glenoak goes to Crawford Clown College. They've already accepted Matt, which has to mean that mastery of the "oxygen in, carbon dioxide out" principle makes you a shoo-in. Hey, whatever happened to Annie taking her courses? Did the producers finally realize what the viewers knew all along, that that story arc was boring and poorly handled? Annie is grateful to have such a sucky daughter, but she's not so grateful that she won't harangue that daughter, ad nauseum, about Mary. Where did Mary get the money? Where is Mary now? What happened to Mary's bookstore job? And of course, whatever happened to Lucy's Homecoming Bitch nomination?
RevCam has the same conversation with Simon while doing a piss-poor job at pretending to pay attention to the twins. Then -- because the third time's the charm -- we get to endure the same conversation yet again as SuperMom calls Dopey on the phone and harasses him for info about Mary. Except here the third time is most assuredly not the charm, for not only do we find out nothing new, but we are subjected to Matt's patented "wacky nervous" routine again. It really wasn't funny the first fifty times Tori Spelling performed it, so I fail to see how it would suddenly become funny now. Hope springs eternal, I guess. Annie rudely hangs up on Dopey without saying goodbye. At least they play that for comedy this time instead of pretending it's normal for people to act that way. It feels suspiciously like a shout-out, except that I would imagine the writers probably hate our guts. Annie and RevCam go on to have a conversation in which they invent a way to eliminate both world hunger and the music of Celine Dion. Nah, I didn't think you'd buy that; you must have guessed already that they would just discuss Mary some more. We're almost ten minutes into the show and nothing has happened yet. I find myself nodding off, so I take a short break to watch the kitchen faucet drip for a while, hoping that the comparative excitement will wake me up. Feeling more rested and refreshed than I've been since this episode began, I turn on the VCR again. Ah, I'm just in time to hear RevCam say that Mary's former employers already told him they didn't give Mary any paycheques recently. I wonder if it ever occurred to anyone involved with the show that by telling RevCam all Mary's personal financial business, these characters were behaving highly unethically. In fact, I'll bet they were breaking the law. But I guess that's nothing when compared with the evil, evil sin of under-age Mary drinking that half a beer. Is this attitude completely hypocritical? Well, I think it is.