Episode Report Card Djb: D | 4 USERS: A+ YOU GRADE IT In The Claire
By Djb | Season 4 | Episode 8 | Aired on 08.29.2000
Ouch. Welcome to the sort-of-finale of a show I'm actually sad to see end for a while. I must, must, must throw some major props in the direction of co-recapper and in-house etiquette administrator ("Oh, look, pamie, your mom is back"), Megyn. Also big props to the regulars on the forums, Paulie for snagging a satellite dish and moving across the street, and Sars, for deciding to forgo an entire day out of every other weekend to willingly stay at home and wrestle with endless, compound, stream-of-consciousness sentences (with tons --TONS -- of parentheticals) that make up syntactical behemoths much like one you are reading right now. Thanks.
Fade up on Augustus "If Stilted Metaphor be the Food of Life, Prattle On" Hill, sitting (as opposed to his usual narrational demeanor of "dancing mirthfully whilst donning top hat and cane" or "sweating to Alyssa Milano's patented shakes and shimmies in her much-derided though hopelessly underrated Teen Steam exercise video 'cause Hill's just gotta let it out, gotta let it out) in front of a makeshift game show set and explaining in as many words as exist in this universe and any others you may know, "Back in the 1950s there was a game show on TV called You Bet Your Life, hosted by Groucho Marx." Hill editorializes that Groucho's questions were "inane," and tut-tuts the host's wont to "insult the contestants," like Hill is the self-appointed president of the Citizens for the Ethical Treatment of People Who Can Correctly Guess the Price of a Box of Laundry Detergent to the Closest Penny but Without Going Over, um, Society all of a sudden. Jeez, Hill, if you really need to promote the cause that badly, why not get out there and do the grassroots thing, pounding the pavement and letting downtrodden game show contestants of the world know that they don't have to PAY for vowels, or lose all their hard-fought earnings to those pesky Whammies, or sit in silence while some unctuous host didactically tells them the correct answer to the ten billion dollar question like he's known it all his life, when in reality all he's doing is reading it off the card in front of him. See, now he's gone and gotten me all up in hackles, too. He kvetches on, as if presenting groundbreaking empirical evidence on the matter: "But not once did anyone actually bet their life," which seems to be a matter of particular surprise to Hill, considering the show's other maudlin contingencies, including a wacky duck on a string and a live studio audience and the fact that the very genre loudly advertises that the show must comply with the predetermined laws and mores of applicable law while also remaining staunchly in the rubric of recreation, seeing as it is a "game" and all. So who's the groucho now, Hill? Who's the groucho indeed? And while you're out there, do you think you could do something about Tom Bergeron? I mean, since I can see from this display you know so much about the cause and all. Anything?
It's spirit week inside Oz again, as the nearly all-black Em City shouts its well-rehearsed rallying cry, "Clayton! Clayton! Clayton!" at the televised news of Devlin's shooting, while the increasingly Aryan Cellblock B wants to "Kill Hughes! Kill Hughes! Kill Hughes!" McManus sits dejectedly in his office and tells Murphy to call for a lockdown, but as the C.O. attempts to corral the wayward inmates into their cells, a black prisoner hauls off and takes Murphy down with the heavy-handed wallop of non-ambiguous thematic relevance. Black prisoner? White guard? I don't want to speak too soon here, folks, but I think it is entirely possible that this episode might be tackling the sticky issue of racial politics. Let's go see!