Episode Report Card 1 USERS: B+ YOU GRADE IT Misfortune
By Chuck | Season 5 | Episode 5 | Aired on 02.02.2002
Hill sits in his wheelchair inside a spinning pod along with lots of massive, numbered ping-pong balls, which looks pretty cool. Rebadow stands behind him, stone-faced. Maintaining the fortune-teller motif, Hill talks about being lured into a storefront, knowing that it's all bullshit, yet hearing the one thing that you really want to hear, and then beginning to hope that she (yes, "she" again) actually knows the truth.
Dave Brass accepts his really big two-million-dollar check, and informs the world that he's a C.O. at Oz. Or he used to be. He quit. Rebadow looks livid. He then looks livid in a closer shot. And a closer one. And a closer one. Until we're counting his eyebrow hairs while feeling dizzy from the rapid cuts. In the gym, Terry Kinney jumps rope, perhaps as penance for the last scene. Murphy walks in and asks if anyone has heard from Brass. Nope -- no one. Not his family, not his sure-to-be-a-sad-case girlfriend. He left the lottery office and hopped a plane. Murphy says that Brass was understandably excited upon winning, and that he'd have screwed just about any of the inmates, but that Rebadow, with a dying grandson, is an exception. Murphy thinks Brass's decision was "dead-of-winter cold." McManus counters that "Brass was a good guy" -- "was" being the operative term. McManus says he got to know Dave Brass when they were ballers, but he's so deluded that nothing he says is worth much, and he's feeling guilty about Brass, because, as usual, it's all about him, since he opened his big mouth, and because McManus forced Brass to come to Oz, even though he had a "big pair of gigantic NBA tits in his face." They must have been really huge -- but what does an NBA tit look like, anyway? Murphy tells McManus to shut up since Dave Brass filled out an application, and that working in a maximum-security prison comes with some fairly obvious risks, and then they talk some more but I'm not listening. I'm wishing that Murphy would tell McManus that he is to blame, instead of talking McManus out of his guilt, which is exactly what he wants.
Smellie walks in, all bundled up for the cold, and tells PrettyDogLady that she wishes she had a fur coat, "like one of your seeing-eye dogs." PrettyDogLady jumps up on her high horse to tell Smellie that they're actually called "guide dogs," like anyone cares, and then Smellie makes a bunch of constipated facial expressions and pretends to be interested in the progress of the program, which is going very well, thank you. PrettyDogLady puffs herself up by explaining that she's got three of the more disparate prisoners she's ever worked with, and she's kicking ass. Alvarez rolls out of bed with his dog (I'm still wondering where these dogs go to the bathroom); Penders gives his dogs some pills; and Hill -- uh oh -- Hill's a big fat mess, babbling, sweat-soaked, and falling out of bed, as his dog jumps against the glass with an Lassie-style urgent message about how drugs and people just don't mix.
Gloria repeats what the dog told her -- that Hill's got some major kidney problem that often affects paraplegics, and a whole "shitload of heroin in his bloodstream." She's also shoved some tubes up his nose. "I Just Run The Place" McManus is shocked -- shocked, I tell you -- that Hill's back on the smack, and toddles off to get to the bottom of things. But not before a snippet of Sallycize, complete with the chirpy ubiqui-blonde jumping around in a bikini behind a volleyball net, gets Guerra in a lather. McManus strides into the common area and ignores requests for an update on Hill's condition, heading straight for Redding. In a cry for help -- I mean, "show of authority" -- he grabs Redding's collar and demands to know who supplied Hill with the drugs. I fight the urge to yell, "Beecher did it!" Redding assures McManus that he knows nothing about it, that he's old, and should be dead, and refuses to outlive young Hill, and he toddles off to get to the bottom of things. McManus tells him to deliver the perp to him as soon as he finds him, so that he can give them a sound tongue-lashing and a lollipop. Redding heads straight for Poet, who denies any involvement in Hill's big smack attack, suggesting that Redding interrogate his enemies rather than his friends.