Episode Report Card Niki: A | Grade It Now! YOU GRADE IT Baby Blues
By Niki | Season 2 | Episode 8 | Aired on 01.09.2001
And on the other side of town, Eli's dropping off Wannabe in Karen's safe and sensible mini-van. She thanks him for the ride and then just stares at him, making no move to open the door. Oh, no. Oh, please no. Not this. Anything but this. "So?" she says. "So?" he echoes. "So I gotta be going," I announce, as they slowly move toward each other. They don't care. In fact, I doubt they even notice that I'm gone. From the quiet squishy sounds, I'm pretty sure they're kissing, but I can't see the screen from the safety of my kitchen.
Cue the tandem relationship, as Rick enters Lily's place and softly calls out to her. He finds her out back, struggling with big bags of garbage. She yelps when she spots him on the stoop. He helps her with the trash then says simply, "I wanna talk. You wanna talk?" She does.
Back to the mini-van of mini-depravity, where Wannabe's skeezing her way into the back seat. She puts out a hand for Eli to follow. He does. She lies there and pulls him on top of her, then pulls his head down to kiss him. Tell me, when do the lambs stop screaming? Rick and Lily head into the darkened laundry room. They both start talking at once. He finally says that he was wondering what things would be like if they'd just met; if they'd be able to stick together through all the chaos. Lily says she wonders what it would have been like if they'd met first; if they'd have gotten married, had kids, and would they be divorced now. Rick says that he's screwed up in his life before, and he knows what he's capable of. He let his marriage become "this empty, numb thing." She hops up next to him on the machines and says that hers wasn't exactly a walk in the park. Yeah. We know. God. Rick says he feels like he's still screwing up. His daughter has "a real problem" and when he "look[s] at Eli and sees how far away he's gotten…" He glances sadly at Lily. "I mean, being a good father, that's something I thought I could do," he says. Teary, she grabs his face in her hands and assures him that he's a "wonderful father." They're quiet for a moment, before Rick says that he "think[s] that's what happened when [he] though that [she] might be pregnant, [he] just went back to place where [he] couldn't deal with anything." Lily tells him there hasn't been a day in her life when she hasn't said to herself "You have no idea what you're doing." She says that meeting Rick hasn't made her life any "easier, or calmer, or less crazy. If anything, [things] got crazier. But it didn't matter, because [they] were going through it together." She says that when she felt him pulling away she thought, "Oh! I know what this is. This is when he cuts and runs, just like…" Rick takes hold of her and says that he's not going anywhere. He says he may not know much of anything else in his life, but he does know that everything he wants is right there. "The laundry room?" she quips. Oh, stop! Rick says, "The laundry room. And the garbage. And the dented car. And Eli's blue hair. And a baby…maybe…if that's what we decide we want." "A baby maybe?" Lily parrots with a smile. "Shut up," Rick says. "Make me," she says, but her face says, "Take me." They kiss and start tearing at one another's clothes and gasping and thank god we switch scenes…