Episode Report Card M. Giant: B- | Grade It Now! YOU GRADE IT Taking Out The Trash
By M. Giant | Season 1 | Episode 6 | Aired on 10.23.2007
In a hurry? Read the recaplet for a nutshell description! Finished? Click here to close.Being off the Town Council doesn't seem to agree with Taylor. And neither does anyone else, except Leila. This ends up tying into a more substantive problem faced by the Council: the town rubbish tip next to the kitchen. The Council decides to relocate the stinky mess to a new landfill they dig outside of town. Guylan proves to be a lot better at winning elections than he is at handling a shovel. Taylor and Leila decide to sit it out entirely, until Leila wisely abandons the rebellion. Taylor, on the other hand, gets sentenced by the Council to fill the town water tank, and refuses to do that, either. So the whole town steps up and does it without her. Mike, by the way, is handling his new role in the private sector just fine, at least by comparison. This week's Showdown requires the districts to root around in a giant tank of baked beans and live pigs so they can retrieve color-coded tin cans. The teams end up being ranked as follows: Red, Green, Yellow, and Blue. They also win the reward, and here's the choice they have to make: a whole rack of fresh produce versus a pair of dune buggies and an unlimited supply of gas for them. The Council wisely chooses the former. After job assignments, Zach lays down the law with Taylor and Leila, telling them that if they don't do their jobs they don't get paid, and they can forget about the Gold Star -- "FOREVER!" That's a direct quote. Before the Town Hall meeting, the Council unanimously decides to award the Gold Star to DK, who has been standing out the last couple of days as a mature peacekeeper. With the suspense of the decision thus defused, you know something's going to happen to derail it at the meeting. At the Town Hall, Taylor's eviction from the Council doesn't keep everyone from piling on her, because she sucks just as much as a civilian, and things get pretty ugly. Until DK steps up to calm everyone down, further cementing what was already his lock on the Gold Star. But when Jonathan asks who wants to go home, DK says he's had enough of the drama, and decides to opt out. Until Guylan takes him aside and talks him into staying, and DK ends up being really glad he did, now that he's $20,000 richer. He sure would have felt like a bonehead watching tonight's episode at home if he'd left. Want more? The full recap starts right below!
Even the previouslies think Taylor is a jerk now. With all the controversy over child labor and child endangerment and child exploitation, we totally forgot to worry about the ethics of giving a ten-year-old the asshole edit.
It's Day 17, and Laurel and Anjay are welcoming Zach and Guylan to the Council by having them up at the butt-crack of dawn to ring the bell and wake up the town. Guylan confidently interviews that he's going to do a great job as the new Red Leader, and Zach is rather more obnoxious, doing a little celebratory song and dance for the interview cameras. At least none of the other kids are around to see it, presumably. Zach gets the honor of ringing the big bell. Inside the Yellow girls' bunkhouse, Taylor sits up in her sleeping bag and literally screams. "I'm sorry, I'm going to complain," she says, suddenly dressed, up, and stomping toward the bunkhouse door. She interviews that she plans to get Zach back. We see her approaching the bell-ringing council with her wingmen Kelsey and Leila. And apparently to her, the equivalent of Zach telling her to work more and be less rude is for her to tell Zach how many people hate him and make fun of his alleged unibrow (for the record, Zach does not have a unibrow). Laurel shoos the Mini-Heathers away and assures Zach that Taylor's simply acting out of jealousy and humiliation. Not a sublimated crush? Zach, of course, already knows what Laurel is telling him. "I win," he interviews.
But what has he won? Bonanza City appears to be turning into an environmental disaster -- huge mud puddles, trash barrels overflowing with empty food cans, and that increasingly grody little yard right next to the cookhouse where they've apparently been throwing everything they don't eat. After 17 days, that's got to be getting rank, even despite the cold. The rats seem to like it, though. Clearly they haven't seen Ratatouille. DK worries that the discarded food might attract something larger and more dangerous, like a coyote or perhaps Governor Richardson. Sophia interviews, "Bonanza is disgusting." Which is kind of rich, because if they'd kept disposing of their scraps the way Sophia was at the beginning, the dump would be in the middle of the street right in front of the kitchen instead of discreetly tucked away next door. Meanwhile, a rat stands up and indignantly squeaks, "Disgusting? My home this is!"