Episode Report Card Djb: D | 1 USERS: A+ YOU GRADE IT The Love Pope
By Djb | Season 4 | Episode 4 | Aired on 08.01.2000
Gym. Said tells The Boy Formerly Known as Boy that the homicide detective who arrested him has dropped by for a meeting. Cut to aforementioned detective, a man so decrepit that the pallbearers for his own funeral are standing outside of the prison's front gate, antsily checking their watches. He only has a few months to live, his doctors say, so he wants to clear the air ASAP: he tampered with the evidence in The Boy Formerly Known As Boy's trial and had a friend in forensics doctor up the results to make it look like TBFKAB's fingerprints were all over it. Oops. He still knows that the "cocksucker" (I'm sorry, were the results of this case motivated by homophobia? That hadn't been made crystal freakin' clear. Thanks for clarifying) is guilty, but he wanted to clear his own name, because we're thematically required to think of absolution before death a lot this week.
TBFKAB charmingly reports to Said after the meeting that when they "go public with this information, the press will get a seven-inch boner." Wow. No, he really said that. Because it's not TV. It's HBO. Said, knotty moral ambiguities finally catching up with him, goes all Allah on TBFKAB's ass and recuses himself from the case. "Immediately." Wherever will TBFKAB turn now? My guess is right out of the gates of Oz before this episode ends, and then right back in during an upcoming, Megyn-recapped episode like, say, next week. Sorry, Boy. But this ain't over. Cut to the TV news telling us that TBFKAB's case lasted twelve seconds and that he is now innocent. Furrowed brows ahoy. Jason packs his thing (y'know, the "Boy" shirt) and he's gone.
Said spots Glynn somewhere gray with bars all around and calls him over for "a word" about the hiring of a replacement for Tim McManus. Too late, Glynn shoots back, he's already hired someone. Cut to this new hire, an arguable political pawn (he's African-American) wearing such a widely-lapelled sports jacket with small white spots on it and a black mock turtleneck under it and a goatee of such outmoded proportions that I wonder if this "Martin Querns" hasn't fashioned his entire aesthetic after a Lionel Richie-circa-1984 photo shoot when he hosted the American Music Awards. Querns thanks Glynn for the opportunity to shape up Em City, which Glynn calls "a failed experiment," and Glynn shares with him that his top priorities in running Oz are "one, keeping a lid on the racial tension, and two, keeping a lid on the violence in general." Querns concurs that these are his top priorities as well (shouldn't this all have been covered in the interview? What'd they talk about during that lengthy process? The surprising platinum sales of his solo albums? The best Commodores song to perform at karaoke night? Is "Hello" really about a blind girl?), requesting a "free hand" in trying out his own style in running the place. Glynn tells him that's exactly what he had in mind: "Until you fuck up." They shake on it.