Episode Report Card Jacob Clifton: C | Grade It Now! YOU GRADE IT Elle In A Handbasket
By Jacob Clifton | Season 3 | Episode 11 | Aired on 01.08.2009
I know it's fun to be a victim, but the thing that freaks me out about this kind of thinking is that it's just as much fun to be a victim whether or not anybody is victimizing you, or even fucking cares, which means you can't really trust yourself once you head down that path. I guess I should just be grateful that she gets burned for taking the easy way out, except for how it makes it seem like Nikki's evil and Betty's completely innocent as usual, like if there were just another fat girl at Swill -- perhaps somewhere behind Nikki Blonsky -- she would have been better off sticking to her own kind. Ugh. Assuming somebody sucks because of the way they look is a fast-forward trip to a hell of your own devising, because if the best you can do is assume that beautiful people are stupid, then you deserve your loneliness.
So Betty comes in walking all weird and waddly and screaming about nothing, then fills Daniel in on how Elle's cover shoot no longer conflicts with Mode's trip to Venice, which means Betty wins the bottle of very nice wine. They chatter about how Betty's got a friend at Elle now and that can't possibly bite her in the ass, and then Daniel asks Betty to (DO HER JOB) instead of leaving work early, and pick up the Halston dress at five. Betty acts like she's being slow-motion destroyed, then fills up a big bin of beauty samples for Hilda's giftbags, and he bitches because the Queens Morning Tribulation is doing a story on Hilda's garage boutique -- which I'm so sure -- and Christina offers to go back to Queens with Papi for again, no reason, but I thought they already said that and anyway, who knows what she really said. Ignacio pisses his panties for no reason about how Betty should apparently just hoist Hilda onto her back and carry her to the land where rainbows come from, or at least as far as she can get until her feet are worn down into bloody stumps.
Now I will lay some knowledge on you, because I don't know very much about TV but I do know what the problem is here. You know how if you have a gun in the first act you have to have the gun go off in the third act, you know that thing? Well, there is an opposite corollary that if you're going to have a gun go off in the third act, probably you should have the gun in the room in the first act so that people get used to it. And when you're a screenwriter, something you must always understand and never forget is that we the audience do not have your time machine. We don't have the luxury of going back to page ten when you realize somewhere around page forty that you forgot the gun.