Episode Report Card Djb: D | 0 USERS: N/A YOU GRADE IT In The Claire
By Djb | Season 4 | Episode 8 | Aired on 2000.08.30
Back in his cell, Moses keeps digging and Miles keeps, um, self-rendering, and Moses gives the ol' chit-chat one more try: "Sometimes the reality of what's gonna happen fucks me up too." Cue two more racial epithets of strangely unimaginative variety. Moses begins to sing "Amazing Grace," and when Miles leans far enough into the wall to tell him to shut up once more, Moses smashes his fist through the hole and takes Miles down into a stranglehold. Okay, that was kind of cool. It wasn't Shirley-or-that-fag-kid-doing-anything-dammit-anything-at-all cool, but it had its merits as far as these two are concerned. LoPresti breaks it up. Miles is carted off, very very dead. Cut back to LoPresti carrying a cardboard box of the dead man's stuff, and Moses asks LoPresti for the hand-held mirror that has been passed from Shirley to that fag kid and then to Miles, driving home some nebulous thematic connection between them I'm still at a loss to comprehend. LoPresti fishes it out of the box and tosses it toward the cell. It breaks into many, many pieces as he chides, "Aw, gee. Seven years of bad luck." Um, yawn? You mean it hasn't been seven years already?
Schillinger! Yay! A blow for fans of boring, over-exhausted subplots everywhere! Murphy slums it on Cellblock B and tells the aforementioned devil man that his "daughter-in-law" has come to visit. He walks into the visiting room to lay eyes on the hairstyle from literally every female photo out of my Long Island middle-school yearbook, bedecked in a dual-tone denim jacket that in itself fairly screams, "To me, TJ Maxx is more than just an expensive designer label. He's also a friend." Gee, I wonder what type of characterization they're trying to set up for this chick. Shhhh. Let's listen in! And so this "Carrie" introduces herself as "Hank's wife," and breaks into racking sobs when Vern informs her that he didn't know his son was married. His level of sympathy for her emotional outburst is, I don't think I need to report, boundless. She backstories the day away for our convenience: she and Hank met and got real cuddly real fast, and when he suddenly came into some money a few weeks back, they got married. Then he disappeared. Schillinger, who clearly missed last week's episode (and Megyn's delightful recap of said episode) due to countless other diabolical schemes he needed to enact or complete at a moment's notice (I'm sure he has a "Bless This Satanic Mess" sampler or embroidered pillow of his own down at Inferno, Inc.'s executive offices), missed the boat on the whole "Hank as dead son number two" routine and tells weepy Carrie that Hank left for Miami with no real conjecture as to when he was coming back. Problem: Carrie's pregnant. Oy. Does the evil nature of each subsequent generation lessen when the child is still indirectly the spawn of the devil? Does the dominant "EE" of Schillinger's EEvil punnet square ever fade into a recessive 'Ee,' by which a grandchild would just be the carrier of said evil without it actually manifesting evil of its own? Schillinger sits poised on the brink of a (shudder) smile. No sir, that evil right there is all in the family, and it ain't gonna be fished out of the gene pool any time soon.