Episode Report Card Grade It Now! YOU GRADE IT Where it all began
By Sara M | Season 5 | Episode 23 | Aired on 11.12.1998
Oooh, Christmas party time! JTT is drinking eggnog. You know, if he were a real bad boy, it would be spiked. But this is Disney. Cheating is fine, but drinking is bad. JTT gets surrounded by Robbie and the thirty-five-year-olds. They’re pissed. We get a shot of Ian locked in his locker in a dark hallway. Wow, he could die in there. And he may well have, since we don’t see him ever again in this movie. JTT gets carried off by the four, and then it’s the next morning and Mary is waiting for him to pick her up to go to the airport.
But he can’t, because he’s lying in the middle of a desert glued into a Santa suit. He wakes up and realizes his situation. He rubs his head. Um, how did Robbie and his friends do this? Did they knock him out? Drug him? They also must have taken his clothes off and put him into the Santa suit, beard and all, while he was unconscious. If four guys did that to me I would be really upset, to say the least. And they left him lying in the middle of a desert! He could have died! That’s two people Robbie almost killed. But JTT takes it all in stride. He’s going to have to find a way to get that beard off, because I can’t see that teen idol face of his and am quickly losing interest in the movie.
Back at school, Robbie offers to give Mary a ride home in his SUV, which I thought he crashed like the day before. Maybe it’s a self-repairing model. Also, it turns out that Robbie lives in the same town as JTT and Mary, which is silly. Well, I don’t know -- maybe that town doesn’t have a high school/college and thus has to send all of its children to Palisades College because of a town law. Anyway, Mary threatens to “slug” Robbie if he does anything slimy. A threat indeed, since I’m sure he’s really scared of getting hit by a female. Although I don’t feel quite right calling Mary that, seeing as she lurches around and speaks so mannishly.
JTT makes it to a gas station without dying of thirst or heat exhaustion. But wouldn’t this have been a better movie if he had? Think about it. Then Gary Coleman could have spent the rest of the movie seeking revenge on Robbie. JTT calls his dad and asks him to wire him some money to get home, but Dad doesn’t believe that he’s in the desert in a Santa suit. And doesn’t give him any money. And hangs up on him. Not to worry -- some old lady heard the conversation. JTT appeals to her elderlyness to get a free ride from her and her friends, who are all on their way to a Tom Jones concert in Vegas. Dude, they’re like eighty years old. They were forty when Tom Jones started his career. People my mother’s age are fans of his, not people of an age right between my grandmother and great-grandmother. What an insult to Tom Jones, who did nothing to deserve this. Well, except for the video for “If I Only Knew.” Anyway, the next shot is of the Old Lady Mobile, which is of course a boat car from the fifties. I would point out how stereotypical and wrong it is to have the old ladies drive such a vehicle, but the fact is that my own grandmother drives a car so huge that Chevrolet isn’t allowed to sell it to the general public anymore, so I’m on shaky ground here. JTT has to sit bitch in the car, surrounded by old ladies who enjoy the music of Tom Jones. Oh, a fate worse than death. Then one of them falls asleep, and her dentures fall out into his crotch. All gummy-jawed, she follows them. He responds, “Hey, get out of there!” which I thought he delivered pretty well. I did not find the fact that an elderly person’s dentures fell out funny at all, however. Then a lady in the front seat spins around with a huge open jar of pickles and offers them to the folks in the back seat. Apparently I was asleep when the stereotype that old people like to swing open jars of pickles around emerged. Of course she spills the pickle juice on JTT’s lap, except that this lady is not very good at staged spills and so she basically just launches it at him. Then JTT throws up twice, and the old ladies throw him out of the car and rip off his beard. See, I told you that beard wouldn’t last. ["Was that the director's subtle way of telling us that the rumors about JTT's sexuality are true? Heh. Just kidding, JTT's legal team!" -- Sars]