Episode Report Card Aaron: B | Grade It Now! YOU GRADE IT Death, dicks, dope, and a dancer
By Aaron | Season 1 | Episode 8 | Aired on 07.21.2001
Meanwhile, Claire is still searching for Captain America. Instead, she finds Parker and Dennis The Evil Counselor doing the wooded nasty in a sleeping bag. She apologizes profusely, and backs away before tripping over a root and hitting the ground. Heh. Lauren Ambrose even falls cute. Parker explains to Dennis that no one will believe her if she tells on them, because everyone thinks Claire is crazy. Then the Ironic Segue Fairy cuts us to a Discovery Channel special on "the sexual habits of the koala." As the announcer explains that "the male koala's penis is forked like a snake's tongue," we see David eating yogurt and watching with porn-like fascination. Nate enters behind him, asking, "Whatcha watching?" in a suggestive tone of voice. "PBS. Very funny," is David's sardonic reply. Nate pulls up a chair beside him, and explains everything about Federico lying about the ultrasound and stealing materials from the Body Shop. David immediately knows to blame Kroehner, and suggests that he'll call around to find out what's going on. "Why didn't you tell me about this earlier?" he asks. Nate claims to have been distracted by David and "Square Dance Boy," and also reports that he doesn't mind if Rico does a little moonlighting. David isn't having it, though. "When he takes a job for Gilardi while he's still on the clock with us, that's treason." An amused Nate warns his brother to "stop acting like a drama queen," and David rightly snaps back, "Stop acting like you're honorary mayor of West Hollywood all of a sudden." The brothers consider Rico's betrayal as we fade to white.
Morning on the mountain. Parker approaches Claire, who apologizes for walking in on them last night. I'm not sure why. I mean, as Gustave explained last week, they were probably just engaged in a frantic search for a contact lens or something. Parker takes the apology well, even going so far as to suggest that "maybe it'll break the ice" between them. Claire looks confused, and in a perfectly composed shot, she and Parker chat in the foreground while Dennis watches in the background between them. You'll note that my buddy Allen Coulter keeps all three of them in focus the entire time. Parker confesses that she thinks Claire is "funny and cool" and wants to be her friend. The lovely Lauren Ambrose laughs at this, but agrees to give it a shot before starting the day's hike.
At the Body Shop, Rico returns to find Nate and David waiting for him. David reports that "some of [Rico's] more ardent fans in prep rooms around L.A. are calling this one [his] Sistine Chapel." Okay, eww. It frightens me that there's a mortician's grapevine for this sort of thing. Rico explains that he only did it for the challenge. "You gotta understand…her head was like a watermelon that somebody hit with a sledgehammer. A case like that doesn't come along every day." Personally, I find his exuberance here to be kinda cute, but David is all business. "What did he offer you to leave?" he asks. "What are you offering me to stay?" responds Rico. Ooh. Tension. I love it. This is just like when Steinbrenner threatened Giuliani with the prospect of moving the Yankees to New Jersey if he didn't get a new stadium deal. Although, come to think of it, baseball probably is the only sport in the world that could actually be improved by moving it to New Jersey. Sorry, Sars. I kid because I love. In fact, you all should know that I've always considered Sars to be the coolly professional Tiger Woods to my endearingly immature Sergio Garcia (and non-sports fans can just think of me as the Horus to her Isis). She's hitting three-hundred yard drives to the center of the fairway each week, and I'm out here gallivanting recklessly about the course (or in this case, corpse), dangling my modifiers and rakishly leaving the punctuation outside the quotation marks. You should just call me the Subjunctive Casey Martin. Oy. I know. That was bad. I was going for a home-run name joke, and I ended up Bunting. Wow. I'm just like a big ol' Barnacle of Affection today, ain't I? Oh, what's that you say, Sars? Get out? Now? Ja wohl, meine fuhrerin!