Episode Report Card Niki: B+ | Grade It Now! YOU GRADE IT Flirting with Disaster
By Niki | Season 2 | Episode 12 | Aired on 02.06.2001
Graham leans in and whispers to Lily, "Little crispy today." Yes, yes she is. Crusty, you might even say. I'm going to consider that a shout-out, and there's nothing you can do to stop me. Lily diplomatically keeps her lips sealed on that one, and says that she has work to do. "One more thing first," Graham says. "The advice column --" "is terrible," Lily interjects. He needs one idea. One idea to make it work. Lily hesitates. He tells her "the ideas off the top of your head are usually the best ones." I'm not sure if he means "your" in the general sense, or if he's referring specifically to Lily. If it's the latter, he's definitely kissing her ass. "This is terrible!" she protests through a wide, red-lipsticked smile. Yeah, looks like torture, all right. He keeps pressing, his needle apparently having stuck on "one idea." She finally relents, insists that it's stupid, and says, "What if the person giving advice was a dog?" Well, I've always suspected that those columnists were bitter, lonely old unwanted types, but that's a little blunt. Oh, she means what if the columnist literally was a dog. She's right: it is stupid. ["Plus it's something they already do, kind of at The Onion, and have been for several years. You know, 'Ask a Worker Bee,' 'Ask a Nineteenth-Century Preacher,' and the like." -- Wing Chun] Like it's not embarrassing enough writing about your most intimate problems to someone with a few designations after their name; people are going to be busting quills writing to a pooch about low sex drive and their crush on the delivery guy. Graham, however, thinks it's brilliant. He loves her! I mean, he loves it! He believes there's no one better to point out "our foibles" than a dog. It could be a good premise for a story or something, but I just don't buy it for an advice column. Graham dances around her desk trying to keep his head on while Lily takes a call. With her attention focused elsewhere, and her deflector shields down, Lily's an easy target for his overly excited lips. They plant a firm smooch on her forehead and totally knock Lily for a loop. "I-I-I-I'm sorry, what did you say?" she says into the receiver.
"I said, 'Hi Lily. It's Rick'" Rick answers. Oops.
Lily comes to. "Right. Hi!" she says emphatically. Rick says he meant to call her that morning, and then he got so busy that he thought he did call her. "Basically, I'm losing my mind over here," he says, settling at his desk with a few blueprints. "It's okay, really," she says. "You weren't missing me?" Rick asks. Oh, right. Cue the irony! "Of course I missed you! I just --" Lily says, pausing when Graham approaches her desk and stops to give her an enthusiastic thumbs up. "I just...I just don't expect you to call every..." she says, trying to recover, as she squints after Graham. Rick says he wants to take her out for dinner, if that's all right. "That's very all right," Lily gushes. They tell each other not to work too hard (that's an odd idiom, isn't it?) and hang up. Well, actually, Lily slams the phone down. She looks troubled.