Episode Report Card Aaron: B+ | Grade It Now! YOU GRADE IT Botticelli
By Aaron | Season 3 | Episode 9 | Aired on 04.26.2003
Diaz Residence. Or as I like to call it, The Lyceum. Rico wanders into the living room to find Vanessa zoned out on the couch, and no dinner waiting for him in the oven. "I couldn't decide [what to make]," she explains, without even the strength to tear her eyes away from the "Fanny Lifter" infomercial she's so absorbed in. Rico suggests meatloaf, but they're all out of meat. Then he suggests rice and beans, but the kids already had rice for lunch. "I couldn't remember what we had last night," continues Vanessa, in that same drug-induced monotone. "We had burgers last night," Rico reminds her, with a classic facial expression. What's sad about this is that I just know there's a great "Two Out of Three Ain't Bad" Meatloaf joke in there somewhere, but I can't seem to find it. I mean, we all know Nate has already found "Paradise By The Dashboard Light," right? Rico demands to know if Vanessa has been taking her antidepressants, and she finally manages to display some emotion as she angrily retorts that it can take up to a month for the pills to work. "It takes a month for anything to happen at all?" wonders Rico. "Well, I gained five pounds already, so something is happening!" answers Vanessa, on the verge of tears. Rico takes pity on his obviously ill wife, and then Alan Ball demonstrates that he's still the only one with the ultimate power to shut Rico up by fading to white to end the scene.
We fade back up on The Formaldehyde Fortress, where Nate and Rico are meeting with the DGDJ's ex-boyfriend. Seeing as how we've already noted that everything is always about Nate, you probably won't be surprised to learn that this guy was himself trapped in a relationship with an emotionally unstable woman that he didn't really love. "I never thought she was really going to do it," he confesses. "But maybe in some way I did, because I stayed for years after I wanted to leave." Nate tries to convince him that he did the right thing, but Rico starts getting a little jealous of his partner and tries to make things all about himself for a few minutes. "Was she depressed?" he asks, before following that one up with a request for a detailed breakdown of all the medications she was on. The hapless and somewhat dorky guy offers up a thin ray of hope by mentioning a combination of drugs that seemed to be successful, but then he lapses into some psychobabble about tribes and stolen souls and how pissed off he was that Christy got voted out last week. And with the exception of a few brief seconds towards the end of the episode, that's it for our DGDJ's storyline. StC is 3,047 and counting. Hey, remember when Nate and David actually used to work in a funeral home? Yeah. Those were some good times.