Episode Report Card Lady Lola: B- | Grade It Now! YOU GRADE IT Chasing Tracy
By Lady Lola | Season 5 | Episode 19 | Aired on 04.14.2011
In a hurry? Read the recaplet for a nutshell description! Finished? Click here to close.With the show at stake, Lemon and Kenneth go on a wild Tracy chase. They begin at the Queens pizzeria whose logo appears on the box Kenneth and Lemon saw while Skyping with Tracy. Kenneth outwits the pizzaiolo and gets a lead on Tracy's whereabouts, but it's to no avail when they arrive two weeks too late. Tracy Skypes Kenneth for his lizard Jeremy's 11th birthday, which gives Lemon the clue she needs to discover where he's hiding. They find Tracy in the upstairs of Lemon's own apartment (thanks to her futon that conspicuously lacks sex stains). He tells them he's been hiding because he can no longer take the pressure of being an award-winning performer. Lemon gives him a pep talk that involves the words "attack the Lincoln memorial with a hammer," and Tracy realizes he's just a few shenanigans away from being his old, pressure-free self. Tracy Jordan is back!
Pete discovers his one true talent: Arm wrestling. It all starts when he feels emasculated by one of his crew members (Rob Riggle) and takes his frustration out on the writers with an arm wrestling match. Once he learns of his freakish strength, Pete decides to challenge the meathead crew guy to an arm wrestling match. He has second thoughts when he sees the meathead being emasculated by his own wife and decides to throw the match. Naturally, this good deed backfires when Pete re-enters his losing streak during an arm wrestling match with Frank and goes back to being an emasculated sad sack.
Jenna gets a job on a Saw-lite torture porn, but it's quickly shut down when the state of Connecticut doesn't think the movie is portraying the state in a positive light. Jack, who is trying to run a network where all the shows work, realizes that her movie used to be a sitcom pilot. Long story short, the answer is product placement, and lots of it. The movie becomes a ridiculously inappropriate, yet family-friendly vehicle for shilling every product under the sun. In other words, the perfect project for Jenna.
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Want more? The full recap starts right below!Lemon and Kenneth march into Tracy's dressing room to interrogate Grizz and Dot Com about Tracy's whereabouts. They play coy, so Kenneth pulls out a knife and says, "We have ways of making people talk..." Then he pulls out an apple and continues, "By giving them fresh apple slices." Lemon plays bad cop, saying the show is on the line. Dot Com agrees that they want Tracy back, too. "Do you know how much our Cobra payments are?" he asks, adding, "And he's the only one who knows the combination to the candy safe." Pan over to a clear safe holding scads of candy. Grizz chagrins, "The worst part is being able to see the candy!" Lemon threatens to stop letting them use her office for their history club. "That's ironic," says Dot Com, "because next week's topic is fascism." They pound it out as Lemon gives them the side eye. She leaves, shutting the door in Kenneth's face. Credits.
Lemon heads to Jack's office so they can powwow about more possible ways to find Tracy. Jack says Kenneth should just Skype Tracy, but Lemon tells him Tracy is the one to initiate contact -- and only on special occasions. She tells him there's a chance he'll call tomorrow for his lizard Jeremy's birthday. Other than that, there only lead is the local pizza box she spotted in Tracy's last Skype session. She says they traced the phone number to a pizzeria in Queens. "Listen to me," she quips, "I sound like Cagney and Lacey, but without the slutty clothes." Jack tells Lemon she has to find Tracy because the show works with him. It's all part of Jack's new plan to fix NBC by making only shows that work. Gone are the days of shows like Who Nose?, about an olfactory-deficient detective who must use every sense but smell to solve crimes, and Dad 2.0, about a father who programs a computer to take care of his son after he's gone.
Down in the studio, Pete is getting interrogated by the crew members when Tracy is coming back. One in particular named Reggie (Rob Riggle), calls Pete a "bald bitch" and razzes him with such classics as "That's what your wife told me in the shower this morning." Hey-oh! Pete acknowledges that he's been bald -- ever since he hit that gypsy's kid with his car -- but insists he's still the boss. Instead of subservience, he gets a guy coming out in a swimming cap, dancing around, and yelling, "I'm the bald bitch!" as the crew guys laugh at Pete.
Jenna enters the writers' room, pronouncing, "Listen up, fives, a 10 is speaking!" She tells them that her JennaBabies were recalled after it was discovered they were merely a front to smuggle drugs from Mexico. As such, she's got another back-up plan: She's starring in a movie called Take My Hand. She describes, "It's kind of an artsy character study about a young woman who has a lot of holes drilled into her head by a deranged veterinarian named Slaughterface." She says the movie has some serious cred because "the producers of this movie rented Saw and watched it." She tells the gang she'll be in Stamford, Connecticut, filming until further notice, then adds, "On an unrelated matter, does anyone know where I can get intimate bleaching done in Stamford, Connecticut?"