Episode Report Card Grade It Now! YOU GRADE IT When marriage is its own penalty
By Miss Alli | Season 1 | Episode 8 | Aired on 04.13.2003
Outside, Tony's very relieved father is telling him that he "did the honest thing." Man, I hate it when people do that -- tell you you did the right thing just because you did what they wanted you to do. Bleh. Shut up, Tony's dad. Tony actually does look like he feels like crap, which is understandable. Bender, too, tells him that he did the right thing, but Tony points out that it doesn't feel like he did. "I should've just gone along with it, I guess." Boy, there's a good example of learning the wrong lesson from a teaching moment. Bender knows this, and points out that it was either hurt her now or "completely crush her in six months." Tony says that he might have fallen in love with her, but Bender says it's not like he could possibly know that.
Back in the closet of Billie Jeanne's suffering, her peeps have opened the doors so that she's just kind of sitting in the back of her closet. She's crying and crying and crying, still clutching her bouquet. "He came here for something else; he didn't come here to get married," she blubbers miserably. ["What else would he have come for? The happy deer?" -- Sars]
Outside, Tony's father tells him that he doesn't think BJ would have wanted Tony to go through with it if he wasn't sure. Oh, how little Tony's father knows our Billie Jeanne.
Back in the closet, Billie Jeanne has stopped sobbing, and is now just slumped against the closet wall, staring down at her hands. "I'm a joke," she says, stunned.
Outside, Crying Duane debates with Tony's peeps his conviction that if that was what Tony was going to do, he should have warned Billie Jeanne. I'm inclined to agree, I guess, but Duane seems to be forgetting that they were unexpectedly separated for the last two days, and it may well be that Tony would have warned her if that hadn't happened. One of Billie Jeanne's friends says, "A real man would have told her ahead of time, and would have let her be the one to say no." An interesting analysis, but again, one that fails to take into account the fact that he didn't see her for the last two days. Crying Duane is so angry that he flings his beer bottle, but he manages to do so in a way that pours beer all over his own back during the windup. It's a very funny little moment in a very dark hour.
Billie Jeanne comes back downstairs, still in her gown and veil, and Bender encourages Tony to go talk to her. (Or a producer encourages Bender to encourage Tony to go talk to her, or something.) When they meet up, she tells him quietly, "I can't believe you did that in front of my friends...you made me be a jerk." He puts his hand on the back of her neck and assures her that he's the jerk, and not to worry. She questions him as to whether he really came to meet someone, and he tells her he did. "And I found you," he says. He tells her that he tried to be straight with her about how he felt, and he had thought he could go through with it, but in the end, he couldn't. "You don't think you could love me?" she says. He tells her that he thinks she's great, and he doesn't know why he doesn't have those feelings about her. He tells her he didn't want to marry her now and hurt her in six months (borrowing from Bender a few minutes ago), and then he apologizes again and gets quite teared up, dabbing at his face with his handkerchief. She laments to him that she came here and "let [him] in," and he responded by crushing her. Well...yes, dear. That's what "let you in" means. It means "your foot is on my throat; please step carefully." He tells her that he doesn't want to stop seeing her -- he wants her to come to L.A. and they can see how it goes. "I don't care about this money, I don't care about any of that," he says softly. "I just wanted to make sure I was doing what was right." She looks miserable. She hugs him, but into his shoulder, she says, "I don't think I can see you anymore." She says that she'd never be able to trust him in the future, because he "threw it away." He insists that he didn't mean to throw her away. In an interview, he says that he feels bad -- he was in his tux on his wedding day and hurt BJ, and that's not anything he intended. You'd hope someone, somewhere, is taking notes on the possibility that there are things in the world that you, as a television network, should not fuck around with, but somehow, I'm not sure the odds are with us.
BJ says that her heart is numb. She breaks down again in the interview, and then, in his interview, Tony snorfles that he can't imagine feeling much worse than he does. He repeats that he should have just gone through with it. In her interview, she says that, this morning, she thought all her dreams would come true. She cries and cries, and we get to see some stretchy saliva strands in her mouth, which is nice. She says she felt "so alive and so happy" before, so I guess now she's dead inside. She breaks down in tears.