Episode Report Card Djb: D | 1 USERS: A+ YOU GRADE IT The Love Pope
By Djb | Season 4 | Episode 4 | Aired on 08.01.2000
Back in Em City, Poet apprehends Mobay to tell him that Adebisi still isn't convinced of Mobay's fortitude and, more importantly, his integrity. He has to take another test. Cut to Adebisi and his posse in the gym, telling Mobay that his next test is to find out if he can "take a punch." He requests gloves. Tough guy Pancamo steps in to tell him that they won't exactly be sparring, and that Mobay's idea of the fight (y'know, the one where he has any method of defense at all) is ever so slightly inaccurate. But Pancamo's got gloves. And they're going to use Mobay as "a heavy bag." Then they kick his ass in fifteen seconds. Dissolve to Mobay's pod, where the lawman lies dazed on his bed. Poet enters with a little gift to "soothe" his "wounds," leaving him with a small baggie filled with a telltale white concoction of drugs and, well, just drugs. Mobay leaps off the bed and snorts the confection with nary a moment's pause. At which moment Hill wheels himself in, fresh from talking at an unsuspecting group of exhausted strangers (called, familiarly, "us") about the manifold glories of mercy in its numerous forms, and finds Mobay in the process of using and losing. He asks didactically just what the hell Mobay is doing. Oh, Hill. Just relax. I half expect him to launch into the McGruff the Crime Fighting Dog song shown ad nauseam during Saturday morning cartoons back in my own heady "Just Say No," "this is your brain on drugs" childhood. It was a catchy song. But a song with a message. See if you can figure out what that message might be:
Users are losers, and losers are users
So don't use drugs, don't use drugs
Users are losers, and losers are users
So don't use drugs, don't use drugs
[Bridge]
If you know a user even part of the time,
Tell him to quit, take a bite out of crime!
Users are losers, and losers are users
So don't use drugs, don't use drugs!
[Cue the epiphany-oriented eyebrow-raising of a nation of impressionable children thirsting for life's lessons via the proven teaching acumen of an animated mongrel. And if you think McGruff is a civic-minded pup now, you should hear his extensive thoughts on fire safety. You'll never leave a stove unattended again. Anyway.]
Hill wheels around and leaves their shared pod in disgust. Mobay comments as he climbs back into bed that he's having a "breakfast of champions." I'm just impressed that he can keep his accents straight when he's that high. When I used to smoke pot, it took me a half an hour to make a bowl of Ramen noodles. ["He can't keep his breakfasts straight either -- everyone knows the one, the only breakfast of champions is a fine little lager I like to call 'Budweiser.'" -- Sars]
Cut to Mobay walking into a pod containing Pancamo, Adebisi, and Morales. They tell him that they have taken "a straw poll" on Mobay's merits. Pancamo voted yes, Adebisi voted no, and Morales settled for an abstention. And there's only one way to break the tie and solidify their trust. He has to kill somebody. He agrees to do it. Because McGruff the Crime Fighting Dog never wrote a song about contract killing, I imagine.