Episode Report Card Niki: A | Grade It Now! YOU GRADE IT Sex, Lies, and Bugaboos
By Niki | Season 1 | Episode 4 | Aired on 10.11.1999
Soliloquy Lily's got her bitch on. Arms folded, she gripes, "She came home early to check him out. Obviously." She can't even look at the interviewer, she's so damn mad.
Looking up from her defiled tub, Judy vents, "I had to walk out of that movie early. It made me physically ill." Buttoning his pants, Rick looks over his shoulder and asks what she saw. "You know, that movie that everyone's so..." Judy continues struggling with the movie title, playing a well-executed round of the Vague Game. She sits down with a bowl of grapes and continues muttering to herself as Rick and Lily scramble to finish dressing in the background. Rick tugs on his socks and tries to make sense of Judy's ramblings. He asks what she hated about the unidentified movie and she tries to explain, by way of really bad imitations of pompous British accents, that she hated how it was so self-conscious about its entertainment value. Rick points out that the point of movies is to be entertaining. Judy pauses while chewing a grape, thinking, perhaps, of spitting it at him. She thinks better of it, continues chewing, and says, accusingly, "So you liked it?" Rick quickly says that he doesn't even know what movie she's talking about. "Then how can you defend it?" she demands. He looks at her for a moment and tries for a little levity: "Well, we should all walk out of a movie together sometime." Judy thinks he's an idiot. Rick tries to suck up with a little phony spiel about how it all worked out in the end because he got to meet Judy. She puts on a bright smile and agrees, a little too exuberantly, through her clenched teeth.
"Well, I wouldn't use the word 'hate,'" Soliloquy Judy says. I think she would, if she were alone with her friends. She tries out a few alternatives: "Maybe 'rubbed the wrong way,' 'disliked'...." She lets those hang in the air for a few seconds and then admits it: "Okay. I hated him. And that night, I washed all the sheets. But it still didn't help. I kept picturing them in my bed. I had to sleep on the floor." Wah wahhh. See, that's funny because...oh never mind.
"So you're writing Dad a note?" Jessie asks, watching Eli tear a sheet out of his notebook and lay it on Rick's bed. She complains that her class was supposed to interview their fathers for English, and she didn't have a chance to do it. You know, that strikes me as a really insensitive assignment, considering a lot of kids don't have fathers. "So do it over the phone," Eli says, slinging his backpack over his shoulder. He catches the disappointment on Jessie's face and pauses in the doorway to ask what I want to know: "What do people do who don't have fathers?" Jessie shrugs and says, "I don't know because I supposedly have one." Eli says that Jessie should just ask Eli the questions instead; he knows everything about Rick. She's about to fire the first question, but they're interrupted by a knock at the door.