Episode Report Card Aaron: B- | Grade It Now! YOU GRADE IT The Pest Savant at the End of the Universe
By Aaron | Season 6 | Episode 7 | Aired on 02.15.2003
After lights out, Rebadoze and Busmalis are chatting in the Grumpy Old Pod. It's all very grumpy and old, but spirits are lifted when McManus taps on the window and delivers a jaunty thumbs-up. Sigh. I guess Patti is still alive, after all. Man, where's Gene Siskel and his downward-pointing thumb when you really need him? Oh, that's right. He's dead.
More Sallycize. Or, as Urbano puts it, "It's time to exercise the old fantasy muscle." Ew. Again. This whole scene is pretty much just an excuse for the boys to taunt Busmalis about his impending wedding, especially because the last time around, Norma left him at the altar to get pregnant by another man. It's all very cute and well-intentioned, but the whole thing goes off the rails when Busmalis gets up and announces, "Well, to all you lonely and horny naysayers with no one but Rosie Palm and her five sisters to love you, I say this: 'Right here, baby.'" This last is accompanied by the truly unholy sight of Busmalis grabbing his crotch, jumping up and down, and shouting, "Right in my big blue balls!" Wow. Just…wow. After much careful deliberation, I've decided to rank that at number four on my all-time list of The Most Horrifying Things I've Ever Had To Recap, just behind The Spoon, Janice and Joey, and naked Stilgar. At least Reggie manages to get off a good line. "The brat was conceived on what should have been your honeymoon," he says. "That's even freakier than cloning." Hee!
The wedding. I would recap this scene with the care and attention to detail it deserves, but Busmalis is wearing a gold polka-dot bow tie with a green V-neck sweater and a red, white, and black checked blazer, so I'm not even sure I can look directly at the screen without suffering an epileptic seizure. Norma is obviously late -- because otherwise we wouldn't have any phony dramatic tension about whether or not he'll get stood up again -- but she does arrive eventually, and Mukada pronounces them boring and big-breasted. Er, I mean, "man and wife."
Hill. There's junk in outer space, too. Now if only we could find a way to send him up there to clean it. In space, no one can hear you suck.
The Most Annoying Pod In The Whole Wide World. Idzik hovers over Omar's bed just before the morning count, begging to know if he's devised a plan to kill him yet. Oh, yeah. That's a good idea. Let OMAR make the plan. Omar claims that he's been unable to think with Idzik bothering him all the time, although that still doesn't explain why he wasn't capable of rational thought for the other thirty some-odd years of his life. And just to provide further proof of how stupid he is, Omar next turns to McManus for advice. Oh, yeah. That's a good idea. Let TIMMY solve your problems. "Of all the ridiculous things you've said and done," says Timbo, "and there have been plenty, this is the most ridiculous." Sigh. You know what? If Timmy is on the screen, just assume I'm shouting the exact same thing. Over and over and over again.
McManus throws him out of the office, which prompts Omar to continue his futile quest for a clue in the cafeteria, where he begs Idzik for an explanation of why he wants to die so badly. Idzik leads him to everyone's favorite unguarded storage closet (where you'd think there'd be a line outside of prisoners waiting to get in, but I guess not), and even just the mere prospect of these two engaging in some kind of an illicit sexual encounter was enough to leave me quivering in the fetal position for the better part of an hour. When I return to full consciousness, Idzik is in the middle of yet another of his epic-length physics lectures. This one deals with how a lack of light will one day doom our entire universe, and all the life within. Hmm. Sounds like someone has been reading the recaps. I haven't been watching this show long enough to know whether or not Tom Fontana is capable of subtle self-parody (or "subtle" anything, for that matter), but I'm going to give him the benefit of the doubt and assume that he was just having some fun with us here. So good job, Tommy. No spoon for you. Omar's response to the news of this impending astronomical debacle is to ask, "Well, yeah, but we could, um, maybe build a rocket ship, right?" Sigh. If you still don't understand why I hate Omar, here's a perfect example. That's a good joke, but even the closed captioning had better timing on the delivery than Michael Wright. For the nine billionth time, Idzik demands to know whether Omar is willing to kill him, and Omar promises to have an answer by noon.