Episode Report Card Aaron: B | 791 USERS: C+ YOU GRADE IT Baldness <> Death
By Aaron | Season 6 | Episode 6 | Aired on 2003.02.09
Dino makes his fifth and final appearance at this point, sitting pointedly in Hill's wheelchair as he announces that "accidents" are the next cause of death on the list. Because no guest narration is complete without an overwrought reference to the end of the world, he also amends his earlier comments to say that "no matter what damn lie you've been told, we're the leading cause of death. Mankind. And there's no cure for us." Except for the mute button, of course. That'll cure anything.
Hell, if you use the mute button on your phone, it'll even cure telemarketers, although I personally consider it to be much more entertaining to mess with their heads a bit before hanging up on them. I once kept an insurance salesman on the phone for almost twenty minutes while I occasionally covered the mouthpiece to shout obscenities at my imaginary wife and smacked the side of my desk a few times to make him think I was beating her. And God bless the guy, because he never once broke stride. In fact, I actually tried to hire him for my own call center, just because he was so perfectly unflappable. Nothing that amusing happens in this next scene, however, which pretty much just consists of Business Barbie telling Redding that he's got to go out and find new workers to replace Poet and the others. Barbie still looks pretty cute, although she does lose some points on the intelligence scale for thinking that Oz has more than 28,000 inmates in a single prison. With the death rate we've seen so far, I'd frankly be surprised if they still had more than a few dozen.
Determined not to disappoint the boss, Redding next heads to the cafeteria to try recruiting new employees with the promise of a newfound self-respect and free Jell-O during coffee breaks. After getting turned down by Ryan O'Reily (who prefers to stay in the kitchen, because putting ground-up glass into a telephone isn't a very effective way to kill somebody), Crackhead Cosby heads over to the new inmate table and sits down to deliver his pitch. "For all the flak it gets," he says, "a sales position in telemarketing is a fine way to keep yourself active." Um, "active"? You sit in a chair and talk on the phone all day. That six-million-pound guy who's always on Jerry Springer probably gets more exercise than your average phone rep. Pretty much everyone bails as soon as they hear the word "telemarketing," which does at least enable Cosby to elicit a giggle by asking the one remaining guy if he's "gotta go jerk off or something." Heh.
Meanwhile, things aren't going too well for the Muslims, either. Poet and Reggie show up at the product-placement shop to collect their paychecks, and Arif is forced to confess that he doesn't even have enough money to cover the payroll. Cut to our boys wandering through the common area in Em City, Reggie declaring that they simply have to get back into the pudding pop business to put some much needed cash into their pockets. "I'm way ahead of you," announces Poet, who's arranged for a friend named "Sky Bar" to deliver a shipment of the frosty chocolate-flavored treats that very afternoon. Their celebration is put on hold, however, when Pancamo sidles over to report that Sky Bar recently "got run over by a Chevy. Thirty-seven times." Whoops. Farewell, Sky Bar. Such is life in the high-stakes, cutthroat world of illicit gelatin-based dessert distribution.