Episode Report Card Sars: D | 1 USERS: C- YOU GRADE IT Home Movies
By Sars | Season 3 | Episode 4 | Aired on 10.19.1999
Henry "The Ninth -- Grader, That Is" Parker tells a long-winded story to the team about how he acquired Doug Flutie's mouthpiece. Jen comes up to the group as Henry makes a weird rictus with his face and asks, "What's everybody looking at?" Jack tells her drily, "Apparently, we're looking at Doug Flutie's old mouthpiece." Henry holds up the mouthpiece worshipfully in Jen's direction. She pronounces it "disgusting." According to Jack, "Henry says it's his good-luck charm." According to Jen, "Henry needs his head examined." Jen and her posse o' cheerleaders march off. Henry crawls over to Jack and asks for Jack's help with the massive crush he has on Jen, throwing around slurpy phrases like "her voice is the sweetest music" and "her very name is fire in my loins." Jack laughs in his face and advises him to "start by saying hello." Sars advises him not to use the word "loins" ever again.
Oh, Lord above. Jen. The other cheerleaders. Jen, missed by the other cheerleaders at the spirit table. Jen, having "limits." The cheerleaders, diagnosing a "low-iron day" and blithering on about the silent auction, "like, the most successful one" they've had to date. Jen, figuring out that they've auctioned off a ride on the Minuteman Mule ("Mule"? Didn't Paul Revere ride a full-sized horse?) and a kiss with the head cheerleader, namely Jen. Jen objects, the cheerleaders sputter, and Jen backs them down the hall while growling that she started the whole cheerleading thing as a joke, but now she's had enough of the "polyester molest-me skirt," and rather than "be sold off like a harem girl to the highest bidder," and she quits and stomps all Peterbilt-like down the hall. If I cared one whit about this plot, I'd mention that Jen's completely unconsidered and inconsistent anti-objectification rants really chap my ass, but I don't, so I won't. I'll merely report that lookers-on in the hall cheer her as her mudflaps disappear from view.
Andie "Encyclopedia Blonde" McPhee, kitted out in a hideous pink top and state-hospital bangs, hastens out of a classroom and crashes into a guy in a suit, knocking his papers to the floor. Helping him gather them up, she reads the front of a folder with evident dismay: "ETS!" ETS Agent Guy snaps, "Drop! That folder," and she does, and then he orders her to back away from the testing materials and keep her hands "in plain sight." Okay, this is much closer to the way ETS approaches its testing materials than what we saw last week. Anyhow, Andie yammers guiltily that she hopes nobody at Capeside High has "compromised the integrity of the exam," a phrase she rephrases several different ways so as to highlight her deft verbal skills, and ETS Agent Guy says he can't tell her that, and he asks her if she knows where he can find Principal Green. She says no, but before ETS Agent Guy heads off, she expresses her "regret and recalcitrance at this incident." "'Recalcitrance'?" ETS Agent Guy repeats quizzically, and Andie perkily corrects herself with a few other synonyms to cover her Freudian usage slip. The agent tells Andie to "watch" herself, and she skitters away. You will find me, dear reader, listed in the Manhattan telephone directory, so if you can think of any reason why I should care about this subplot, please call me posthaste.