Episode Report Card Djb: B | Grade It Now! YOU GRADE IT The Drowned World Tour
By Djb | Season 4 | Episode 1 | Aired on 06.12.2004
"That's not what Lisa wanted," Nate tells Mrs. Lisa. Nate and David sit together on two chairs across from Mr. Lisa, Mrs. Lisa, and the singly-named "Barb." This is going to be one of the most unfair games of "Coke and Pepsi" ever played in the history of the modern Bar Mitzvah. Barb? Is already out. Mrs. Lisa yells that Lisa is going to be cremated, but Nate is all, "That's not what she wanted. Doesn't that matter to you people at all?" Nate, show them the flashback. It worked for us when it was just shoehorned in during what might have been a commercial if this network were at all interested in my having a BREAK, EVER. Nate rants on that Lisa didn't want to be cremated or embalmed, and that she just wanted to be put back into the Earth. Fight fight fight-ity fight, until Nate clomps predictably off with an "I'm sorry. I can't do this." No. No, of course you can't. David pauses a second and suggests that they "start to think in terms of middle ground." Mrs. Lisa smolders with anger because her middle ground is not underground, or some equally inappropriate pro-cremation bumper sticker I've accidentally just suggested to some fringe sector of the pro-cremation lobbying populace. Also a possibility? "Nothing says lovin' like something from the oven!" Sorry. I don't like it either. But they're the ones with the bumper-sticker-making machine.
Oy, Russell. You don't have to be happy about it, but you have to know it was coming. Well. It's here. He and the goatee he's been pretending to grow since 1992, three days following his birth, are marching around in a parking lot. He asks Claire to "speak," and she does. With news of Lisa's death. No wonder she can't keep a man. Good song, though.
Even Arthur knows he's not wanted ["except by me!" -- Wing Chun], and the only time he's not in madly hazy focus is when he's trying to escape from the frame altogether. Except when, mid-scene, he offers to go file some unfiled cremains, which is important because, well, ssssssh. See you at the end. Nate and David fight about the fight David had about fighting with Lisa's parents. David promises that he's on Nate's side, but that he's trying to keep everyone happy. Nate leaps through the camera and into my living room in an attempt to fly backwards around the world and make time run backwards so he can encode some real quick backstory onto Lisa and make us believe that it was there the whole time: "You tell me you think it's okay for that fucking hydra -- which, incidentally, is what Lisa called her -- you think it's okay for them to burn my wife up in an oven and stick her in a drawer when all that Lisa wanted was to be outside somewhere under the stars." And when the nighttime starts to sing a lonesome lullaby. It helps to think she's buried underneath that same big skyyyyyy. God, I love An American Tail. David pulls back and suggests that what Nate is suggesting might run afoul of the law, softening further and promising, "We all want to do a good thing." Nate is silent, because if giving Lili Taylor right to the elements that would break her down to something constructive the quickest is wrong, Nate doesn't want to be right.