Episode Report Card Djb: B- | 1 USERS: D YOU GRADE IT Untitled
By Djb | Season 4 | Episode 12 | Aired on 09.11.2004
A giant Italian restaurant somewhere near the airport. Or at least I hope it is, because if this girl has a two-hour layover and she left LAX, she's already missed her connecting flight. George and Ruth discuss the eatery, which Ruth used to go to when she was a girl. "Sarah and I would eat thousand island dressing all by itself." And the status of the inhabitants of those thousand islands? Well, Ruth just laughs and laughs. MANIAC! George agrees in his own increasingly psychotic way, noting, "And this building has stood through all the mudslides, fires, earthquakes." And all the tectonic shifts in George's character. What an amazing structure.
George's daughter Maggie makes an appearance from the back of the room. George gives her a big hug that suggests that a piece of Big Red told him to "hug a little longer," and Maggie finally breaks it up.
A cleaved edit later, they're mid-dinner, Maggie announcing, "With managed care the way that it is, most of these samples that I haul around end up going to patients who can't pay for prescriptions." Yes, yes. I'm not bored at all. George asks what's new in antibiotics, somehow managing to pronounce the "i" the same every time he hits one without ever landing on the actual "long i" sound itself. She pulls out a sample box and hands it over, telling him that it will "knock out just about anything." Ruth asks if he's sick (well, yeeeeeeeeees), but George tells her, "I just want to be prepared." He continues his long, slippery slide into the pool marked "wonky survivalist pool, no breathing," rhetorically asking his daughter, "Did you know you that you can order potassium iodide off the internet now?" Ruth asks what that is, which...well, bad idea, I think, and George explains that that it blocks the body's intake of radioactive material from a nuclear accident. But his pronunciation of "nuclear" shares in common quite a bit with the President's.
Nate lies on the couch blinking and breaking stuff, blinking and breaking stuff. From the table in the next room, Brenda volunteers, "I'd like to talk about this morning." Nate, lying with what looks like a photograph facedown on his chest, asks, "What about it?" Brenda stands now, and explains that Nate's "big emotions" are "not that easy to live with." Translation: you're an asshole. She legitimately complains that he dumps on her a lot, but he counters non-legitimately that if he got some support from her, "that's not how it would feel to" her. She's basically all, "Girl, please" about that rationale, telling him, "All I do is support you. It's like a full-time job." But he can't hear her, because he's too busy ignoring his girlfriend's emotional needs because he's looking at a photograph of his dead wife. She takes the picture out of his hand and announces, "I can't compete with a dead woman." Nate shrugs. Brenda shrugs. And Fat Joe is all, "'He Shrugs, She Shrugs' is totally the name of my next song, y'all."