Episode Report Card Couch Baron: B | Grade It Now! YOU GRADE IT Saving Karen...Not So Much
By Couch Baron | Season 3 | Episode 2 | Aired on 10.09.2006
Lamb -- not particularly sympathetically, but far less nastily than he was to Veronica -- asks Parker for a window of time that she might have gotten back to the dorm. Parker has no idea, but Veronica pipes up that the rape occurred at 11:45 or thereabouts, and explains about her retrieving the movie passes. (Oh, last week I referenced Veronica hearing something in "the other room," which was just a straight-up brain-freeze typo. Mac and Parker clearly share one room, albeit a big one.) I don't think Veronica had any choice here, but this can't have been easy to confess, especially in front of Lamb, and it's not like Mac owns up to Parker about her role in Veronica's perception of Parker, either now or in the rest of the episode. Veronica adds that the light was off, and that she didn't see much. Lamb asks why she didn't turn the light on, and is told that it's because she heard noises, "like breathing...and buzzing." Lamb asks if the buzzing was like an electric razor, and Veronica says that it's possible, but that it turned off right after she opened the door, and that she thought the noises were..."something else." I went back and listened to that scene with the volume up pretty high, and it's true that there's a very quick buzz-like sound (although not completely identifiable, even knowing what I'm looking for), but it's so quick and subtle that it still seems like part of the song that's playing. Which is cool. Lamb's amused, although it's not clear whether that's at Veronica's general discomfort, or if he's thinking about what Veronica thought the buzzing might be, which is taking it a little deeper. (I have got to stop doing that.) Veronica (sounding lame even to her, I'd wager) tells Parker that it didn't occur to her that anything going on was against Parker's will. Parker shrieks that Veronica let the rape happen, and rushes out as Veronica tries in vain to apologize. Lamb, again, looks amused, and he'd really be begging to regain his old "Officer Fuckface" moniker if I hadn't gotten so used to typing something shorter. Credits.
In what looks like very hot daylight, Keith is using a large stick to help himself make his way through the desert. He sets off a bear trap, but luckily, it's the wood that takes the damage. Finally, something Duncan would have been good for, and he's nowhere to be found.
In the Sociology class mentioned in the previous episode, a "Dr. Kinney" is lecturing the class, which includes Wallace and Logan, that torture has existed as long as have prisons and wars and armies. Yeah, dude, I've seen Rome, too. Also in the class is Rider Strong. Kinney shows a famous photo from Abu Ghraib, and asks who among the students saw it and thought to himself that he would never do something like that. Most of the students raise their hands, but Logan, with an amused look, doesn't. One could be forgiven for thinking that he's recalling his role in organizing bumfights ["I'll NEVER FORGET" -- Wing Chun], but the fact that the photo in question is the one of the prisoner being dragged along on a leash, I think Logan's remembering an activity of his that's a little more current. And frequent. The professor tells them that in his opinion, it's likely that only two or three of them are right in their assessment of their own characters. Also, the students each have a twenty-page research project due at the end of the term about the effects of imprisonment and torture. One wonders what sort of grade twenty pages of repeating "I'm going crazy from having to sit inside and write this fucking paper on a Saturday night" would merit. Kinney offers them an out: he's conducting an extensive study on the prisoner-guard relationship. Anyone who volunteers will participate in an experiment in which he'll be either a prisoner or a guard. The prisoners will be given an arbitrary piece of information, which the guards will attempt to extract from them. The members of the winning team are exempt from the paper, while the losing side's burden will be reduced to ten pages. I'm annoyed with the writers here, not so much because this is unrealistic, but because, from reading the boards, I can no longer see the words "Stanford Experiment" without screaming. Whoops. AIEEEEEE! Anyway, let's just say that there's extensive online documentation of why this experiment would never be allowed to happen these days and leave it at that. Wallace and Logan volunteer, although Logan's hand-raising is so fey that you could perfectly balance a server's tray on it. Given what we see later, I wonder if Dick went to him for lessons.