Episode Report Card Gwen: C- | Grade It Now! YOU GRADE IT Do a Little Dance, Kill a Little Baby
By Gwen | Season 4 | Episode 23 | Aired on 05.20.2001
Jane and John talk in the lobby. She tells him that Richard is sitting in his office and seems a little sad. "He basically has a sign around his neck that says, 'Go away, I'm sad,'" she says. John goes to check on him.
John finds Richard sitting in his office with a sign around his neck that says, "GO AWAY, I'M SAD." Heh. Richard bemoans the fact that the firm members used to be friends, but now they're all cold to each other. John says that he and Ally have had wonderful years. They had their hearts broken, but they lived emotionally. Oh, shut up, John. Nobody cares about you and Ally. Jeez. John goes on to say that most of the people at the firm don't live emotionally. Richard says they should change that and asks if they should fire everyone. John says no, but that they do need a big change. The theme music for "Wacky Schemes to Come" plays us out of the scene. Since there's no time for any life-changing hijinks between now and the end of the hour, I'm going to pretend that this dialogue is David E. Kelley's wink-nudge pledge to the viewers to try to make the show stop sucking next season.
Ally explains to a nosy, bitchy retail clerk that she's not chaperoning a prom, she's attending one as a guest. The woman asks whether Ally's "a little vintage" to be attending a prom, then says that she has a lovely chiffon number that will go beautifully with Ally's Botox. Ow. Meow! Ally got bitch-slapped with that one. While the clerk goes for the dress, Ally looks at a wedding gown and then hallucinates the mannequins coming alive and singing "Remember -- Walking in the Sand." Normally the live-mannequin thing would scare the crap out of me, but the blonde one is super-hot so I'm okay with it. Ally cringes and wails just in time for the clerk to come out and see her doing it, of course. The clerk asks whether Ally's worried that she won't be able to fit into the gown. All I can say to that is, "Snort!" (No -- really. My sinuses are messed up today.)
In the F&C lobby, Richard asks Ally whether he may go along to the prom, too. He wants to take Jane so she can be with people near her age. Ally says he can go. Whatever. Maybe it's because the high schools in my hometown were underfunded, but it seems to me that kids have to pay for prom tickets with their senior dues and can't be asking any old local lawyers to come along for the ride. Elaine walks up to tell Ally that her father is waiting for her in The Bar.
In The Bar, Ally's dad plays the piano. He thinks Larry was un-noble for walking away from the relationship. Ally excuses him, saying that Larry was in a lot of pain. Then, of course, they sing "Dulcinea." Then, of course, we get the flashback to them singing it twenty thousand years ago. Ally's dad puts his arm around her, but she doesn't shove him away like she did to her mother. I wonder why her parents were in this episode, and then assume that it was because they had already been hired to participate in Larry and Ally's wedding scene before RDJ started careening down his spiral of tragedy and dysfunction again.