By Lady Lola
All the major players catch up on their New Year's Eve shenanigans. Jack got violently sick on some ancient wine, Lemon outed her cousin Randy from the boonies, Tracy impregnated Angie, and Jenna set up a sham romance with James Franco. Naturally all of these attempts to put one year behind them and come charging into another go horribly awry.
For starters, Jack drunk-dialed Nancy Donovan, who hasn't contacted him since last year. In his words, Jack "Lemon-ed the situation." (Imagine Lemon herself Lemon-ing The Situation.) So he must forge an elaborate plot involving a pants-less Kenneth, a wire hanger, and a doggy door in order to erase the message while Nancy's out of town on a family vacation. While doing so, he puts together various environmental clues and realizes that Nancy and her husband are on the outs and starts to think he has a chance -- one he might lose when Nancy finds all the webcam pics that luddite Kenneth has inadvertently taken while Jack rifled through the Donovans' things. Kenneth grows increasingly paranoid as Jack avoids listening to the message all night. After the sun rises, Jack finally listens to the message and has a change of heart, only to be dissuaded from his pursuit by Kenneth. Oh, but there's more! Kenneth realizes that Nancy's voicemail security code spells the name "Klaus," which was Jack's name in the German class he and Nancy took back in high school.
In a Jennanco -- or "James," as those less-than-creative tabs call them -- strategy meeting, we learn that James Franco is trying to escape the internet rumors that he's in love with a Japanese body pillow shaped like a lady (which he totally is). Their pap-filled courtship is everything Jenna could ever dream of -- except that it's not real and must eventually end. Jenna, for perhaps the first time ever, has a crisis of conscience about the set-up. She breaks up with Franco and encourages him to pursue his taboo love for a pillow.
Lemon's cousin comes prancing into town chock full o' naïveté, much to Lemon's chagrin. He picks up about a thousand men before Lemon tries to ship him back home where he belongs. But he outwits Lemon by -- fittingly -- throwing her in a closet, then takes off to find the love of his life, a sailor whom he plans to wed in Massachusetts. Lemon catching him announcing this with much panache and subtlety on The Today Show and intercepts him again. He refuses to leave New York until he shows her what living's all about. That's right! It's a big, gay night on the town for Lemon! As luck would have it, when you throw some cosmos into Lemon, she ends up having a three-way with Franco and his lady pillow. The morning-after awkwardness alone is enough to send Randy running back to rural Pennsylvania.
And Tracy starts to see the error of his scoundrel ways when he hits on a back-up dancer named Virginia. Coincidentally, this is the very name he was planning on giving to his future daughter. He realizes that every woman is someone's daughter, and it kills his hard-on. Tracy takes Grizz, Kenneth and Dot Com to task for harboring disrespectful emotions, haircuts, and literary preferences toward women, respectively. He resolves to bring a woman into the entourage. Which I'm sure will go down about as smoothly as a spoon in a blender…
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