By Lady Lola
Lemon suddenly slithers her way into popularity when she wins a $1,000 TGS lottery and hands the money over to the crew to have a night out at the bar on her. When a crew member accuses her of leaving out the recovering alcoholics, she has to one-up herself. Lemon insists she's up to the challenge, but Jenna and Tracy argue that she's not meant to be the popular girl she's pretending to be (a.k.a. The Liz-ard, The BLiz-zard, The BLizbian, etc.) and is instead like the R.A. in college -- all rules, no fun. After her ice cream sundae bar goes doubly awry for a lactose-intolerant recovering alcoholic, Lemon gives him a watch that's been passed down in her family for generations. Due to the inscription on the back, the crew guys recognize Lemon's desperate stabs for acceptance and call her out. She finally resigns herself to her R.A. role and lays down some discipline on those fools.
Jack finds himself useful in ways he didn't anticipate and extraneous in ways he thought he'd be essential. In the case of the latter, he receives a copy of the quarterly report for GE's microwave division, and they've done better than usual, apparently without his help. Distressed, he travels up to Stamford to ensure that he is needed but is only met by derision from the new engineers, who deem his spearheading of the trivection oven totally 2009. He confiscates their prototype microwave and elicits Kenneth's help to prove he is useful. After shocking Kenneth, making him simulate using the microwave in a freezing rain storm, and inching our favorite Page one step closer to "the light," Jack marches back to the microwave engineers with a speech prepared. As he delivers it, the microwave's talking feature (using his voice, more on that below) keeps interrupting him in such a way to make him realize that his glory days are over. He concedes defeat, congratulates the engineers on their success, and passes the torch.
Meanwhile, the writers discover that Jack's voice is being used for an online pronunciation dictionary. Jack explains that he worked on a linguistic project during his undergraduate days at Princeton, pronouncing literally every word in the dictionary to preserve the standard American accent, and the recordings were later sold. But no amount of explanation can stall the shenanigans the writers inevitably get up to when they realize they can make Jack "say" anything they want. They proceed to prank-call Pete and, as Jack, promise to make his dreams come true -- as long he brings his guitar for a jam and wears a Mexican poncho for a private rendezvous. Happily for Pete, Jack's experience with GE's microwave engineers (read below) puts him in such a frame of mind to view Pete's prank-inspired foolishness as a reminder of the college he could have had if he weren't reading that damn dictionary all day to pay his way through school. They sit, drink brews, and jam... until Lemon disrupts them and forces them to watch her shotgun a pizza.
Watch the episode below, discuss it in our forums, then see whether 30 Rock is a good place to work!
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