So Susan's been having these sex dreams about Paul. They're pretty graphic, which means a lot of sexy naked Paul and a similar amount of cooing, groaning naked Susan. So there's that. Mike's getting kidney-related blue balls waiting for Susan to remove the 2x4s nailed crosswise over her genitals, so he doesn't really pay attention to Susan's growing obsession with rescuing Paul from his depression while also trying to process the sex feelings she's having for him.
The evening of their Big Doing It, Mike discovers Susan cooking for poor old Paul, and throws a five-second shit fit before his boner finally gets him the urgent message to shut up. For once, this stupid show actually high-fives compassion, and Susan actually ends up being the Hufflepuff superhero she always tries and fails to be. It's pretty awesome.
But just when everything is going okay for old Paul, Felicia's getting all up in Karen McCluskey's head about how they have to take revenge on Beth's behalf, including some lies and half-truths and an even more decisive fact: McCluskey was there the night Felicia cut off her own fingers to frame Paul for her murder, and decided to stay quiet while her friend's sister faked her own death. Since Paul actually did kill Martha, I don't see a problem here, but since Paul's "depression" seems clearly more like Felicia poisoning him, it's about to get real weird -- seeing Karen involved in a central mystery is more than a little unsettling, after all this time, but especially in relation to the Paul stuff.
Although Bree -- as the number-one collaborator with this show's gender bullshit -- initially agrees with Carlos's fatwa on interacting with Gabi, Gabrielle spends about half the episode literally seducing her into being secret besties. It's one of the weirder things that's ever happened on this show, like, the women explicitly compare their secret relationship to adultery, and Carlos is the spurned wife, and he eventually figures out that they're running away together -- after this long, hilarious-only-because-of-Longoria thing involving a cake and a bluetooth headset -- for a weekend getaway, and tosses her out of the house.
The only difference between Gabi's cheating with Bree and a husband cheating on his wife? When she comes to stay on your couch, she brings the kids. Which means week, Bree is going to have three Solis mess-makers on her hands, so here's hoping that doesn't get incredibly offensive super-fast. Still, it's a neat little story between the women, and I like how Gabi still isn't really being punished for not following orders.
The only epically failed storyline this week -- shocker -- is the Scavos, who attend a business conference together in which Lynette is treated like a cocker spaniel while Tom gets to attend keynote speeches. That kind of shit is fine with The Other Gay One, who loves wifely things like flower arranging, but will not fly with Lynette. Since it's this show, however, her common-sense response to being treated like a brain-damaged child makes her look... Not unlike a brain-damaged child.
Fast-forward past the Attempted Feminist Uprising, the Mutual Undercutting By Bitches Of One Another, the Sexual Perversity Of Homosexuals (Even Those In Disguise As Regular Americans), the Usual Inability Of Women To Behave Properly In Social Circumstances, and Renee Reiterates How All Women Are Whores, and eventually you just have the Scavos on the rocks. God, if only. Seven years is way too long to wait for the inevitable murder-suicide toward which the Scavos have always been vrooming.
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Mary Alice: "After Susan Delfino's kidney transplant, her doctor ordered her to abstain from sex for six weeks. But what the doctor couldn't prevent Susan from doing was dreaming about it..."
Fast-forward past a skellington getting it all the different ways... Wait, is that Paul Young? Hold up. I'm not going to talk about it, but I'm sure gonna watch it. Paul Young should constantly have sex on this show.
Mike: "I was watching you have a bony orgasm with Dream Paul and it reminded me how we can't do it for another 02:17:35:00."
Susan: "I love how you're so lifelike."
Mike: "I love how you're going to let me put it in the butt."
Susan: "Get real! In the Republican universe of this show there's zero other stuff we can do besides the old Shivering Corpse, which is why we had to wait six whole weeks."
Mike: "I can't wait to get out the old sheet-with-a-hole and really go to town."
Mary Alice: "The residents of Wisteria Lane are nothing if not loyal..."
(They are both. They are not loyal, and they are essentially nothing people.)
Mary Alice: "They love their country, they root for the home team, they support their favorite brand."
(Right, right. Clear eyes, full hearts, Walmart. American values all the way.)
Mary Alice: "But the fiercest loyalty on Wisteria Lane is the one between friends."
Which is our intro to Gabi and Carlos having their bullshit fight about how Bree killed his mother so Gabi can no longer hang out with her, and then Gabi just begging for spousal abuse some more, and lots of forbidding getting done, and it's all nasty.
Gabi: "Are we in history where men can boss us?"
Bree: "No, we're on this show. And as the biggest Nurse Ratched collaborator of all time with women treating themselves and each other like shit, I am on Carlos's side."
What happens is this weird sex thing where you trade out all the normal words for sex words.
Gabi: "What are you saying? No more poker? No more lunches? No more shopping?"
Bree: "I'll miss it as much as you do."
Gabi: "Oh, really? It doesn't sound like it! I think this is easy for you."
Bree: "Easy? I wanna come over there right now so you can drag me to the mall kicking and screaming... But we can't. I have to go, I have scones in the oven."
Gabi: "I love your scones..."
Bree: "Stop. Goodbye, Gabi."
Gabi: "...You're not hanging up."
Bree: "But I have to."
See? Hanging out with your GFs is just like having sex with them, if you are an incredibly lonely person who is going insane from being lonely and has never had a friend before so you don't know what it's like.
While Gabi loses herself to a fantasy of stroking and tweaking Bree's deliciously pert scones, Lynette and Tom have a similar orgasm meltdown about the Weisman Leadership Conference -- attended by luminaries such as Warren Buffett, Bill Gates and even Oprah, of whom the WLC is one of her Favorite Things -- to which they've both been invited now that Tom finally got his big break, in this parallel universe where Lynette is not a great businesswoman as like her only skill, because now her only skill is sucking:
Lynette: "No kids, right? No kids? Yes! Yes! I gotta figure out what to wear!"
McCluskey has figured out that Susan and Mike are preparing for a world-ending fuckfest as soon as her kidney incisions have healed up, and the way she figured it out is even grosser than that. So then she points Susan toward the house where she used to live and which she now rents to Paul Young, I guess since he got kicked out of Felicia's house by the rule of fake law. It looks like Boo Radley lives there, which kind of is true, and Karen's not interested in checking it out, but thinks maybe Susan should. The old Boogeyman Trap.
Susan heads over there -- which honestly, it does look like Dorothy's house once it landed -- and she's picking up the papers and debris and garbage when he comes to the door.
Paul: "Susan, why are you cleaning my yard?"
Susan: "I'm at eye-level with your crotch right now, so could you close that robe?"
Paul: "Just get out of my yard, Susan."
Susan: "You look like you're dying. You look like you're having dialysis six hours three times a week over here."
Paul: "My wives keep shooting themselves in the head and the only person that will fuck me is a praying mantis with deformed organs and no sense of equilibrium or boundaries. And even her, only when she's unconscious. Things are not going great."
Susan: "By the time I'm done here you will look back on this time as comparably joyful."
At the Conference, the Scavos are met by the Gay Ones, who come running up lip-synching "I'm Every Woman" in Bob Mackie knockoffs and doing constant poppers and growing great big mustaches and buying leather motorcycle hats and only eating egg whites at brunch and having emotional breakdowns for no reason.
Lee: "Because we are the passive members of our households and thus infantilized and denied basic respect or accountability, we're going to do Japanese flower arranging while the men do all that thinkin' and networkin' and bacon-bringin'."
Lynette: "That seems really awful to me. And yet, my response will be so typically horrific that this sexual marginalization will somehow seem like a less shitty option."
Lee: "Margaritas! Mojitos! Japanese flower arranging! Where other people have genitals I just have a happy smiley face shining down on marriage between a man and a woman. Otherwise it's too weird for everybody!"
Lynette: "I can't believe a gay man just said the word genitals to me. That's too real, you guys."
In line, Lynette meets an awesome lady who will turn out to be a ballbusting a-hole, but she doesn't know that yet so they make friends... Until the lady realizes Scavo's a Plus-1 and thus deserves to have cigarettes put out on her brain.
Meg Butler: "I am a CEO or something. I keep my business smarts where regular women keep their vaginas."
Lynette: "I used to have a real job, but now I just lick the baseboards clean every day while juggling children and drugs, then take out my resentment on my gay husband."
Meg Butler: "Stay At Home Mothers are retards. Get a fucking job, Komrade."
Lynette: "I am an interior designer. You know, the kind of job that takes no training or education at all."
Yep, the Mommy Wars are real. Totally not a made-up conflict that benefits only men. No way. Would this show lie to you? This shit is relevant and relatable. Every woman who is a professional success is in a secret club where they make fun of you, and every woman who stays home to raise kids, they have a club where they sit around knowing what womanhood really means: Those are your two options. Archie Andrews had it fuckin' tough, watching those bitches take each other out every chance they got.
Lynette: "Why are they dividing us up like this?"
Meg Butler: "Maybe it's because some of us spent our lives working our way up the corporate ladder, and others just married someone who did. Excuse me."
Renee, off-camera: "See? ALL WOMEN ARE WHORES."
Gender Kommandant: "If I could have all of my Plus-1's find a buddy, we're going to get to know each other with a scavenger hunt!"
Bree and Gabi "accidentally" meet up at Lynette's and seduce each other with talk of new clothes and what lies beneath them, sexy mid-morning coffee on the couch, the gradual slide into marital perdition that happens when two middle-aged women find themselves alone in a friend's house in the middle of the day with nothing to do but Platonically check each other's scones for lumps and try on lingerie for each other. Of note:
Gabi: "It's just coffee, Bree!"
Bree: "But your husband..."
Gabi: "He'd never look for us here!"
Bree: (Wavering at the sight of Gabi's heaving scones, offered up like a brunchtime treat kept warm under a kitchen towel.)
Gabi: "Oh, come on. It's been really hard for me not seeing you."
Bree: "Aw, it's been hard for me, too, especially with Lynette out of town."
(Note please the total porn you are watching.)
Bree, awesomely: "I mean, there's Susan, of course, but lately whatever topic you bring up, she manages to steer it right back to kidneys... I guess I could put on a pot."
Gabi, for real: "I like mine with cream!"
Bree, not even trying to play it safe: "I know how you like it."
(Instant scissor party all over every surface in the Scavo home.)
Felicia brings McCluskey some kind of knickknack of Martha's so we can be reminded of how much Martha loved McCluskey, and how they used to chow down on each other's scones back in the day, and then we learn a new fact, which is that McCluskey was out and about the night F-Bomb cut off her own fingers and stashed them in Paul's car and vanished into the Crazypants night. Only Our Mrs. Landingham could make the flashback -- which ends with her going back to calling for Ida Greenberg's lost cat, as though nothing had happened -- seem so forlorn and wistful and creepy and sad.
Lee: [General apathy and/or satisfaction with the cultural impetus to infantilize and marginalize gay men -- and all women -- so they don't scare the horses, preserving the male-female economy while attempting to turn us all into meek and childlike Paris Hiltons.]
Lynette: [Grotesque straw-man arguments that practically make the above seem sane but have nothing to do with rationality, humanism or any thought an actual person has ever actually thought. Not subjective, but only existing as a mouthpiece of the establishment's rank terror when these things are challenged, comparable to Gabrielle's wetback jokes.]
Gabi: "This is the best pineapple upside-down cake you have ever made!"
Bree: "You know why? It has an ingredient my cakes have never had before. Danger!"
Gabi compares their lesbian affair to that time she fucked the hot gay gardener so hard his eyebrows self-manicured. Bree admits that she cheated on Orson with Karl, and it's hilarious because Bree is like, "I would never have cheated on Rex, but since it's Orson it doesn't matter," in the most scornful, beautiful way.
Bree, verbatim, on Karl Mayer: "Oh my God! He was a slimeball, but he was hot. We'd meet at this cheap hotel, and as guilty as it made me, I still felt this... Tingle, this frisson I'd never felt before. And now this week with you... It's back. I just wish Lynette didn't have to come home tomorrow."
Gabi, also verbatim: "Actually, that motel story gives me an idea."
Bree: "Gabi, I'm flattered, but I really don't think we should."
Gabi removes her head from under Bree's shirt to scoff about how she wasn't suggesting they do it... And then invites Bree to a weekend getaway at a lake resort.
See, if the Flipper Thing had been this... I don't know if clever is the word, but it's all so subtextual -- if not subtle, but of course with this show you're a beggar, not a chooser -- that the joke makes itself. The Flipper did this exact same joke, but turned gay men into rapists and creepazoids and there was that whole thing where Carlos kept moisturizing his one hand and it was so fucking fucked up.
Mike: "Hey, how come Paul's house looks so shitty?"
Susan: "He is dying of something."
Mike: "I forbid you to check on Paul's welfare!"
Susan: "I... Have we met? It's foolhardy, pushy and it makes me seem like a martyr, not to mention the fact that somebody's finally less fortunate than I am. It's the Perfect Storm of shit I love."
Susan immediately has another sexy dream about shower sex with Paul, despite there being no transition from the scene, which makes the whole conversation above seem like part of the dream sequence, which would have been easy to avoid if this show weren't so dumb. Or maybe it's on purpose that we skipped a level, because actually Paul is laying Inception eggs in Susan's mind using remote kidney technology.
Lynette breaks through the human wall of officers and sadists keeping women in their cages, screaming out for her husband's aid, slavering dogs nipping at her heels, but it's too late: They have him, he turns away and pretends he cannot hear her screaming, even as the leather-garbed Schutzstaffel grab her by the tits, put on a shock-collar and toss her in the Hole. It is a cold day, and a rainy one. Through barbed wire she can see the female executives, little girls learning to play soccer, a young woman leading her first PowerPoint presentation... Why is this world denied her?
The mind asks. The clown-car of your uterus answers.
McCluskey: "You know how I like my coffee."
Felicia: "Strong... And Irish!"
McCluskey: "Haha, the implication that a white woman in our neighborhood would ever deign to miscegenation! So why did they let you out of prison? Did you suck a warden's dick?"
Felicia: "I've so missed your salty sense of propriety. No, it's because my daughter blew her head off in front of little kids."
McCluskey: "That sounds... Characteristic of what we know about your family."
Felicia: "The black fly in that chardonnay is that you knew her! It was none other than Beth Young, mail-order bride of my sexy nemesis Paul Young!"
McCluskey: "Thanks for the coffee! This is generally where I get the fuck on up out of these kinds of storylines. I'm old, I don't have time for bombs and constant rape and whatnot."
Susan: "Can I ask you a personal and not medically relevant question as a pretext for talking endlessly about myself and giving you way too much grody information?"
Doctor: "Right, you're Susan Delfino. There's a Post-It on your chart that says you always pull this shit, I didn't see it at first. Proceed."
Susan: "Do all kidney transplant patients have sex dreams about the murdering husbands of their kidney donors who also share a child with their husbands and murdered the mothers of those children and live in the house they used to live in?"
Doctor: "Yeah, you fucking moron. That shit happens all the time. It's super-common."
Susan: "So you're saying I should definitely go make Paul Young some soup."
Doctor: "Sorry, I went down to the ER to shoot myself in the head while you were talking just now."
Susan: "Dibs on your spleen! And whatever goes wrong with me !"
Felicia's version of the story is that Paul knew who Beth was when they connected in jail, and he convinced her that he was righteous, and then "When he was released, when he had defiled her, the real Paul came out," and that he said he "Never loved her, that she was stupid and that she didn't deserve to live. So she killed herself."
What's funny about that is, it's way closer to what Felicia did to her. But then, who knows what Felicia thought was going on -- she might, through the lens of confabulation and projection, actually think that's what happened. She might not actually be lying about any of this. Of course, she's manipulating Karen -- works like a charm, Karen gets kind of Hydrangea Circle militant with a quickness -- but it's still interesting to think about. The first part of her story could have actually appeared that way, and the second part is largely conjecture based on what Felicia did. That's pretty good writing, if that's the intent of what's going on here. Anyway, Karen is now on Team Tillman.
Other Gay One: "Wonderful what a four-handed massage can do. One more hand and it would've been perfect, but this ain't that kind of spa!"
Now, speaking as a homosexual, there's nothing I like more than a handjob in a public place with my dearest friends nearby, but I still resent the fact that no other character -- besides possibly the low-rent Samantha that is Renee -- would ever crack that kind of joke. It's a very fucking old idea about gays that they're all into creepy weird sex gimp activities. I sort of thought we'd gotten over that one.
Meg Butler flounces by, ballbusting hardworking men on her phone, so... Lynette follows her to a spa, steals her lanyard and clothes, and busts into the big keynote speech she wanted to attend. They seat her upfront and she takes the stage, because apparently Meg Butler was supposed to introduce the speaker, and Lynette admits up-front that she's not Meg Butler before proceeding with the introduction in a ruinous and embarrassing fashion -- "Where are ya, ya big-brained rascal? Oh, there he is. Almost as hot as his author photo. Anyway..." -- thus proving that Plus-1s should stay in their fucking gilded cages and let their husbands do the talking.
The Entire Internet: "You know who I hate? January Jones."
January Jones: "Well, that's because you're all ugly hogs, just like those bitches in high school."
The Entire Internet: "I cannot wait to find out what Jezebel thinks of this!"
ibid., outraged: (Circle-jerks a quick confirmation that they're all rational attractive humans, and completely in the right, thus proving that January Jones is worth not only hatred but also worth so very many misguided screeds about nothing whatsoever but their own insecurities and the failure of What-Is to match up with What-Should-Be.)
Everybody In This Scenario: (Thinks they are a feminist.)
Nobody In This Scenario: (Is helping.)
Walking Death: "Why are you back at my house, Delfino? And why are you talking about these dreams you keep having about my sexy self?"
Susan: "Look, I'm your landlord. I have a right to come in."
(Nope.)
Susan: "But I'd like you to invite me."
After a brief but harrowing meeting with leeks in their natural form, Susan makes Paul some soup and tries not to think about fucking, fucking, fucking. I actually really like this storyline, I like the idea that her compassion and the Beth connection would express themselves subconsciously as a sex thing -- dreams about sex are never about sex -- and that she's doing this whole pushy routine firstly because she finds herself caring about Paul but also to resolve the inner tension that's causing this stuff to well up and leak out in the first place. That rings incredibly true for me.
Tom and Lynette come home and force Renee -- who's just chilling in their house, I guess? Watching Bree and Gabi burn through an entire box of dental dams to earn their Girl Scout Tribadism Badges -- to watch Tom beat Lynette senseless. She finally runs out into the yard, spouting blood from where he has bitten off her left ear; inside, Tom panics when he suddenly realizes that without Lynette, nobody will be around to change his diaper, and without Lynette's ear, nobody will hear his masculinity's constant cries for validation. Out in the yard, Lynette holds some frozen peas to the side of her head and a steak to her quickly rising shiner, and Renee explains the Basic Whore Facts again.
Lynette, verbatim: "It was awful! All weekend I was treated like a Plus-1, a second class citizen. A wife!"
(Yeah, she did. She fucking said it.)
Renee, verbatim: "Lynette, in Tom's world, that's what you are."
(Also in the dictionary, you absolutely ludicrous woman.)
Renee, verbatim: "You're gonna have to get used to it. Take it from someone who spent eight years being Mrs. Third Baseman. You can be a wife, or you can be a first wife."
Across the street, Gabi's harboring a similar black eye after Carlos finds not only pineapple upside-down lesbian porn in the VCR, but a literal stray hair on his wife's ass. (Let's just say the carpet matches the drapes, and leave it at that.)
What follows is a quasi-sexual bondage game in which Carlos can only get off while Gabrielle pretends to bake a pineapple upside-down cake from scratch, but it's only fun for Gabrielle if she's got Bree on the bluetooth the whole time -- strummin' edamame, hummin' soft and quiet kitchen songs -- so the three of them engage in this whole scene that's just complicated and inorganic enough that it'd make the Gay Ones feel like heterosexual virgins on their wedding night, and not the jaded Pine Barrens sluts they are.
Susan and Paul drink some wine, eat some soup, and reminisce about the time his wife blew her own head off. Not the one who's currently at the table -- or at least a bit of her -- but the one that's constantly reassuring us about what conscienceless dickholes we are. Mike catches her at it, all this slutty soup-making and welfare-taking, and blows a taciturn gasket, jerking MJ away from McCluskey so fast his arm comes out of the socket and they call Child Protective Services and the Delfinos have to pretend they miss awful old MJ.
Susan takes one look at that scene and realizes that Paul is not only hot as hell, but better company than her starter log of a husband, so she tells Mike to screw: Hand me an ultimatum between soup and a self-righteous Mike fit, hell, I'd pick soup too. And I don't even like soup.
While Gabi is cruisin' for a bruisin', shoving Carlos's face in the perfect cake she pretended to make, Susan heads back home to get her punishment for disobeying Mike. Instead, he has made her romantic dinner and put Sexapalooza 2011 back on the calendar.
Mike: "What I realized is that you are mentally compromised, and incapable of change. The kindness you're showing Paul -- though it's as utterly offensive as any compassion shown by anyone on this show -- is the sort of kindness we all have to show you, because your brain is more deformed than your kidneys. I realized that if I wanted to marry a real, grown-up woman -- with well-formed opinions and a right to exist -- I would have moved far away from Fairview, to where women aren't worthless trash. But you see, I wanted you: A lily-livered ninnyhammer without the brains God gave cattle. I'm basically a pedophile."
Susan: "Oh, you just want to fuck this bag of bones."
Mike: "That too. But since I let you eat dinner with a bereaved man, I get to put it in the butt."
Susan: "Always with the butt."
Carlos finds it suspicious that Gabi's modeling friend suddenly died, so he goes through her luggage and finds a bunch of bikinis and -- understandably, given that he spends every episode prancing off to remote holidays with Hot Gay Bob and Hot Gay Andrew and any other hot gay dudes he meets -- immediately assumes that she's running away with Bree to get their flossy-flossy up in each other's grills.
Carlos: "Then what's with this bright red pube?"
Gabi, verbatim: "I hugged a clown?"
Carlos, too taken aback to guffaw: "Do WHAT?"
Gabi: "Hugged a clown! His monkey died, he was very emotional."
So while Tom and Lynette are thinking about getting a divorce and becoming the plus-minuses they've always been, and Bree is Kegeling like there's no tomorrow, and Karen's sharpening her gardening clippers, and Paul is slowly but seductively dying of kidney failure, and Andrew's off fucking his AA sponsor real good, and Felicia is writing fucker fucker fucker like a thousand times on every piece of scrap paper in the house, and Renee is bathing in virgin's blood like every Sunday, and Paige is drawing up her emancipation papers in an infantile scrawl, Carlos hands his wife an ultimatum about how it's him or Bree, and you know what I always say about ultimatums:
Uh, fuck you?
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