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Previously on Desperate Housewives: a season finale by the name of "One Wonderful Day" aired. Maybe you saw it?

Okay so...Mike was about to walk into his house and get his brains blown out by Zana. Or maybe it's Bongo who's going to get it, or Susan will manage to shoot herself somehow. But before we get to that, first...Ida Greenberg. Come on, Ida Greenberg? You remember Ida. Ida, the newspaper thief? Ida, who is also the neighborhood drunk? Ida "Sure Like Another Drink" Greenberg? So Ida is sneaking out of a house with something suspiciously bottle-y wrapped in a paper bag. We get some Ida flashbacking, with MAVO explaining how she'd been spotted hiccupping drunk at sewing bees, hiccupping drunk at the DMV, and burping drunk at First Methodist church. (And who's that sitting in the pew behind Ida? Edie? In church! ["Probably sweating like a...well, anyway." -- Wing Chun]) Back in the now, we see Ida walking up the street, unscrewing the top of some sort of whisky something. MAVO: "Ida had tried to quit drinking many times, but she couldn't. Then one night, in a moment of despair, she challenged God," Ida looks up at the heavens, "to quench her neverending thirst. Luckily for Ida, God was listening." Mike's truck drives up the street behind Ida and pulls into his driveway.

And then bam! Mike's walking in the door and Zana's right there with his gun, his shirt buttoned and tucked beyond all sanity. And Bongo's there. And Susan too. Slowly, with lips pursed like a little girl flute player, Zana levels his gun at Mike. "[Zana], listen to me," Mike pleads, but Zana isn't in a listening mood; rather, he's in a gun-cocking mood. At the sound of the bullet clicking into place, Susan springs out of her seat, shouting "Noooooo" as she throws her body, all seven pounds of it, against Zana. Zana falls to the ground, the gun gets knocked to the side, and a spastic struggle ensues, Zana pulling on Susan's leg and Mike pulling on Zana's arm and Bongo bonging like crazy. Somehow, Susan manages to grab the gun. "Not so tough now, are you?" says she. Hey, Susan's lip's bleeding! Susan's moment of triumph lasts all of two seconds before Bongo attacks her leg. That bad, bad Bongo, such a grudge-keeper! Mike lets go of Zana and runs over to try to get Bongo off Susan. Susan trips backward and falls into a chair, causing the gun to, of course, go off, as surely we all knew it would the very second we saw it in Susan's hands. But don't worry, no one's hurt! Nobody except Ida's bottle of precious brown fluids, which Susan has managed to shoot by way of Mike's window. Zana races out the door and up the street, and we see Ida, standing there looking astonished with nothing but the neck of her exploded bottle in her hands. MAVO: "It was at that moment it occurred to Ida [that] God may work in mysterious ways, but he isn't particularly subtle."

Wah-wahhhh. And roll those credits!

We come back from credits and pan in on the famous framed photo of Mary Alice, all covered in cobwebs. Wow, how much time has passed here? They may have gone a little overboard with the webbing; seriously, it looks like Miss Havisham's house in there...though maybe this is some sort of special Halloween decoration? Huh. MAVO: "It's been a year since my death, and a lot has changed on Wisteria Lane." (Everything except the credit sequence, which seems pretty much untouched.) MAVO trills on about how, since she's been gone, children have learned new games, and we see some kids wearing...army helmets and tossing a ball over a white picket fence. I'm not sure I know of this game? And then MAVO reminds us about the new neighbors, and we see Betty and Hotty Applewhite taking down the "for sale" sign from in front of their house. MAVO goes on to remind us of "old houses that had been rebuilt," and we see Edie in front of her almost-rebuilt house with a bunch of construction guys buzzing around. MAVO: "And fresh tragedies had occurred. In one house," and now here is Bree and Rex's "light of Jesus"-illuminated wedding portrait, "a widow was getting ready to tell her friends of her husband's passing." We see Bree, we see the clock. It's five minutes to 9. "But until the time was right, she would wait." Bree's finger taps impatiently on the phone. Not at all surprisingly, it appears that Bree is a "never call before 9" girl. "And life, as it tends to do, would go on."

Cut to Susan, in a hospital bed, her mouth full of gauze. Daughter Julie is perched on the bed to her. Around the gauze, Susan is grunting how awful she looks, and that she needs a hairbrush. "Yeah, um, that' not going to help," Julie says kindly. Mike walks in with a cop, who's there to take Susan's statement. The cop asks if Zach Young was who gave her the bloody lip, and Mike jumps in to say, "No, she did that to herself. She fell, bit her lip, it was an accident." Mike seems a little "over it" here. Hm. Susan starts to tell her story, but her fat lip gauze makes her completely incomprehensible. So she takes out the gauze and does some painful muttering: "That's Zach with an 'H,' he pointed a gun at me," etc. Then Julie makes Susan put the gauze back in, per the doctor's orders. Mike jumps in to say that Zana has a lot of emotional problems, and Susan makes the loony signal and barks, "Ya, cuz he cay zee." Mike defends Zana again: "Still, I don't think he meant to hurt anybody." A flabbergasted Susan spits out her gauze again: "Uh hello, he was waiting there for you to come home so he could kill you!" The cop asks if that indeed is what happened: did the kid take a shot at Mike? "Actually, Susan fired the gun," says Mike. Again, Susan sputters out her bloody mouth gauze (and Susan, paused right now on my screen, looks profoundly disturbing here, like a hunched bloody-mouth apple doll), and states, "That's because I was wrestling it away from Zach so he wouldn't shoot you!" All the yelling starts the blood flowing again, and Julie asks if they can do this later: "She's kind of a mess right now." Mike says he can probably fill the cop in on the rest anyway, and they retire to the hallway. Hey, what about Felicia? Weren't the cops already after Zana for pummeling her with a hockey stick? I don't really think Mike would be able to downplay this one, what with Zana's growing list of violent extracurricular activities. Also, why is no one even visiting Felicia? We're already at the hospital; how hard would it be to pick up some sort of balloon in the lobby and pay her a little neighborly visit? Julie gets up to get Susan some more ice, and overhears Mike telling the cop that "Susan really flew off the handle when she jumped the kid." "So you're saying this is more of a domestic squabble?" Yup, according to Mike, that's all it was. Nothing to see here! As they walk off, Julie looks after them, astonished. And...it's four minutes to 9.

Lynette rolls into the wacky, creative, and fun offices of the purple and orange. Stu the receptionist is there, his headset strapped into place as he goes in to take a huge bite of sandwich. He tells her to go right on in, they're just about ready for her. Lynette: "Listen, Stu, you look like a bright, responsible young man, I bet you just love kids. Am I right?" Stu looks rightfully panicked.

Cut to Lynette, who's standing in big boss Ed's office, looking over some of his sports paraphernalia. Ed walks in with Tits, who is wearing a similarly revealing top today, this time in pink. Ed immediately reveals himself to be a busy man. He's going to have to make this quick, because he has to take off in five minutes to go catch a plane. He has Celtics tickets! Where are we? If he has to fly to get to Boston then...that still tells me nothing. Where oh where is this town? As Ed talks, he crumples pieces of paper and tosses them into his trashcan across the room, which has a worn basketball net suspended above it la Bosom Buddies. Ed tells her that he thinks her rsum looks great, and they do some shop-talking. Then he asks her if she's had a lot of copy work experience. So Lynette is a copywriter! Lynette agrees that she has, but when she moved over to "Cenn and Simmons," she got to do "a broader range of campaigns, including TV, radio, billboards." The whole time Lynette is talking here, she's looking through the chic glass wall of the office at Penny, who is lying on Stu's desk and crying. Stu is flirting with someone and totally ignoring her. This sight gives Lynette's delivery a...weird...sort of...Forest Gump styling.

Finally, she can stand it no longer. "Could you excuse me for a moment?" she says, and then she does that funny run that rushed women in heels and a pencil skirt do -- part bunny hop, part tip-toe shuffle. We see and faintly hear Lynette calling Stu an "idiot, and absolute idiot," and then Lynette is back in the interview, crying baby in her arms. Lynette giddily introduces them to Penny, saying "she gives me my best ideas." Tits: "You brought your baby to the interview." Lynette: "Don't worry, it won't be an ongoing thing." Tits: "You bet it won't." But just as Tits inhales to deliver what's almost sure to be a "get out," Ed says, "It's fine. Any chance we can get the little lady to be quiet?" Lynette says she just needs a few minutes to go change her diaper. Ed doesn't really have time for that, and he gets up to go. Lynette: "All right, then watch me multitask." She proceeds to change Penny right there on the couch while rolling out her spiel, about how this is a really good shop, but if they want to take things to the level, they need awards -- "do some PSA, some pro bono work, whatever it takes" -- and they also need a better website, because the current one is "hard to navigate, it has no site map." Call me old-fashioned, but if a site is well-designed, it shouldn't need a site map. Also? Just hearing Lynette say "site map" makes me cringe, like when my mom once said to me "you go girl!" Anyway, surprise, Ed is totally impressed by Lynette's amazing ability to do the dazzle-dance while simultaneously wiping urine off of some third-party nethers (which, incidentally, is yet another aspect of life in advertising...Lynette couldn't have chosen a more apt audition than this!). "You're in," says Ed. "Seriously?" Lynette asks. Tits looks equally as amazed. "Take the office across the hall," says Ed as he twirls out of the room. "I gotta run." Ed actually has a nice kind of Kevin Spacey thing going on here that very much captures the particular essence of "confidence coupled with ignorance" that typifies a certain type of upper management. Lynette does a "well allll right!" and tosses the dirty diaper toward the trashcan, only she misses the hoop, and the diaper just sticks to the window/wall and slowly starts to slide downward as an aghast Tits looks on. "Okay, obviously I'm going to clean that up," says the newly employed Lynette.

Cut to our four ladies walking up the Lane. Susan, in an awkward piece of expository dialogue, says, "So it looks like Mary Alice killed Zach's birth mother in order to keep her from taking Zach away." Lynette: "Oh my god. I mean, I knew Mary Alice had killed herself over something big, but wow...I mean, can you imagine living with that guilt." Gabby: "Isn't it bizarre that Paul and Mary Alice lived with this secret all these years and we didn't even know about it?" Susan: "No, not really. I mean, what do we actually know about our neighbors? We can tell if they keep their lawns nice or they take their trash cans in. But when they do those things, we stop asking questions, because people are good neighbors." Bree: "We don't really care what happens behind closed doors." MAVO: "It had been one year since my suicide." Lynette: "Makes you wonder, doesn't it." MAVO: "And a lot had changed on Wisteria Lane. There were new flowers, new houses, and new neighbors -- the kind anyone would want living door." Okay. That was by far the most ham-fisted piece of storytelling ever. Not just on this show, just...ever. Can't we give Bree just one second of warmth and human-esque kindness before we launch in with the "what do we really know about our neighbors" pontification? Also, isn't this kind of "pointing out the obvious" stuff MAVO's primary domain? What's the point of having a dead omniscient narrator if you're just going to have the characters themselves point out the meaning behind each and every one of the show's few subtleties? Characters who, by the way, are still wearing their funeral garb and who should be quietly, meditatively contemplating the VERY SAD DEMISE OF THEIR FRIEND AND/OR LOVER REX? Why must you hurt me this way, Cherry?

Meanwhile, over at the Applewhites, there is some serious "behind closed doors" stuff going on. Betty is playing a hymn on the piano; the funeral just put her in the mood for it. Matthew stops in to listen; he's carrying a food tray. "Did you remember the butter?" she asks him sharply. Matthew reminds her that he makes up the tray every night. "Of course you do! I'm sorry," says Betty in a peculiar, biting sing-song. Still playing, Betty notices that there's a rose in a vase on the tray. Still in the "sarcastic storyteller" voice, she says, "Oh look! You added a flower!" Matthew says, semi-defensively, that he just thought it might be nice. "How did I get so lucky to have a child like you? You really do try to think of others. That flower, it's a small act of kindness, and yet you did it anyway. It says a lot about how you were raised." Matthew: "Well, I guess you did your job." Hold on. What is going on here? There are some serious creepy undertones to this whole conversation. It's all very bad touchy-touchy. Betty comes over to Matthew and says, "I'll take the tray, you take the gun." Who? What?

Together, Betty and Matthew go down to the basement and unlock an elaborately rusted door. (How lucky for Betty and toothsome Matthew that the house they bought over the internet or whatever came with its own rust-stained dungeon!) Betty goes into a small room and places the tray on a table as Matthew watches on from the door. Betty retreats to the door, then takes one last look at the food tray. "It really is a lovely gesture," she says, and she and Matthew leave. The door swings shut, and...a SHACKLED HAND reaches out for the glass of juice and/or urine.

What the...? Where is that plodding over-explainer MAVO when you need her?

Sunday: Karl sleeps with Edie!