Once she learns that dialysis gets you out of everything, Susan quickly becomes so gross that even Renee is impressed. They scam the townspeople, the gentry, officers of the law, and restaurant hostesses, all using Susan's dialysis. They eventually start a mini-riot at one exclusive restaurant when Susan starts comparing her disease (deformed kidney is not a disease) and the "six hours, three times a week" of dialysis (that she already never shuts up about) to other people's silly problems like rheumatoid arthritis and diabetes. But before the townspeople can finish what they started when they kicked her kidneys out of her in the first place, she drops dead and Renee makes a coat of her pelt. Or something, I kind of checked out. You know that girl ain't going anywhere.
The boomeranged Twins are making Lynette's life hell, so she decides it's time for them to grow up and makes them get an apartment and jobs. Fake out! They move across the street to McCluskey's, who dotes on them more than Tom and Lynette ever did. Lynette sneaks them a keg and prods them to throw a party, so they end up back at Fort Scavo... But it turns out that Lynette is the one that made them like this -- retarded -- and so she is not only a bad mother but also a bad woman because it's always women's fault whenever anything happens, even personal things like growing a pair and a brain, because men have zero accountability, because Fairview is a disgusting town.
But not as disgusting as Las Colinas, TX, where Gabi lived before she ran away from her molester stepfather to become a famous supermodel. Of course, the whole town (which is a mishmash of every idea you might have ever had about Texas, but backwards and upside down) thinks of her as a hometown hero, which she finds therapeutic. Of course, the Solizes are there so she can read her farewell letter over stepdad's grave and get closure on all that, but she hits a surprisingly small number of roadblocks before realizing she actually needs to confront and take down the bitch nun who refused to protect her all those years ago, and contributed mightily to her trauma and fallout, at which point things get just a little Durang around the edges.
(Dude, when even a relentlessly hidebound, idiotic show like this is calling out the RCC for their crimes against children? You know you done fucked up.)
Also getting called out for her crimes against children is Bree, because her boyfriend's bastard son is moving with his pretty mommy all the way to Florida and since Bree kept Charlie a secret for a while, that's time Keith will never get back. He begs her to move with him to Florida, but of course she can't do that, and she finally figures out that she is a gross old controlling cougar and had no business being with Keith in the first place, so she sets him free. And he wanders away across the yard, all those tattoos and complex thoughts, just brewing and steaming, and then a mean dog gets him. Just bites him in half. A red-tailed hawk quickly swoops for the top half and then he's gone, disappeared, back to nature. He was never going to survive out there. Maybe now his hot dad can come back.
Oh, and Paul has a whole talk with Zana about how he wasn't the reason Mary Alice killed herself, but Zach's being super vague about why he's crazy in this particular way right now and why suddenly he's always hated Paul and this kind of thing. Then Zach tells him that nobody could ever love him, because of course everyone on this show already irrationally hates the shit out of Paul so why not Zach too? Then Paul goes home and -- having just learned last episode that Beth is Felicia's daughter and thus clearly a double agent for the enemy -- kicks Beth's deranged ass out into the street, where she ugly-cries like Angela Chase and is clearly this close to pulling a Mary Alice her own self.
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This week, Lynette is going to realize that she has done her sons a disservice by babying them the way everybody babies Tom. As usual, Tom will have zero accountability, and Lynette will be forced to come to terms with the fact that she is a nexus of evil that ruins everything she touches. Just when you think she's going to figure it out, the voice of white male supremacy will thunder across the sky, and she'll realize that when men don't have their own backbones, it's still somehow your fault. This will be accomplished by making the Twins look like cartoonishly low-functioning cases of heretofore undiagnosed developmental disorders on par with The Other Sister.
Things the Twins have not discovered for themselves having reached the age of majority: The location of eggs. The location of the refrigerator. Sarcasm. What goes under the kitchen sink (hint, it's not "fresh fruit"), The ingredients of an omelet. Whether it's appropriate to explain to your mother the difference between a "booty call" and a "drunken hookup."
They have girls downstairs for the look of whom Lynette does not much care, whom they met at a kegger and who are starving for the kind of food only Lynette in the middle of the night can provide. Their names are, of course, Kimberly and Tiffany, and one of them is from Denver, which is why the omelet much be a Denver omelet. The boys weakly offer to make this themselves, but are so lost in the weeds that Lynette immediately jumps out of bed to make it for them, complaining all the while in her crankiest voice. Mary Alice is like, "The worst thing about having children is that they exist."
morning, Lynette and a mystified Tom hand the boys the classified ads: They've got one week to find jobs and an apartment, or else. There's that usual confusion of pronouns that people who have no idea what twins are like -- but a childish sentimental excitement about the idea of twins -- show: Sometimes it's one of them graduating from college, sometimes both, sometimes only one of them needs a job, sometimes both. Sometimes "I," sometimes "we," mostly an unrealistic and vaguely defined middle.
Tom's like, "But they're male children, why do they have to do anything for themselves? I'm not criticizing, I'm honestly confused. Could you scratch my arm?" Lynette compares them to baby birds who will never fly, and shows him a grim future in which they live in the basement long into the Scavos' retirement, and he finally gets how it might affect him, so he's on board.
More things the Twins are too fucking Susan-stupid to understand: Places people might live that are not this house. How to create money in order to buy things. How to use a landline. Where the knives are. Magnets. It's dumb and dipshitty anyway, but also: Didn't one or both of them like already move out a couple of times? And, like, grow a mustache? I cannot have made that up. I don't want them gone because they're nice to look at, but any way you look at it, this show is hard to deal with sometimes.
Susan is drinking coffee -- kidneys love coffee -- and chatting with her insurance company as she drives down the road, narrowly missing a chipmunk and spilling coffee all over herself. The reason this is all happening at once is that her insurance might not be paying for all of her dialysis. (I don't know if you heard, but Susan's on dialysis. Six hours, three times a week.) Then a cop pulls her over, not because of the random swerving or the talking on her phone, but some other instance of bad driving that happened before all that.
"Sorry, it's just my deformed kidney made me drive poorly! I am going to be late for my dialysis, which I have for six hours three times a week!" The cop is like, "DIALYSIS? Let me carry you there on my broad back while you drink your coffee and read magazines and tell me each and every instance of the way you're constantly and unfairly being mistreated by this big old bad universe of ours." Well, it all started when I got naked on the internet for pervs to jack off to. I'd just threatened to murder a grieving widower down the street with a caveman's club, and let me tell you my ex-addict husband could not have been more sympathetic. He was in Alaska at the time, fucking a snowman, but he wouldn't bother to give me his kidney...
Gabi's therapist, in light of her air-clearing concentration on how her storyline this season has been about circling the abuse of her childhood, has suggested that she write a letter to the stepfather in question. This helped, I'm sure, a great deal. The step is to take this letter to Texas -- and how dumb do I feel that I didn't connect the Grace/Texas thing to the Gabi/Texas thing, which is actually a smart thing the show did -- and read it to her stepfather's grave. I don't even want to talk about the way Texas is presented or the way Gabi talks about it, because it's par for the course of this show, but I'm guessing you already know exactly how that's going to fall out.
Paul and Mike have been detoxing their son on the way to rehab -- just a barfin' spittin' hissin' mess -- and it's clearly weighing on them. But then, I'd rather be locked in a barfmobile truck putting cold compresses to Zach Young's head and hugging him tight then spend one second with either MJ or Susan, much less both, so maybe I'm not being sympathetic enough. He does all the usual addict shit, and finally lures Paul into a confrontation about how this is all Paul's fault, which is too much. Mike calms Paul down as much as he can, in that low voice he uses when he's being awesome, and Paul's like, "Fact remains you shot your dad with the gun your mom used to kill herself. Can't help but think maybe something there bears investigating a l'il bit. Also, you are a crazy drug addict from a biological and adoptive family made up entirely of crazies and drug addicts." On a scale of one-to-Andrew-on-the-side-of-the-road, I'd put it at about a seven.
Ha! Dumb Keith is teaching Charlie to throw a baseball using the exact same trick as when he taught him to throw a basketball last week. I kind of love this show. Of course Keith only knows one trick. Of course the nasty old queens who write this show think the hazy Kevin Costner definition of fatherhood consists entirely of Keith teaching him this one trick over and over, just using different balls. week he'll teach Charlie to throw, like, a golfball overhand. "Hand in the cookie jar, Charlie. You're doing great."
Charlie's pretty mom drives up and we learn that it's been a week since they were introduced, and also she's suddenly moving to Florida. Inside, Keith points out that he lost an entire week before that to Bree being a gross controlling monster and keeping Charlie a secret, but it's not really a fight, just exposition to get us up to speed, because this episode is just like, "Yeah, she pulled shit, get over it." So she apologizes a hundred times and he apologizes for pointing out how ugly her whole approach was, and then she accepts his apology for... Doing nothing wrong whatsoever beyond questioning her absurdly crazy judgment.
Bree feels his life-giving energy pouring out through her plastic surgery scars, so she drags him upstairs to suck more of the life out of his nimble young 37-year-old tadpole self, which shuts him up, because men are all about sex and their brains stop working, so that's how you should end every argument.
Poor old Susan is spending the last of her food stamps on gourmet pomegranate juice and prosciutto at Trader Joe's when MJ starts howling about how he wants to travel back in time to the '70s and watch his favorite cartoon, Tom & Jerry, so she tells all the women in line that she's on dialysis and they lay down palm fronds and put her on the back of a donkey and she doesn't even have to pay for her groceries, it's just balloons come down from the ceiling and there's glitter and a neon sign lights up that says DIALYSIS in rainbow letters and she just stares ungratefully at them like she can't believe they didn't bring her some coffee and where's her dialysis footrub and bring me some more of those lemon-poppy muffins samples from Aisle 5, because momma gets dialysis six hours a day, three times a week.
Las Colinas, which is funny every time because the real Las Colinas is like the suburban DFW equivalent of Silicon Valley -- polo shirts and Aspergers and NordicTracks, all the way from here to the big Texas horizon -- and nothing like what we're looking at: A pile of industrial waste that has been set on fire. Some creepy old nun comes trolling around the corner, and you can tell from the complete lack of affect on Gabi's face exactly what went down there, but before she can attack the nun for throwing her child self under the sexual abuse bus, some lady comes running up with the hilarity of Gabi's maiden name: "Gabrielle Marquez."
Did we know this? That's the funniest joke this show has ever done, if so. Well played, show. Tell me her mom's maiden name was Garcia and I will mail you five dollars, show. Here is a hug from me to you. So anyway, the lady is so excited because as it turns out, Gabi's a hometown hero, having been the only person who ever escaped and who hit escape velocity so hard, due to the hell of her life there, that she eventually became an international supermodel. Possibly this would get more play, but Gabi's feeling sick because of the nun, so they hit the hotel for a minute.
Keith has dropped off Charlie and his mom at the airport to Florida, and will now commence sitting on the porch looking sad and heavily tattooed. Bree is sympathetic, to the degree that she has a sympathetic bone in her body, and he spins some tale about how the cat's in the cradle and the silver spoon and inside herself Bree's just like, "Well, that's enough of that. Time once again to arrange everybody else's life to my greatest convenience."
The Twins have actually found an apartment, and the Scavos are super-excited about loading up the car, taking pictures, tearful hugs goodbye -- Tom's still not clear on what is actually going on, really -- and then the car pulls out of the driveway and onto the Lane and then errk parks in front of the McCluskey residence, across the street. Awesomely, Lynette's only response at this time is to delete all the photos she just took, because that is some bullshit.
Susan gets out of jury duty through dialysis -- six hours a day, three times a week -- but like as a trick to delight Renee, who's been a proudly soulless monster forever while Susan is only now learning this about herself. Renee reiterates, as she does every week, that there is no reason for her and Susan to be friends, and then Susan says that she is owed all the shit and perqs she can get because of dialysis and how it's inconvenient and horrible. Like everybody else on dialysis, but you know, a little bit more because it's fucking Susan and everything is more important when it's about her. Renee responds by dragging her to this hot new restaurant in town, Girard's, where she can't get a table.
Dinner with Susan? Priceless. Dinner with Susan where she gets to hold it over your head the entire time that her illness is the reason you have the table? Even better.
"You sure you want to eat here? I think I just saw two cockroaches throwing up." Oh, Carlos, I miss you. It's only recently that you've become wonderful again. They go into the restaurant, and it's covered with photos of Gabi and crawling with poor people, and then before you know it they're dining on Gabrielle Garcia Marquez Nacho Platters and taking photographs with everybody and they all think Carlos is her chauffeur and she's offering to do radio spots and give a speech at her old school to help the girls understand that if you're pretty enough, your dreams might just come true.
Remember Beth? We haven't seen her since Paul was in the hospital and he figured out that she's Felicia's daughter and decided probably to torture her to death. I'm happy to see her; she's very happy to have Paul back. But he's acting super weird, even for Paul Young, and then he starts waving her gun around ("My son tried to kill me. Fool me once!") and asking why "his bride" brought a gun into the house in the first place, and because she has no idea what he's on about -- but does, truly, love him -- she gets twenty kinds of codependent and appeasing with him, to no avail.
And if you think about how they've set this up, it's actually very clever. All we know about Beth is that she was like this Rapunzel that Felicia kept trapped in the house and pimped out to her vendetta victims. She's only ever lived with her mom, and then Paul. And while I have no problem understanding why you would fall in love with Paul, the idea that he's literally the only other human being she's, like, met in her life grants this storyline a hell of a lot more weight than it otherwise should have. It wasn't like she made the choice to be a double agent, or any choices at any time: She did what her mom said, finally figured out her mom was fucking loony tunes, and then realized she'd lucked out by marrying a guy she could actually love. From a nightmare to a turnkey life as a not-so-desperate housewife: Boom, done. Happy ending. And now the shit hits the fan? Isn't that just so sad?
Keith would like to move to Florida so they can be closer to Charlie. As if to illustrate the fact that he is a lost child of a man-boy, these are his reasons, like his list of Pro reasons that Bree would be down for this: "We'll pick oranges, and swim with dolphins! And do all the other stuff you do in Florida!" Um, meth? And anyway, Bree's quite happy where she is, dumbass, and he already knew that, so then he passive-aggressives her all, "Unless... Oh, never mind. Well... No, I can't say it..." Which gets you a punch in the nose from me so don't ever do it, but Bree's just like, "Fuckin' what." The what is, what if he dumped Bree and moved to Florida because their relationship is ridiculous, but he would never say that, so goodnight. Shut up, Keith. Shut up, both of you.
Gabi's doing interview after interview on the hotel phone, and Carlos is like, "Remember the grave and the whole thing? You were going to let a red balloon into the air to symbolize our miscarriage or whatever?" Gabi says that being adored by everybody in a town that once made her feel like lowly, loathesome trash is the best kind of therapy. I don't know for sure, but that does sound pretty good. Still up in the air, as far as whether or not she's actually doing the letter thing, but the outlook is not good, and Carlos has to make that one face he makes, really hard, until she stops looking at him.
The Scavos are horrified at first by the Twins' big fakeout, but after all McCluskey is a hard old crone that doesn't take shit from anybody, so maybe it'll be okay. Of course, she immediately calls them up to ask about Lynette's omelet recipe, because hers are not up to par, and Lynette's like, "Yeah, I'll be right over." Tom is like, "How do you make an omelet?"
At McCluskeys, the Twins are sitting around with either Tiffany and Kimberly or another set of loose young broads, and McCluskey's running around feeding them and clipping their toenails for them and washing their laundry by hand down by the river and stroking their heads with a lullabye, and Lynette goes off.
"They just moved from my boob to yours!" she shouts, which is like the most direct thing anybody has ever said on this show, so of course everybody is horrified. McCluskey assures Lynette that she doesn't mind grandmothering and that she'll try to stay cool, but if they fuck up even one time she'll kick them out. Instead of treating everybody like the adults she's nominally wanting them all to be, of course, Lynette figures out some horrible shitty plan where the collateral damage is so out of line with whatever point she's trying to make that nobody would ever actually be her friend.
Also gross, and I almost left it out entirely, but McCluskey doesn't mind that the Twins have sluts around all the time, because it gives her elderly husband an erection. Which he then fucks her with. So deal with that rock and roll right there.
Speaking of feminism: "Now girls, if it were up to me I'd say avoid math and science. They cause serious frown lines. Young girls today need to know the dangers of long division." Embarrassing for everybody. The principal of her old school comes up schlepping the mean-looking nun from earlier, and Gabi about freaks out right there, and the mean old nun is like, "You're dressed like a whore, as usual, but of course you've always loved getting attention, with your antics." She slopes off into the shadows with a face like a truncheon and Gabi's like, "You know what? I'ma be right back. I just gotta kick the shit out of Sister Marta real quick."
Get it, girl. (Impute usual boilerplate about how good of an actress Eva Longoria is, with a slight NB that she actually pulls back from this part because there's no drama in it: Just the truth. All the screaming about the baby and Texas, and now this. Cold and sad and healing right in front of you.)
Gabi's like, "Hey Sister Marta, remember when I came to you as a trusted adult and told you I was being raped by a parent and you told me I was a liar and a piece of trash and I should feel ashamed? Joke's on me, because I totally did feel ashamed for the last 20 years, despite being the only person in the situation who was completely blameless." The nun's like, "I don't believe you," and tries to run away, and Gabi is just like, "No. Because check it: My therapist sent me here to tell my stepfather how I felt about things now, and it occurs to me that he is dead, while you merely appear that way."
So here's my letter: I did not deserve what happened to me. I was a child. But you were a grown-up, and you did nothing. You should be ashamed of yourself.
And that's how Gabi finally found her way home.
Lynette brings the Twins a keg in the hopes that they will somehow cause the deaths of McCluskey and her ogling husband Carl, and thus she will win. The Twins are so stupid that they buy into this, and that's how McCluskey's house got toilet-papered by an art department so aggressive that it ends up looking like a Christo installation.
Beth Young being good and spooked, Paul heads back to rehab to ask Zach why he shot him, and what follows is a crazed druggie conversation I couldn't really follow. At first Paul is steadfast, not entirely unloving, and then Zach starts in on this stuff about how Paul's the reason Mary Alice killed herself, which we know and Paul knows is not true, and while at first Paul assesses that this is all drug talk and Zach hasn't actually hated him this entire time, Zach kind of pulls him off his conversational bicycle and onto the ground so that by the end of the interaction Paul is convinced that nobody could ever love him.
I'm going to leave this one in a liminal space for now, because I honestly don't understand the point of it. It was effective acting- wise, and Zach is always wonderful, but the intent of the scene -- Are we rewriting the history of the two relationships at the heart of this show? The Youngs are the first thing that ever happened, and we've covered all of this. So are we saying Zach is delusional and confused and contributing to Paul's unearned martyrdom? -- is unclear.
Susan and Renee try to work their kidney magic, but the guy behind them in line has diabetes and his wife has rheumatoid arthritis. Susan tells them to go fuck their diseases, because hers is way better, and then everybody starts yelling at everybody else. ("I have Restless Leg Syndrome!" one woman yells, and they all beat her savagely.) Only this show could somehow implicate everyone on earth as being a horrible victim stereotype, because only this show honestly believes that we are as selfish and vile and grasping and greedy and unlovely as these people.
So finally the gruesome twosome realize it's not going to work... Which is, of course, when Susan actually does just keel over onto the floor. Renee's like, "Honey, it's not working, get up, you're being weird." It takes her a few seconds to realize that Susan is dying right there in the middle of Girard's, and she screams for help, but the people just step over her and keep trying to wrangle for a table, because we are all assholes in America and with the Kidney Genovese all the time.
Or, you know, because Susan is the worst goddamn thing and probably all of Fairview have had her drive up onto their lawns, or knock out their children at the playground, or trip their grandmothers at a funeral, or whatever fucking mayhem she's always unleashing.
Beth finds Paul packing a suitcase, but it is not his suitcase, oh no. It is Beth's suitcase, because she is going on a little trip. Where to? Nobody knows. The curb. Paul's like, "Don't forget your gun!" which I think is a little premature considering they're both just crazy as all get out, but if Zach was right that means everybody is an enemy and safety starts at home, so she's out. Mary Alice says some snide bullshit about how all of these stories are connected by leaving things behind -- childhood, molestation, the man who killed your aunt with a household appliance -- but the balls-out Douglas Sirk kitsch of having Beth Young literally dragging her suitcase down the middle of the street, mascara running down her face, howling like we're in the Baskervilles? That's only matched by Mary Alice going, "And the shittiest thing of all is when you're Paul Young's wife and then you shoot yourself right in the fucking head."
week: Presumably Beth murders herself in an elaborate and public fashion, Felicia comes rocketing out of prison looking for triple-vengeance, Susan accidentally eats both of Beth's kidneys instead of getting them donated into her abdomen, or fashions them into a hat, or sells them for some magic beans on the magic black market. Gabrielle discovers what acting like a normal person feels like, but since by now Juanita's probably got a job as a paralegal somewhere and doesn't really need the stress, only Celia will "benefit." Zach will get cleaned up and go back to looking like a little kid and not the bad-ass hottie he's been looking like lately, which will make certain of us, not naming names, feel retroactively super-creepy. And Paul, if this is possible, Paul will get even more deranged, and blame somebody even more ridiculous for all his horrible travails. Somehow, Lynette will make all of these things worse.
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