Episode Report Card LuluBates: B | Grade It Now! YOU GRADE IT A Boozer on a Train Headed to Los Angeles
By LuluBates | Season 1 | Episode 6 | Aired on 10.29.2009
Mark does not have a Halloween costume, but since he is bringing his sponsor with him when he takes his daughter trick or treating, I guess he is going as a recovering alcoholic. His daughter, Charlie, is dressed as a character that I have never heard of: Tim Tim or Tim Jim? I don't know. If it's not Flossie or Freddie, I'm out. She convinces Mark to masquerade as her father, which strangely involves an eyepatch and buck teeth (and not just an outfit substantially similar to what he was wearing before when he was her father). I guess they just had an extra eye patch and a set of fake teeth laying around the house, meaning they have a far more ready-for-fun house than I do. So Mark and Charlie and the sponsor head out and the first thing they see is a kangaroo. Mark is so surprised he even lifts his eyepatch so he can really see the 'roo trotting down the street. He really should have arrested that marsupial as a material witness, just to keep things interesting. At the hospital, Lloyd has lost his son. He rushes to the security guard and asks if he has seen a young boy dressed as a pimp. WHAT??!! You're going to call Flavor Flav A PIMP and think you can get away with it? The Security Guard doesn't throw him into cuffs and make him watch twenty hours of Flavor of Love or anything, but just points him to the nurses' station. LAME! Also, totally unrealistic. What self-respecting black man who is bored out of his mind at work standing guard at a hospital would miss an opportunity to defend Flav from such outright slander? Flav is not a pimp. He's a player. He doesn't pay for love, he plays for it. Lloyd runs off and the guard just stands there.
Janice tries to kick her boss out of her hospital room because, frankly, who the hell wants their boss loitering in their hospital room for hours on end? Not that I don't LOVE the Powers That Be here at Television Without Pity, but I also don't want them seeing me get examined by a sleep-deprived resident. Wedeck really doesn't catch the hint that Janice wants him to go and instead takes a one-man walk down memory lane reminiscing that he watched his wife give birth to their son and it was "primal". Yeah, I highly recommend telling a laboring woman that she looks "primal," that is sure to go over really well. All that talk about the magic of birth and creating new life is probably not the best topic for Janice. She flashes forward to her pregnant future self and gets so depressed that her blood count drops and she is rushed back to surgery. Nice going Wedeck.
Meanwhile the midnight express to Los Angeles continues its run, but it is far from a lonely voyage -- at least in one sleeper car. The hot blonde fell for the old "how many physicists does it take to screw in a sleeper car" line, because she is inflagrante delicto with Mr. Physicist and -- ew. I have a question that has been bugging me for years: If you are an up-and-coming actress and you land a bit part on a primetime television show, but you have to act like you are in the middle of some hot one-night stand and you have your naked leg wrapped around a naked man's torso and it looks like he has been embedded in your nether bits for the duration of your screen time, do you let your parents watch your big break? What about your grandparents? The happy couple is recounting their flash forwards mid-nookie, we don't hear the lady's tale of the future, but Mr. Physicist succumbs to her arm twisting and tells her that for those two minutes and seventeen seconds, he was strangling a man with his bare hands. Mood killer! More champagne, STAT!
Lloyd and the security guard with a work ethic look over the hospital's surveillance tape trying to track Dylan's move. They see him leaving the hospital, but Lloyd doesn't know his son well enough to guess where he could be going. Dylan is getting on a bus. And the bus driver has no qualms about letting an unaccompanied minor dressed like an originator of rap ride the bus late at night. But Dylan does have to pay the fare. When Dylan doesn't respond, the bus driver gets in his face demanding his 75 cents (as if anything in Los Angeles cost 75 cents). When the driver asks if Dylan is brain damaged, a Latin King with a heart of gold, some neck tattoos, and a glare that could stop a Flying Burrito Brother intervenes to save the lil rapper from the mean old public employee. Thank god for gangbangers. Dylan recites an address and the Latin King threatens the driver with bodily harm until he tells him how many bus transfers it will take to get there.
Hours after they left FBI HQ, Demetri and Jett are still trying to track their clue and Jett is getting antsy especially once he hears that Janice is back in surgery. He's worried, but not overly so since Janice had a flash forward. At the hospital, Olivia is performing a risky but less invasive procedure that could save Janice's uterus for future inhabitants. Interspersed with the surgical scenes, Demetri tells Jett a tale of Janice's ability to drink him under the table, which is meant to either prove her toughness or show that her insides are so pickled they are impervious to bullets. Jett mocks Demetri for letting a girl drink him under the table, but Demetri wins the argument when he finds a stop sign on Baltimore Street with a sticker of a skeletal blue hand on it. They do a happy clue dance.
Mark and Olivia are so rich that they can afford to pay their babysitter to stay home and hand out candy to the trick-or-treaters while Mark takes their daughter trick-or- treating. My mamma always said: Marry a doctor (and floss). When Nicole opens the door to feed the teeming hoards of trick-or-treaters, Dylan walks in and helps himself to a cookie while Nicole stands there looking perplexed instead of sending out the hounds, pulling up the drawbridge, and protecting the family stronghold. Sheesh, what do they pay her for? Out on the mean streets of suburbia, Mark is being tugged along by his candy fiend daughter. But everything goes slo-mo when he spots a trio of men all in black with masks that are eerily similar to the men he saw in his flash forward. You know, the men all in black with masks and really big guns with laser sites who are hunting him down like he is the last pair of Manolo Blahniks at the Barney's Warehouse Sale. He stares intensely at them until they notice his burning gaze. He asks his sponsor (the reason for his presence suddenly becoming apparent) to watch Charlie as he yells at the guys to "Stop! FBI!" The guys bolt and Mark takes off after them, leaping over a wall, and most likely traumatizing his daughter and all the other little kids who witnessed the scene. Halloween is scary, kids!
Demetri and The Famous Jett Jackson are still staring at the stop sign. It takes all their years of experience and Quantico training to realize that the blue hand is pointing left. Crack team, there. Meanwhile, Mark is pursuing the masked men through his gated community and into a...Cemetery! It is Halloween after all. He pulls his gun, runs like a girl, and then tracks them into the graveyard where he dodges all the Goths making out and all the "Thriller" re-enacters and tackles one of the men and pins him to the ground. Mark unmasks him while holding a gun to his head and demands to know everything. Unfortunately the masked attacker turns out to be a kid who will never ever ever ever egg another house again. Mark's cell phone rings and he quickly answers and is impressively not out of breath or anything, which is not bad for an old dude who just chased a teenager half a mile and jumped over three different six foot walls. I bet he gets awarded the Presidential Physical Fitness Award next time he goes to Congress. Nicole explains about their uninvited guest and Mark rushes home to deal with it. Hold up, he took his gun trick-or-treating? That'll teach people to hand out raisins. Crimes against humanity, I tell ya!
Demetri and Jett follow the Clue of the Blue Hand like they are the new multi-cultural Hardy Boys. They think the Blue Hand might be a secret club and as they put together the clues they realize