Djb gave this episode a grade of
C-
25 users have given this episode an average grade of
B+
I can't believe I forgot to do this last week. So here they are now. The props. Raucous, deafening, creamy-nougat-covered, actually tuneful props to BluEyesGrl for the tapes, and to Heathen, for teaching me everything there is to know about the Making the Band recapping process. Except, of course, how to be funnier than her. Er, Heathen? Wouldn't mind the last chapter of the lesson now? Heathen?
We open on a long, slow, overtly meaningful, if-you-build-it-he-won't-care panning shot of Kevin Costner Memorial Wet Dream Metaphor For Waning Youth Stadium, a photographer snapping shot after shot of a stolid-looking Trevor out in the middle of left field. The scene is made all the more hazy and surreal by the necessary blurring of every single advertisement that lines the outfield fence, because small companies can only pay for space in a professional T-Ball park that reaches 124 people and not on an ABC Friday ad-blitzed show in a Daddio-eqsue ratings toilet holding steadily in the range of 127. B/M ad reps to Earth: "Screw you, local chapter of March of Dimes! You want national television exposure? Here's a suggestion: March of Twenties!" Either that or the advertisers themselves saw the approaching cameras emblazoned with the MTB logos and quickly decided that the high caliber of their products -- be it Chinese bomb secrets or child pornography or Rocket Fuel Malt Liquor -- would not benefit their good name by the besmirching associated with appearing within a radius-of-Pearlman-around-the-middle distance of this show. But I digress. As I have no doubt digressed before.
Trevor gets all misty-eyed Golden Girls flashback ("Picture this: California, 1999. Perpetual public humiliation is for me! If only I could skip this silly bout with respectable obscurity and fast-forward two years." Okay, that's not really what he says), reminiscing, "I can just so see myself running around here, acting like a fool like I used to." Yessir. Just like he used to. Before he graduated from Wharton, went to work at that think tank specializing in foreign economic policy, donned a suit and tie and somber dot-gov-ending email address, and...nah, check it. Still the fool. Still pitied by me. And so the inner monologue continues, Trevor lapsing into an elegantly bilingual sentiment (prerequisite for work in the aforementioned think tank, 'haps?), reporting, all by itself, "Rancho Cucamonga." I guess the hope was that offering the TV audience the official Latin medical term for the eczema-like shrubbery plaguing Jacob's face at this most inopportune, televised time in his life might lead us to forgive him for its not being there intentionally. But it's too late. The damage has already been done. And, as it turns out, Rancho Cucamonga is the name of Trevor's hometown, translated to English as the entirely less exotic, well, Cucamonga Ranch. So there you go. And, as the blurry baseball scoreboard shows the Rancho Cucamonga Frivolous Expositions besting the visiting Narrative Subtletys (a team always without a home on this show, it sadly seems) by an ever-increasing margin, Trevor one-lines, "I was Mister Trash." Snerk. File under "easy comma too." More? Oh, okay: "I was part of this thing called the Trash Family they had at the stadium. We'd dress up in tuxedoes and we'd walk around the stadium and just collect trash." As a cruel though knowing visual juxtaposition, the word "trash" signals a cut to the front gates of the stadium, where a passel of screaming teenagers imbue Trevor with that look that screams right back, "Guess I wasn't needing that tuxedo for the picking up of said trash, after all." Trevor thinks, "It's so weird that I'm gonna be performing in my hometown." Also contrived, sad, and smacking of the vaguest whiff of we-can't-get-a- gig-on-this -planet-unless- kindly-ol'- Mister-Willoughby- at-the-general- store-makes-a- call-to-his- friend-the-mayor- of-Rancho-Cucamonga- whose-lase-name- is-also-Penick- but-I-assure- you-it's-just- a-coincidence desperation (you know, that kind). But yes, it's also weird.
Mr. Trash and the other O-Boys (who, by divine coincidence, represent all in the music world that is reused, reduced, and recycled) congregate backstage for this minorest of minor-league appearances. The rabid and economically viable demographic of girls ranging from twelve to, say, twelve (I guess the demographic range shrinks ever so slightly when the entire fan base for a show is made up of "this one cousin of Trevor's") shriek and scream inside Ad-Free Park. They hold their usual signs of the "We [heart] O-Town" and "O-Town Rulz" and "Like the two Coreys, the only thing my prepubescent mind can process about my love for you is that it is quickly fleeting" and "Sting Op In Training" varieties. A leather-clad, twentysomething, poor man's VJ local I would nickname Cucamonga Carson if I believed we'd ever be seeing him again, announces to the crowd, "I was kickin' it backstage with Trevor." And here's me, getting all weak-kneed in the presence of fame. "We were talkin' about his old days, working at this very stadium as Mr. Trash." Wow, Cucamonga Carson (hey! I did it!). Nice work reading the press packet and watching his confessional from four seconds ago. I guess you won't even get to stay and watch the whole show, busy as you'll be clearing that spot on your mantel where your "World's Greatest Shill" statue once stood and making room for your Pulitzer for excellence in music journalistic integrity for getting Trev to open up on the whole Mr. Trash thing again. We all know how much he's shown he hates talking about his past, eh, Lester Bangs? Whatever. And so the band is introduced and the jailbait are jumpin', jumpin'. Cue merciful obscuring of the band from more dry ice than Spinal Tap could burn off -- collectively and satirically -- in the whole of the 1970s. We cut to a confessional just before Dan opens his mouth to sing on "Take Me Under" (because it's all about the music, people), and Trevor tells us once more that it was amazing (for Trevor) to be on stage in front of his parents and his family and the people he went to high school with and the choir teacher who was all, "Well, maybe they can invent a machine that would make you sound like you've ever sung a note on pitch, but until then I recommend you fill your free time with sports intramurals and study hall and beating up the fat kids." Well, it looks like they have, Choirmaster. Maybe they just have.
The former Single-A losers the Narrative Subtletys ("There's no subtlety in baseball!") become so inviable to the action that they actually relegate to a professional United States cricket team as Trevor transitions, "One of the people I would like to see is my ex-girlfriend, Kelly." The concert ends, and the audience stands around cursing at their complimentary tickets (not so easy to make a customer pay when said audience shares your town name, history, gene pool, so forth) and claiming that the only reason they were unironically yelling out "Play Freebird!" over and over and over again throughout the set was because they were told that they were there, in fact, to see a Skynyrd concert. The fix was in, Racho Cucamonga. Damn, I love writing those words. Cucamonga Carson tells the audience to "give it up for my man Trevor and O-Town," which, note for note, rings about as false a send-off as George Michael turning to his (paying) audience after the "Don't Let the Sun Go Down on Me" duet and insisting they "give it up for Andrew Ridgley, wherever his nimble wrists may be pumping gas tonight!" Voice-over omniscience brainwashes us into believing, "It was a good show." It was a good show. It was a good show. At the sound of my snap, the twenty-two-minute weekly target-marketed infomercial for O-Town will convince you that this was a good show. Snap! Damn, that was a good show. Condensed into seven total seconds of actual TV time, that's as good a show as I can rightfully expect. On their walk out of the park, the evil advertisements B/M insists we be shielded from at the outfield fence are too far away to be perceived and patronized by the casual viewer. Ha! Take that, stupid American Cancer Society. Here's making sure you won't be curing cancer this Friday night!
The I'm-Self- Conscious-About- Being-Preserved- In-Amber- On-This- Stupid-Show- Cam shines brightly in the faces of Trevor's town (I'm fairly certain that I myself will be making a rather unfavorable appearance on a reality television show in a few weeks, so I'm currently hypersensitive about the way Normal People are being perceived and depicted when they accidentally wander into the glare of other people's spotlight) as we cut over to an after-party at Trevor's friend Amy's house. Or, as Pundit Trevor calls it, "A party-slash-get-together thing for all my friends and family." It's a party! And a get-together! It's a bar! And it's a club! It's both! How can it be? Trevor's a busy man on the go. His dad tells him that he and mom are on their way out. Cut to Trevor sitting outside on the front stoop with his mom (the famed B/M Squiggly Hip Font of Character Introduction --though a bit less squiggly on this show than it is on The Real World -- helpfully enlightens us that the woman he just called his mother is, in fact, "Trevor's mom." Thanks, Squiggly Hip Font!). His sister Rani comes over and hangs herself off his other bicep as Trevor informs mom and sister, "You get two minutes together, 'cause everybody wants two minutes." Ouch. I'm gonna try that line on my mom the time my boy band rolls into town and see how it works out. I'll let you know if she decides to dress me down with a "You're welcome for your birth" or "That's it, bad seed, it's back into the womb with you" upon my ill-fated return to the recapping fray. If I make it back. And I will not make it back.
Back inside Unsuspecting Amy's house, Trevor talks about Kelly and hugs Kelly as Microsoft Font MS Underestimate Audience Extra Bold tells us that this girl Trevor is hugging is, in fact, "Kelly, Trevor's ex-girlfriend." And not, as the context of this scene would have otherwise indicated, former Israeli prime minister Golda Meir. Because we get it, Squiggly Hip Font. Trevor exposits, "After we broke up, y'know, we didn't talk in detail a lot." "In detail"? Trev, are you sure that's what you meant? So it was constant conversation, I'm sure. Just, y'know, no detail:
Trevor: I like things.
Kelly, Trevor's ex-girlfriend: Things can be nice or not nice.
Trevor: My favorite things are the pretty things.
Kelly, Trevor's ex-girlfriend: What'd you let them do to your eyebrows, ya damn sissy boy?
Trevor: Hey!
Kelly, Trevor's ex-girlfriend: Sorry. I mean, "Things are waxed."
Trevor: I am an undetailed kind of placated by your words.
“ Kelly and her plot significance speed away from Trevor and his Chess King endorsement as fast as those paved streets of Rancho Cucamonga will legally allow. ”
Yeah, I can't figure out why this relationship ended. Trevor, to the collective surprise of no one in particular, doesn't have a clue as well: "She just broke up with me for, like, no apparent reason at all. And that's always been in my head." I'm sorry, when did "V-neck cream-colored sleeveless sweaters" such as the one he's wearing right now stop being a viable reason to end a relationship? Because if that dictum has been repealed and that's not a good enough reason to end a relationship anymore, I have, like, a couple of calls to make. Trevor voice-overs "I let her get away." Kelly and her plot significance speed away from Trevor and his Chess King endorsement as fast as those paved streets of Rancho Cucamonga will legally allow.
"I'm Leaving Cucamonga" montage of suitcases and cars, and Trevor co-opts the plot to within an inch of Jacob's patience, cooing in another confessional, "I want someone. You know what I mean?" No, I don't. Because as the super-intelligent MBTV cyborg RecapBot 5000, I have an inability to perceive the nuances of human emotion unless Human Bunim and Human Murray explain them to me in excruciating detail until my Fury Fuse blows and my eyes bleed propane. So thanks. Again. For. That. Helpful. Explanation. And so we cut to Trevor sitting at lunch with Ashley Angel "Of Harlem," telling him, "You know, I saw Save the Last Dance." Hey, an MTV film! Rent it tonight! At Blockbuster! Guaranteed to be there! And, actually, it is. Continuing on his hunt for meaning where meaning fears to dwell (that being within a radius-around-Clive-Davis's-exhumed-coffin's length of anything Julia Stiles has ever touched, breathed on, or looked at), he product-places further. Blah there's a scene where they kiss, and "right after that scene, for the five minutes, I sat there with tears, crying." Because he's the "sensitive sweetie," according to YM. And he realizes that that's what he's missing in his life. Awwww. Word, Trev. I mean, it's a sad day for popular culture's influence over the youth of America when one of them admits that he takes his cues for deeper spiritual understanding of human nature from The House That Loder Built, but if the whole of his love life can be boiled down to the sentiment that "I want to be kissin' a fugly-ass white girl," well, then he couldn't have picked a more appropriate example.
But as they really begin to ruminate on the deeper meaning of angsty teen films ("I think Jacob's favorite movie is Loser, because, well, he's a loser," they both say at, miraculously, the same exact time), a gray-haired man named "Cleve Dupin, road manager," stage-directs his way over and tells them it's time to go. Geddit? How they don't have any time for themselves? And y'know, if The Reanimated Corpse Of Clive Davis doesn't want to give away the true identity of the genetic clone he secretly had created for himself on his deathbed right after Walt Disney decided to undergo The Big Freeze, he could have done better than naming said 1960s doppelganger "Cleve." Because people are bound to find that one out sooner than later. I'm just sayin'.
“ The photographer, male pattern bald on top and a long Hare Krishna slinky falling down his back (and the upcoming recipient of a suitable-for-framing wall plaque trumpeting, 'Stupidest Haircut Currently In Room, Runner-Up'), tut-tuts Jacob. ”
Stock Footage Plane We're Supposed To Believe They're On lands in the sunny, palm-dotted, product-placed-by-the-Florida-State-Tourism-Bureau-with-a-generous-grant-from-the-folks-at-God-Inc. city of Orlando. Jacob "Scare Apparent" Underwood stands against a red backdrop (if only some Satanist imagery could come along and...oh, there's some now), facing a photographer. The Squiggly Hip font tells us that this is a "Magazine Photo Shoot," rather than a "Judith Light Skin-Care Infomercial" or "U.N. Peacekeeping Troops Entering War-Torn Rwanda" or even "Late-Night Horror Movie: I Was A Teenage Inadvertent Michael Jackson Impersonator, starring Jacob Underwood" we otherwise might just have mistaken it for. Everyone's doing fine with the group shots, but they're then informed that they have to suffer through an individual pic or two. This shocks Jacob right back to Central Casting because...well, it's all about the music, man. He whines -- really, really, whines -- "We have to do them by ourselves, too? I don't want to do individuals," not even bothering to open his mouth to bitch because the sound always just ends up emitting exclusively though the nasal passages anyway. The photographer, male pattern bald on top and a long Hare Krishna slinky falling down his back (and the upcoming recipient of a suitable-for-framing wall plaque trumpeting, "Stupidest Haircut Currently In Room, Runner-Up"), tut-tuts Jacob, "You know we need individuals of this." More whining. Jacob tells us that it has nothing to do with the music and that he's being somebody he's not. Trevor, because he's the only one in the band this week, complains about Jacob walking off the set without allowing any individual shots of him to be taken. Slinky Head sighs, resigned. Earth sighs along. Slinky Head asks Jacob to come back. Earth mutters "fuck it" and goes for pizza and a movie rental. Y'all, I hear that that Save the Last Dance talkie really makes you think.
Jacob stares down the hall at Slinky Head, still on his way through the "Say Cheesy" shoot going on in the room. As Ashley poses patiently, demurely, blondly, beautifully, dimple-y, siiiiiigh...er, sorry. Jacob cracks that he just heard the photographer insist, "Give me sexy." Jacob thinks it's funny. But personally, I think we could all use a little bit of Ashley's sexy in our lives, because, hi, I'm not made of stone even if his cheekbones are carved right from it. Manager Mike Cronin (Meek Mike, to Mike Morin's Mafia Mike) tries to smooth the situation over as we cut to a confessional, where Jacob snarks further, "I'm in a boy band. That's kind of funny. That whole teenybopper scene I never knew existed. I didn't enjoy those kinds of artists, and now, being one, I kind of lost myself." How many things are wrong with that statement? Up to and including the entire season he spent on TV counting the countless people he would actually devour to get his self-worshipping ass in the spotlight as a member of -- sing along in tune if you can still remember the words and dance steps -- a freakin' boy band. ["Yet that's a scene he never even knew existed. He thought he was going to an open casting call for a hot new jazz-fusion ensemble that Lou Pearlman was assembling." -- Wing Chun] Outside of the Lunar Ice Caps Melting (er, I mean "Magazine Photo Shoot." Where's the hip font?), Meek Mike tries to convince Jacob to toe the party line of many nations and billions of raised eyebrows that his fame, his hair, the band's existence as a conceptual premise are all, in reality, "a joke." And, though inarguably plugged with wine through the intravenous drip necessary for each new cornea-singeing episode the first time I watched this episode so very, very late on Friday night, I really thought Jacob finished things up with, "This is my life!" He didn't. This does not make him a better person. Just less dramatic to the sober. Jacob retorts that "it's not a joke, it's stupid," and I fail to see the distinction insofar as how the many nations and the billions of raised eyebrows look at things. Meek Mike pep-talks Jacob, "No one can ever tell you you can't keep it real!" Embroider that on a sampler and mail it too your grandma. It's gospel. It's brilliance. It's the 14,001st thing to be happy about. Dan "The Man With The...Zzzzzz" Miller thinks it's "dithrespectful."