By Jacob
In a hurry? Read the recaplet for a nutshell description! Finished? Click here to close.Kevin's hot sister is pretty annoying but we'll see how that goes. She'll be staying with the Peytons for a few weeks, so I guess most of this season? She's a trainwreck, and possibly will be dating Eddie. Nothing else of note is really happening with home life this week.
What is going on, though, is: Everything is super weird. If this were the new tone of the show I think that would be a great move, because this episode managed to be both funnier and more acidic than usual, while still maintaining a sort of grace that generally doesn't happen on this show. And lots and lots of weirdness. Like, God steals a piano off the street and hauls it into All Saints so that he can counsel Zoey about her Lenny love life... While playing the piano. That kind of thing. Sort of a Northern Exposure cuteness to everything. Akalitus getting into it with this priest who is going to be removing all the statues from the chapel, because it turns out the chapel hasn't been consecrated since the '70s, which seems like a major thematic move for this show, is treated about equally lightly as the guy with a shishkebab skewer through his face, or Thor taking over Coop's fantasy football team.
One of the more enjoyable episodes, I would say, of the series. Which is funny because there weren't really any jokes or anything, just this pervading sense of lightness in a show usually quite happy to simmer in its own filth. And what's weirdest is that it was written by Linda Wallem, who is one of the creators of the show, so the intent behind all this is even stranger and harder to pin down. Here's hoping some of this magic sticks around.
Oh right, and then there was the guy that Jackie mugged last season? I totally forgot about him, with the teeth? Brought flowers; was super scary. So he's back, and it turns out that his deal is basically to be a freelance supervillain for drug addicts: Push them all the way over the edge, so that their redemption/rehabilitation arc actually takes. So basically, like, the human definition of evil. And guess whom he's decided will be his greatest challenge?
Want more? The full recap starts right below!Last week: Jackie threatened everybody she loved with the concept of hunting them down and hugging them to death in a last-ditch attempt to get them nudged back in place. to that, she mugged an epileptic drug dealer with his own scary agenda, and of course she thought there would be no consequences, because there never are.
Under the "you're out of the woods" song from Wizard Of Oz and, memorably, The Sopranos, Jackie's feeling pretty good. Everything's almost back to normal, Eleanor's nearly back, Kevin's getting waffles and sandwiches for breakfast. It's kind of like making amends; she's even making a show of avoiding coffee because caffeine is a drug, et cetera.
Upstairs, Kevin's sister Tunie is curled up around Fiona in bed; Grace is already awake, grinning and lovely, explaining that Tunie broke up with her pilot boyfriend and crept into their house under dark of night last night. Apparently this is something that happens regularly, and we never knew, and Jackie never knew. Tunie's not such a bad egg, although her language could use some adjustment:
"So he breaks up with me while I'm still at work? What a fucking butt knuckle!" Of course Fiona's parents cannot accurately define "butt knuckle" for her, but so anyway, it was a text-message breakup, complete with sad-face emoticon: The funniest kind if you're the breaker-upper and the butt-knucklest if you're the breakupee. Tune proceeded into the British Air Executive Lounge to take advantage of his discount, but it's only open until ten, so she just drank herself silly and crawled into bed with the girls at three AM.
"In all fairness, I'm usually gone before you guys even get up," Tunie says, which is not terribly comforting, but as usual Fiona's got it on lock: "I'm never scared, I just pretend she's the Tooth Fairy." Aunt Tunie admits to having been shitfaced, and everybody has some delicious breakfast. Tunie is the kind of person that doesn't use a plate, just eats off the plates of little children. Turns out she gave Grace her pilot's wristwatch at some point in the night, and now that she's sobered up, she needs to take it back. She softens the blow by offering to buy her fancy shampoo, which should be nice for the few strands of hair Grace hasn't yanked out yet.
Tunie gets Jackie alone -- after a reminder about the whole "getting Eddie a job at All Saints" con turns Kevin almost completely back around -- and hugs her tightly, horribly, about the whole intervention thing with "that snotty doctor you work with." Jackie doesn't want to talk about it, even though Tunie is being hilarious ("Kevin, interventions are just fuckin' rude!") and offers to "be here and there for [her]," and then more hugging, and then of course the request to crash until she figures her shit out. More hugging, more hugging, until finally Jackie's just standing there with her arms at her sides basically praying for a world without all the hugging.