Episode Report Card Gustave: C | Grade It Now! YOU GRADE IT Screaming Queens!
By Gustave | Season 2 | Episode 19 | Aired on 05.03.2001
Credits. Again, Jamie Kennedy comes on to tell us that Face Time is brought to us by Dr. Pepper. And that Dr. Pepper makes the world taste better. But he says it with this ironic pseudo-seriousness, which I guess is supposed to be a secret signal to all of us that his heart isn’t really in shilling for a soft drink and he’s still that cool smirky guy we loved from the Scream movies. Nice try, Jamie.
Back in Harrison and Sam’s quarantined cell, Dr. Salk has brought them a parakeet. Apparently, if the bird dies in their presence within a day, it’s proof that they are infected with the virus. Harrison starts whining about having to share such close quarters with Sam, whom he hates. Sam reminds them that they are about to die, and that this isn’t fun for her either. Dr. Salk tells the “Honeymooners” to shut up and describes the slow painful death that’s heading their way, complete with nosebleeds and organ-liquefying fevers. I have to say that ever since I first laid eyes on Dr. Salk, I have been majorly crushing on her. She’s a small boned, slightly dyke-y but pretty blonde woman in her mid-thirties with just a touch of nerdiness -- just the sort of woman I know I’d totally go for if I were straight. Now that she’s giving major attitude to Sam and Harrison, the crush has become something more -- pure unadulterated love.
Chem’s class. Chem is giving her own lecture on Rift Valley Fever to her class, who have just been informed that they are also being quarantined until the CDC gives the “all clear.” She passes out thermometers and tells them to insert them into their rectums. Okay, that’s not funny; that’s just gross. And if I, the king of tasteless remarks, feel that something’s gone too far, that really says a lot. This time, for some reason, the class doesn’t just blindly follow her instructions like they did with the sex quiz. They put them in their mouths instead and wait for their temperatures to climb to organ-liquefying heights. Is anyone else grossed out, or at least bothered, by the notion that those thermometers were meant for another location? I distinctly remember reading somewhere that rectal thermometers don’t give accurate readings if you use them orally.
Mary Cherry’s cell phone rings. She takes her thermometer out of her ear and answers it. “Hello, Clarisse,” says the sinister-sounding caller. “Have the lambs stopped screaming?” “No,” says Mary Cherry politely. “I’m afraid you’ve got the wrong number.” The caller goes on to tell Mary Cherry that he’s not calling for Clarisse but for her. And can I just ask, what is Popular’s obsession with Silence of the Lambs? He says that there’s something more dangerous going on at this school than an epidemic, because he knows what she did last spring break. “I went to Freaknik in Hot-lanta and I turned the mutha out. So?” says Mary Cherry, looking around the room anxiously. This is a total shout-out to Sars, who was telling me not too long ago that she takes a perverse delight in always referring to Atlanta as “Hot-lanta.” The caller insists that he knows that she made another pathetic stab at fame. “Does the name 'Booze Cock-A-Doodle-Doo-Monster' ring a bell?” asks the sinister caller. “Who is this?” shrieks Mary Cherry at the top of her lungs. “Leave…me…alone!” Meanwhile, Carmen and Lily watch Mary Cherry’s hysterics from their desk a row behind her and assume that some credit-card agency is after her. They go back to ignoring her distress -- as the rest of the class is doing. Lily slips out to use the bathroom (so that later, when Mary Cherry is stalked through the halls by a knife-wielding killer, we’ll suspect it’s her, even though we’ll be wrong…just like in those slasher flicks!). “You have no proof,” says Mary Cherry to the caller. Caller tells her to look under her desk. She does, and there she finds a photo of herself from a low-budget horror film she tried out for. Mary Cherry screams even louder and demands to know who this is. The caller tells her to turn around. There, sitting behind her in plain view in a “Scream” mask and what seems to be a Michael Jackson wig, is the sinister knife-wielding caller. She begs Chem, who is calmly grading papers through all of this, to excuse her so she can “run for [her] life!” Chem lets her go, but tells her to stay on school grounds because of the quarantine. Mary Cherry takes off and runs through the empty Kennedy Halls with the masked killer right behind her. As you can imagine, they cover just about every horror-genre cliché in Mary Cherry’s flight from the knife. She slips on a banana peel. She breaks into a fly-girl routine to avoid being stabbed. She screams in a far too photogenic fashion. Et cetera. Finally, she runs into Dr. Jeanne Salk, who tells her to stop running in the halls. Mary Cherry breathlessly explains that there’s a killer on the loose. Of course, the killer is nowhere to be found now that Dr. Salk is there. She accuses Mary Cherry of hallucinating due to the Rift Valley Fever. “I’ll have to run some tests,” says Dr. Salk. “What kind of tests?” asks Mary Cherry, on the verge of complete hysteria. Dr. Salk holds up a really really large syringe.
Lunch in the extras-filled cafeteria that’s actually more of a set than those pathetic backdrops from last week. Sugar Daddy and Josh wonder how Harrison is and why he went to a place like Yemen for spring break. “Who knows,” says Carmen. “But I hope he had a better spring break than we did.” April Tuna enters and confronts the table full of Browns and Blondes, demanding to know where they went for spring break since she, bitter April, wouldn’t know about such a luxury. Her hair has gotten a tiny bit longer since the "Coup" episode, but she’s got it pulled back, except for her bangs, which flip up, looking as though they’d been rolled up the previous night in a gigantic hair curler. It’s a truly ugly hairstyle that’s just perfect for April. At the mention of spring break, everyone looks really uncomfortable. Finally, Lily, who can’t stand keeping secrets, tells April Tuna via a flashback that they cancelled their trip to MTV’s Spring Break Blow Out because the airline they were booked on, Plummet Air, didn’t seem safe enough. Josh suggested that they split up and “get our Spring Break on individually” while their parents thought they were all in Cancun. Now that April knows their “secret,” Nicole wants to make sure they can trust her with that potentially damaging information. “Your secret’s safe with me,” says April. “Let’s just hope no one goes nuts from being in captivity and tries to kill someone!” Okay, that was the big secret? Whatever.