So the episode starts with a death. The death of a member of the household. One of the fish bites the big one. Swims up to the giant fish bowl in the sky. Jon and his unfortunate hat head hold a little memorial service. Aaron comes home from school and gets the bad news from Dom. His reaction? A big girly "Shut up!" Dom performs a Catholic Lite Funeral Rite (genuflection, but no Latin. I was brought up to believe that doesn't really count if there's no Latin), and they flush the poor fish. Truthfully, the poor thing is probably better off dead than it was living in that house.
Fish disposed of properly, it's time to get down to brass tacks, as they say, although I've never actually heard anyone say that in real life. Jon gets a phone call from a man named Mike Elliott, who claims to be a film producer who caught Jon's performance at a recent country/western talent contest. He's making a film, he says, and he and the director think that Jon would be perfect for the lead. They'd like to meet him. Jon hee-haws that he's leaving for Kentucky the morning, so they agree to meet that afternoon.
Jon, one-on-one in the hot tub: "All of a sudden, boo yeah!" Indeed.
So Jon hightails it over to see Mike Elliott, B-Movie producer (at least judging from the posters on his walls, such as the one for Piranha!). Mike introduces Jon to Dan Golden, the film's director. Dan and Mike are massive dorks, the kind of crap-ass movie producers who think they're really hot shit. The CEO at my last job was a movie producer. Can you tell I'm holding onto some residual bitterness? The stories I could tell you would curl your hair, and I'm not kidding. We're talking completely inappropriate behavior. But I'm saving that story for the bitter exposé in Vanity Fair.
Dan and Mike, Dorks Incorporated, sit Jon down in their office to tell him the plot of the film. Basically, it sounds like cheap porn: beautiful woman married to a gross older man finds lurve with a young drifter cowboy singer, who makes tons of cashola for her bar (with his beautiful singing) and brings her to previously unforeseen heights of passion (with his hot bod). Later, the cowboy kills the old guy. In an interview, Jon calls the movie "a cross between a Clint Eastwood movie and a pervert-type role." I can't really see Jon playing the role of some crazy hot drifter stud, but maybe I'm just missing his appeal because, you know, I'm not yet stone blind. Is that mean? That was mean. I'm the devil. Unemployment is destroying me. What happened to the fragile, delicate flower that once I was? Crushed! Crushed beneath the jack-booted thuggery of the Internet downturn.
Anyway, sweet Jon tells the dorks that he's not sure he's an actor. Dan's shirt is all unbuttoned and his chest hair is running free. He's balding, with a ponytail. He looks awfully familiar. I think he's the guy working at the drive-through Starbucks on the corner of Lincoln and Marine who gave me the wrong change Friday afternoon. I want my 37 cents back, Dan! I have to watch every penny, mister! ["Dude, that Starbucks has a drive-through now? Do they have butterscotch scones? Wait, don't answer that -- quit trying to tempt me back to the Marina, Devil Woman!" -- Wing Chun] Dan and Mike have Jon sing for them. He perkily launches into a song with a distressingly high twang factor. Mike looks like he might start to cry. "We'll...work with you. If that's what we decide...we neeeeeeeeed," Dan says, looking away from Jon in horror. Mike closes his eyes and tells Jon they'll have their people call his people. They give him a copy of the script to read over, and wave half-heartedly as he walks out the door. "Well, that was a bust," Mike's expression says. "Please, Lord, take me now," Dan's expression replies.
Back at the Beach House of Banality, Dom flips approvingly through the script, cackling when he gets to the first sex scene. He reads the stage directions -- which call for "angry love! Rebellious love!" -- aloud. Jon blushes. He doesn't want to make angry love, he says. He wants to make "nice, sweet love." Dom chortles. Jon is a sweetheart, but the mental image of him making any kind of love turns me to a pillar of salt.
Glen whines that Jon doesn't do shit, and now he might have a movie role. "We hate it when our friends become successful," Morrissey sings on the soundtrack. Every morning in the shower, I sing a song of my own, called "Shut Up, Glen."
Jon calls Irene about the movie, but she's none too pleased about it. "You're not kissing any woman," she tells him. Why does she care? Jon twangs that it's better than him kissing a man. Not that there's anything wrong with that. ["Well, of course, according to Jon, there is." -- Wing Chun]
The morning, Jon goes home to Kentucky to visit the family. Tami -- whose mouth is not wired shut, making me wonder whether the Bunim/Murray editors are screwing with the timeline again, although, truly, how could that be? -- gets up at the crack of dawn just to see him off, which is remarkably nice, especially for Tami. Dom drives Jon to the airport, also at an unearthly early hour, which proves to me yet again that Dom is the bomb, and that I am a poet and don't even know it.
As the plane careens toward earth, Jon voice-overs that he's looking forward to returning home, and especially to playing at Goldie's -- the bar he played every Friday and Saturday night for two years. Is anything even remotely interesting going to happen in this episode? Because I'm feeling very, very sleepy.
What looks like the entire town of Owensboro, Kentucky meets Jon at the airport. He's blathering something about having a picture-perfect idea of home in his head and wanting to return to that and all he ever wanted was right in his own backyard and yada yada blee de blah, but all of my attention is directed toward these girls at the airport, all of whom are wearing official Jon Brennan t-shirts, which, frankly, is a little scary to me. Immediately after deplaning, Jon is engulfed by a gaggle of squealing women, including his sister and mother, both of whom shriek about his hair. I don't know why -- he still has the mullet.
Cut back to the West Coast. Dom, Aaron, and Glen are trudging up Bruin Walk, UCLA's main thoroughfare. This season takes place the year before I started at UCLA and it looks just like I remembered it and I feel very nostalgic for college as I watch this. I really enjoyed college. There's a shot of the Bruin Bear -- the statute of UCLA's mascot -- and the coffee house, and the student union the way it used to look, before it was remodeled during my junior year. Ah, college! How I miss it! Although I don't miss not having any money and living in a one-bedroom apartment with two other girls and one of their boyfriends, even though I liked all of them. And I really don't miss our -door neighbor, who tried to have us evicted for playing the radio at noon on a weekday. She was insane. Anyway. In an interview, Aaron says that he's having a real problem living in the house and concentrating on his studies, because it's so loud. I'm sure it would have been quieter in his fraternity house, which was known, by the way, for throwing a fundraiser every fall called "Chippendale's Night," in which girls from all over campus would shove inside the main room of the fraternity, violating all fire laws, to watch as the more attractive fraternity brothers stripped almost completely butt naked for cash. Jell-O shots were involved. From what I hear, that's an atmosphere very conducive to serious study.
Aaron takes Glen and Dom to look at Royce Hall, which is probably the most famous of all of UCLA's buildings, and then to watch a girl band perform on the quad at lunch. He says that he's giving "a show and tell" to his roommates, because he doesn't think they quite get what he does on campus all day. What he seems to be doing, mostly, is socializing, since he knows almost everyone who walks past them. Dom voice-overs that UCLA seems like a "big social club, with classes between the socializing." Which is partially true. The other part is when you're a dip like I was, who really enjoyed the school part of school, and whose plan was to go to grad school and get a PhD and become a professor and so you spend hours and hours in the library and study your ass off and then you still don't get into the graduate schools you wanted to go to, and then you become a copywriter and then you get laid off and lie around and collect unemployment. I should have spent more time drinking, people! But don't get me wrong, I spent plenty of time drinking. Wow, where was I? Right, Aaron is BMOC.
Back in Kentucky, Jon shows his family pictures of his roommates, and the house, and the bits of Los Angeles he's seen, which is basically the view from the sofa. They ooh and ah. Jon voice-overs that he misses his roommates, and that he never expected to feel that way. I. Am. So. Bored. Nobody cares! Get back to crazy Tami and her wired-shut jaw!
Apparently, Owensboro is the barbecue capital of the world, and indeed, Jon attends one huge-ass barbecue while he's at home. Hmmm, barbecue. Over shots of ribs and chili, he voice-overs that he's a big fish in a small pond in Owensboro and a small fish in a big pond in Los Angeles. Hmmm, fish.
Goldie comes to Jon's house to pick him up for a show of some unspecified sort. As Jon lumbers into Goldie's van, he explains that she gave him his big start, and that he loves her for it. She's wearing, appropriately, a flashy gold jumpsuit. I wonder if her entire wardrobe is gold.
The show? At a middle school. It's very O-Town. Without the choreography. The middle school kids go crazy wild for Jon. It's like that famous footage of girls crying and ripping out their hair, watching the Beatles perform on Ed Sullivan. Except that was the Beatles. And this is Jon. He gives some crazy pseudo-inspirational speech about dreams and ambition and whatnot, and then starts to sing and everyone -- I'm telling you, five hundred people, including grown men -- leap to their feet and start screaming and yelling and singing along. I'm making the same face that Director Dan made earlier. The "help me" face.
Jon neatly hands Bunim/Murray a segue by telling us that he wasn't wild about school and studying, back when he was a student. He reminds us that Aaron attends UCLA, and that they don't have anything like that in Owensboro.
Cut to Aaron in what looks like a Statistics class, with Glen and Dom sitting on either side. Dom's trying his damnedest to make time with the cute girl to him, in the middle of the lecture! She is very cute, but I think she's trying to take freaking notes, dude. Wait until after class! God, I'm a nerd. Anyway, Aaron yammers about how this is a graduate-level class, and it's very hard. Dom voice-overs that the class seemed "like common sense" and that he'd "seriously consider school again." Then we get a shot of him grinning toothily at the co-ed to him. See, that was my problem with Stats (which, thank you, I had to drop because I would have failed. I then enrolled in what my Dad supportively called BoneHead Math, which I did quite well in, thank God, because if I hadn't passed it, I wouldn't have graduated and then I would have been killed in a gory family ritual designed by my parents to impress upon my sister the importance of doing one's math homework). In lecture, it all seems like common sense. And then on the test, it makes no sense at all. On the other hand, I was an English major, dude. I don't know from Stats. ["I was an English student, too, but thank god there was a required Science course, not Math, and it was called 'Science for Society.' Real Science students were not allowed to take it. The second-term paper (there was one per term) was a letter to a politician about an environmental issue important to you. It was worse than BoneHead Math, I'm sure. Um, anyway." -- Wing Chun] Enough about me (yeah, that'll be the day). ["Sorry to join Jessica in the trip down memory lane." -- Wing Chun] Dom's only problem with UCLA is that "there are no bars on campus," and don't even get me started about that. It was a huge issue that the campus was dry, and every year, someone would run for student body office on the "get a bar on campus" ticket and they'd always bitch about how Cal has a bar on campus and UCSD has a bar on campus and yada yada yada, we never got a bar on campus. And yet somehow, no one ever dropped dead from having to walk a hundred feet into Westwood to get a beer. And that concludes our Dom = Alcoholic portion of the program. Thank you for watching.
Back in Kentucky. The Brennan family says their prayers and sits down for dinner. Jon wonders aloud whether he'll get the movie role he's up for. The entire family stares at him balefully, not sure how they ought to react to the possibility. You can tell that his little sister is wondering if Jon can introduce her to Tom Cruise. Jon reflects that he doesn't think he's ready to change over to the "California lifestyle," but he sort of suspects that he might want to one day, and that frightens him.
Cue Kentucky Montage. Fields. Church. Cowboy hats. Horsies! Kentucky sure is purty.
Goldie's Bar. The triumphant return of Jon Brennan. I'm blown away, y'all, by the reception Jon gets. We're talking standing ovation. Crying. Screaming. Religious experiences. I mean, I like Jon. And he's talented, if you like that sort of thing, and he can really work the hell out of the crowd, but...dude. He's not, like, Elvis. Jon voice-overs some deep-ass comment about feeling alone, even while he's surrounded by screaming fans. Oh, boo hoo. Life is hard when you're eighteen.
And so Jon leaves Kentucky. Everyone at the airport is wearing a cowboy hat. Everyone. Many hugs and plenty of pictures and buckets of tears later, Jon gets on the place and leaves home, again. He's sad. I'm sad that this episode is all about Jon, because I don't enjoy making fun of him. It's too easy, and he's really so nice that it makes feel dirty and bad. On the other hand, I'm happy that Beth isn't in this episode at all, because every time she appears on screen, so many insults rush simultaneously to my brain that I'm scared I might have a stroke.
LAX is culture shock, Jon says. I think he's just sad not to have a fan club waiting at the gate. He hops in a cab and returns to the beach house. Because there is no action in this episode at all, the cab ride takes, like, thirty-five minutes. Finally, the cabbie drops him off and he kicks in the front gate and walks up to his room, all alone. He voice-overs that he reread the script on the plane, and decided that the movie is not for him. He doesn't just feel comfortable with the plot, what with the murdering and the angry, rebellious lovemaking. Later, Dom listens patiently while Jon explains that he can't do the movie just for the money -- that would be wrong! Dom simply doesn't believe that Jon can't be bought. He starts talking about all the things Jon could buy with the money he'd make as an actor, including a church with his name on it, which, by the way, is totally against the whole humility thing inherent in religion, but whatever. Jon makes a thoughtful face.
Jon calls the production company. According to the receptionist, Mike and Dan are "in a meeting." They'll call him back. That's so Hollywood-ese for "you didn't get the part, kid, go away." Of course, they don't call him back. Cue montage of the phone ringing endlessly. We get our first shot of Beth, who explains that Jon is bummed that he never heard from Mike and Dan, even if he didn't want the part, and then she leaves! Stay away!
While Jon sits by the phone, Aaron and Dom go surfing. I totally don't get this subplot. Is this, like, the Day in the Life of Aaron episode? Because nothing happens. If I want to watch someone go to class and then go to the beach, I'll just go back in time and visit myself in college. Anyway, Aaron doesn't think that Dom can surf, although Dom is positive that he can. Because he once went scuba diving. Once. And he looks good in a wetsuit, he says. Then he puts Aaron's wetsuit on backwards. Aaron laughs in his face. Dom chuckles good-naturedly. I've totally warmed to Dom. I love me some Dom! The boys hit the waves. Aaron does brilliantly. Dom wipes out every single time he tries to get on the board. Dudes, surfing is hard! Aaron is amused by Dom's failure. Dom wryly comments that he almost died out in the water, but he got to check out some "terrific" girls in bikinis, and that totally made up for his brush with death.
Beach House. Dan and Mike are so totally avoiding Jon's calls. Jon, it's over, babe. It's like when you call a girl after getting her number at a bar and she never calls you back. It's because she doesn't want to date you, but would rather not come out and say that. Don't take it personally. She's probably got issues. Anyway, Mike and Dan never call Jon back, ever. The part in the movie goes to a guy who totally looks like a porn star. Jon snits that doesn't care, because he didn't want the part anyway.
This episode, which was truly about nothing, ends with Jon staring, all melancholy, at the fish. He comments that coming to Los Angeles has been good for him. He's changed for the better! He says that he's determined to succeed in life, even if he's not sure how to do that. And thus ends the boringest episode ever.
week: I don't know. I didn't fast-forward to see. It's a mystery!