As I've mentioned, the tapes I'm using to recap these episodes are from one of the many runs of the pre-New Orleans marathons. Interspersed throughout the commercial breaks, as you may remember, are the results of The Real World online poll, featuring pretty much the same three questions over and over and over again for the duration of this twelve-hour period. One of the poll questions asks who we, the voting audience, believe to be the "Life of the Party" during his/her Real World tenure, and the choices are thus: Teck, Ruthie, Nathan, and Lindsay. And so you may have wondered: Why are there no picks from the Boston season in this category? Why no options for someone who would qualify as having a "life" as seen in the context of a "party"? Were you wondering why? Well, this episode is a pretty accurate depiction of why. Pretend you're watching paint dry. Beige paint. On the freshly painted walls of a funeral home. Then pretend you're color-blind. Half the fun of that, and there you have this episode. Yawn. Yawn. A thousand times yawn.
Sometime several hours before the end of last week's episode (the continuity issues, er, continue), the Stagnant Seven sit in the kitchen of the firehouse, enjoying a hearty pasta dinner. We learn from Sean's and Jason's confessionals that "the whole house is working together at an after-school program for kids," and that they will be doing so "Monday through Thursday, 1:30 to 6:00." Children? They're having them work with CHILDREN? Could this be any more irresponsible? Seven self-obsessed brats so captivated by their own personalities that they believed the best mode of personal expression was to showcase their every move on television are going to subdue their angsty, pointless egos and work with kids? This can't end well. Hell, this can't even start well. If MTV saw fit to try and liven things up by sending them to work, maybe they should have picked a less volatile environment in which there was less of a chance of directly destroying the lives of vulnerable, impressionable people. Like putting them to work in the core room of a nuclear testing facility, for instance. Or maybe on an assembly line, welding commercial airliners. Kameelah hits the nail on the head, accurately recapping their entire experience in advance for our benefit: "It's like a stimulating five hours of everything." Well, except for the "five hours" part. And definitely except for the "stimulating" part.
After a short waking-up-and-getting-ready montage (Hey, thanks! I really needed that gratuitous shot of Syrus putting on deodorant), we're back outside in the frozen tundra. Being outdoors for the first time since moving into the firehouse poses quite the challenge for many of these homebodies, though, and within three or four TV seconds, they are lost. Apparently they forgot to bring the more detailed topological map of the city, the one with all the glaciers and permanent ice floes on it, which would probably provide some assistance in this wintry hell they've done their best to avoid thus far. They are soon to find their way to a building marked, "Women's Educational and Industrial Union," an establishing shot for the children's center that I am convinced changes at least once during the course of this season. Once inside, they meet "Ana," the trainer for the volunteer program. She sequesters them in a room and suggests they begin the training. She tosses out a few introductory questions: "Can you walk in late?" A chorus of "no" responds, and Ana lobs another inquiry: "Can you decide, 'We went out last night, we had a really good time, I'm really tired, I want to stay in bed?'" And though ostensibly rhetorical in nature, Ana's questions are practically drowned out by the deafening roar of incredulous eye rolls the seven of them shoot around the room, while the soundtrack features a wailing blues trumpet suggesting that gainful employment is the scourge of the poverty-stricken, non-televised, destitute, and just downright unlucky. Awwwww. Poor, poor Boston cast, with their ball-busting four-and-a-half-hour work day.
Ana gives large pieces of paper and numerous colored magic markers to the seven of them, telling them to "write down all the things you bring into the program." And so they each embark on making lists of qualities that they believe describe them. Montana likes to "play and laugh." Genesis is "creative, patient, and playful." Syrus preaches the benefits of his "organization" and "drawing skills," though he uses but one blue marker to make his hastily assembled list, a list that contains no noticeable organization or drawings of any kind. Maybe he should have listed one of his strong points as "master of visual irony." Kameelah sketches a self-portrait in which she wears a yarmulke, I think. Unsurprisingly, she too advertises a yen to "laugh, be loud/crazy." I rewound this scene six or seven dozen times to try deciphering even one element from Jason's list, but his writing is so poor, I can only imagine that his list of things that make him special begins and ends with, "Can write almost legibly with my feet. Almost." Annoyingly (someone call me on it if I inadvertently begin every sentence for the rest of this recap with that word, since it would be syntactically uninteresting to read but appropriate to the remainder of the action), the posters that they hang on the wall are readily visible to the viewing audience in the scene BEFORE they are said to be drawn. Oh, continuity. How we hardly knew ye.
up (or perhaps it is six hours before -- it's impossible to know now for sure), Ana tells the seven to "focus on what you were doing after school" as a method of connection with the children. Uh-oh. Childhood memory divulgence. You can hear the pathos a-brewin'. Sean had a big family so there were always people around. Elka played with her Barbies. Jason tells a story about shoes almost as lucid as the handwriting on his poster. Montana gets some more points for referencing "Atari" as an integral part of her childhood years. Yay, Atari! Speaking from the educated perspective of someone who spent two years trying to get a high enough score on "Pitfall" so I could take a Polaroid of the screen and send it to Atari Inc. and win a free sew-on patch for my soccer jacket, well, let's just say I briefly connected with Montana for a minute there. Syrus tells a story about his arrival in Los Angeles, seeing the ocean for the first time, and numerous other scoping activities that in no way answer the question of what he did after school. Genesis took care of her brother both before and after school, "because my mom was always passed out and my father was at work at the Air Force base." Her mother and step-father got a divorce and her brother went with her stepfather and it was really very sad and blah blah blah pitypartycakes. Everyone, excepting the melancholy strumming of the acoustic guitar on the soundtrack, observes a moment of silence at her disclosure. Elka smooths her hair back and looks sympathetic in a "no wonder you're such a disturbed, deviant heretic whore" kind of way. Okay, not really. Hereby leaving poor, easy target Elka alone, for at least the rest of this week.
Scanning the "Pathos" chapter of the Bunim-Murray-sanctioned Big Book o' Big Issues and realizing only child abuse, alcoholism, and growing up having only a videogame as a best friend do not make for quite enough dramatic tension, Ana delves further into the pasts of her seven captive confessors under the pretense that "the memories we have sometimes, you might connect with somebody in the program." And so they are told to find a partner and basically repeat the last three exercises where they talk and wail and beat their breasts about their miserable lives. Again. Kameelah tells Sean that she hates her stepfather. Jason shares with us in a confessional that he expects "it's gonna get more honest the longer we live together." Yeah. In the unlikely event they are ever, ever allowed to leave this visually bare, blandly decorated (and even more blandly convened group of yawn-inducers) room again and go the hell home. Anyway, Syrus begins to recount a story, and Sean's informative confessional lets us know that "a discussion arose about rape. And that's the point right there where Montana and Syrus clashed." Montana announces that rape causes women a lot of pain (thank you for telling us that, ye wise oracle), and Syrus rails back with a story about a girl he slept with who "cried rape," even though, as Syrus explains, "This woman took my clothes off! I didn't ask to come up to her room!" Oh, Syrus. The ol' "look at what she was wearing, she asked for it" argument, I see. Yeah, that'll fly with this crowd. If all that weren't enough, Syrus "has a lot of trouble believing when women say they're raped." Ouch! Silence all around, as the lead balloon that is his comment floats over the Boston skyline so loomingly and pervasively that it interrupts the transmission of my television reception and somehow causes the cable to go out. No more recapping of said scene for me. Darn.
I cannot believe. They. Are still. In this. ROOM! Please God, no more. And they're still talking about the Syrus-rape-accusation thing, like this arc is really so dramatic that I was expected to sit stock-still during the commercials, gnawing my fingernails down to the knuckle and nervously muttering, "Oh, God. If there's tension in that house, I just don't know what I'll do. I mean, who ever expected that there would be any tension?" Puh. Leeze. Montana admits to having been sexually abused in her past, and she knows "what you have to go through" to admit it, particularly taking into account a male-dominated culture so quick to discount a woman's pain and often needing "proof" of the assault. Sean jumps to Syrus's sexist defense based on his own life experience (the one where he's an absolute authority on things that have never happened to him) with the assumption, "The bottom line is that it's such a painful thing for the woman that we don't even want to question her about it." Syrus says that because of the experience he went through, he became "scared of women." Yeah, he looked real gun-shy with the ladies in last week's episode. Based on previously established behavior, I think that the only thing Syrus is really afraid of when it comes to women in Boston is running out of new targets to hit on after his first three weeks there.
Ana finally takes the reins, telling them she thinks "there are two issues here," failing to fully elaborate on either one of them in lieu of the real reason they're there to begin with: "Let me give you a heads-up. If you're in a school-age program and a topic like this starts, you need to be real careful, when it comes to professionalism, what you're saying, and you have to learn sometimes to say, 'Y'know what, I'm not gonna go there.'" Good work, Ana, quashing the self-indulgent televised therapy before it stretched through yet another commercial break, with your barely concealed assertion that "there are two issues here. And I really don't give a shit about either of them." Good show, Ana. Go, you.
And so Montana, Kameelah, and Genesis retire to the restroom at the center, where they seek respite because, according to Montana, "I was getting shaky. And I could tell that something was about to happen." Kameelah says she has trouble believing Syrus's story, and the three share a cleansing breath (I always find the bathroom to be the perfect locale for such deep inhalation exercises) before heading back in that eerily lit room for another riveting marathon round of just kind of sitting around whining.
Oh, goodie. No more boring sitting around in a little room today. How about a boring travel montage followed by an even more boring fight instead? Happy to oblige, shouts Real World Boston! Finally sprung from the shackles of self-righteous angsty cheese, the seven run outside and celebrate their freedom by indulging in the only leisure activity nature has to offer them, as they skate on ubiquitous patches of ice and toss out sparkling comments such as, "Look, I'm Brian Boitano." Shut up, whoever said that. They see in the distance what some believe to be the bus they need to take them home, but Kameelah screams that "that's not the bus" and announces that she will be taking over the navigating duties. Kameelah and Genesis ask for directions at a nearby Shell Station, and then Sean does the same thing at the very same Shell Station five seconds later for some strange reason. All the while a warmed-over remake of "Chain of Fools" rages as the soundtrack. Get it? Because they're acting the fools, lost as they are and unwilling to work together? And also because this whole cast and this whole scenario are nothing more than warmed-over remakes of every season that's come before it? Clever, those producers are. Clever and always thinking.
This spellbinding sequence is framed by Sean's confessional, in which he attempts to evoke sympathy in the viewer when he says, "They were walkin' really slow. They were lollygaggin'! And I was really cold." Er, I'm sorry, but did somebody just say "lollygaggin'?" Could he be any more of a dad? But not that child abusing, runaway, deadbeat, bettin' on the ponies, intolerant, waited-until-we-were-down-to-our-last-food-stamp-and-then-used-it-to-buy-a-two-bit-hooker kind of dad all these poor kids seem to have been cursed with. Another kind of dad. Basically, he blames Kameelah for everything. And so, his confessional continues, "I walked up ahead of the group. And I called her a bitch." And in truth, she is being just exactly ten different lethal strains of bitch, but considering my intense (and still deepening, somehow) detestation for Sean, I do not fault Kameelah's actions, reactions, or behavior in any way. Montana pipes in on the action for long enough to voice the collective opinion of the group: "Oh, Sean, okay, shut up." Exactly. Somebody should rename the entire series that. Hell, somebody should rename the entire planet that. Anyway, they finally make it into a T-stop, Kameelah telling Sean that "we're not gonna discuss this in public." Much to my surprise and delight, everyone else in the house believes this entire escapade to be beyond the boundaries of the merely "stupid" and "unnecessary," and they continue cracking up in the background while ostensible drama unfolds before the camera. Oh, this chain of fools and their wacky, foolish ways.
Back at the firehouse, Sean and Syrus smoke cigars in the bathroom (yucky! Now there's something actually worth having a fight over) and Sean complains about how "whacked" everybody is. Sean thinks meeting people and learning new words like that one is really "funky," I'll bet. Kameelah walks by and confronts, "When you're done trying to talk behind my back, I'm upstairs." And so we cut to their little quarrel. Sean apologizes unapologetically, telling Kameelah that he felt "attacked" by her haughty approach to accessing public transportation, and Kameelah responds that Sean "cannot listen to anyone." Sean retorts thusly: "From day one, you've rolled your eyes a lot at me," and we cut to a visually informative montage of four or five billion shots of Kameelah -- just in case the expression "eye rolling" lacks enough description for you -- rolling her eyes. Oh, eye ROLLing. I get it now. Sean tells Kameelah that she "walk[s] around here with a lot of attitude," and they fail to resolve the central issue of the argument, settling instead for the following truce. They agree that (a) they might not be able to remain roommates and (b) they hate each other a little. So who emerges as the victor here? My vote is for whoever successfully navigated them all home, took the issue directly to the person she (or, um, he) had the problem with, and managed to do so without pronouncing himself (or, um, herself) the court jester of Dorksville and scaring away the neighborhood children by wearing the in a collection of grotesquely ugly hats. The winner, clearly, is Kameelah.
Night-time over Boston. Y'all better take pains to get inside before it gets too cold out there. Like it could get one full degree colder before human life as we know it completely ceases to exist. Kameelah lies forlornly in bed while Montana sits bedside, each talking about their problematic relationships with their fathers. Montana has never met her father and doesn't want to. Kameelah is mad that her dad "got remarried, and this woman had a child. Yeah, so you're married taking care of another woman's child." Hmmm. Hey, y'know, I didn't grow up in the Kameelah house and all so I can't make judgments on the comparative amount of pain it caused her to end up in a single-parent situation, but do y'all mind if I take this opportunity to conduct a quick, informal readers' poll? Okay, here it is: Stand up if you had a perfect, parentally unproblematic childhood. Who? Anyone? Don't be shy. Cast your vote. Hey, why is everyone still sitting? See why this is boring?
Montana's confessional tells us that she feels "Syrus is one person in the house [she has] not connected with," re-treading his inability to believe a woman has been raped. Over in the living room, Montana and Elka have a little discussion about a rapist getting the gas chamber. Jason slides in and interrupts at just about the wrongest freakin' moment I can imagine and sermonizes that, in the back of their minds, "you've already convicted Syrus." Apparently, another version of this story (the false one, I think) has it that the girl who accused Syrus of rape later retracted her statement. Eh? As if we were supposed to give any real credence to Syrus's side of the argument, we cut to him at a phone booth beginning a conversation, "You remember that whole, like, rape thing?" The truth of the matter, as he puts it, is that "women do cry wolf." The argument that I really do agree with, though, takes place in another newly-appearing room, where Sean and Genesis sit on the floor and listen to Montana. Get a load of this rare, fleeting display of lucidity: "He says that women shouldn't just be able to say that they were raped and have nobody question them. Just the same as I'm not going to listen to Syrus's story and go, 'Oh, poor guy!'" At this inappropriate moment, Syrus walks into the room, which he probably just found for the first time as well. He tells everyone to "chill" and makes them a time-elapsed cocktail. He and Montana continue that they have had different experiences, and now "it's gonna be in the back of both of our minds." Montana consoles, "I don't hate you, but like you said, it's gonna be in the back of our minds and what can you do? What's there is there." In truth, they're both wrong. 'Cause they both like Sean.