Wait, what's this bogus crap right here? We're over at the (yawn) CCC, where Poor, Poor Anthony tells the Somber Seven that he wants them to find their "niche" with activities of their choice for the kids. Dude, bad call. Just give them all a rote task or two like walking the kids to the bathroom or refilling their empty bug juice cups. As soon as you actually allow them to express any free will, you're going to have Montana and Jason dispensing relationship advice, Elka mixing church and state, and Syrus lecherously oozing around the room skulking up to all of the kids and unctuously asking, "So, kid, any moms at home like you?" Anyway, Jason decides that because he used to like to build model cars, he would have MTV buy him a whole lot of model cars to give to them. That's really the whole scene. Yippee. Oh, and the song "Been It" by The Cardigans rages on as the soundtrack (foreshadowing in the most inadvertent way, considering its repeated use of the word "whore" in the unplayed chorus), which is a song from First Band on the Moon, the same album that features college-party dance staple, "Lovefool." Anyway, it's a great song and album, though not quite as good as the first one, which I found by accident in 1994 when in a desperate search to find a musical proxy for the brilliant Sundays, who had broken up for a brief spell of time called That Entire Decade. This project cost me millions of dollars in crappy CDs, which yielded only a lone quality few such as this one. Speaking of which, if anyone's in the market for the first six Cranberries CDs -- or perhaps you're interested in something a little more in the way of Tasmin Archer, and I'm sure you are -- email me directly. We'll see what we can work out. ["Hope Sandoval is sitting at home, crying inconsolably, right now." -- Wing Chun]
Timber shows up at the door of the firehouse, prepared speech at the ready: "I've been a good girlfriend to you. I have. I have loved you with all of my heart. But I [expletive, probably "smoked," deleted] up, and even worse I lied about it. And I know you were really upset." Kameelah voice-overs that Jason's prone to major attitude. You think? Back at the front door, he tells her she [smoked] up big time, and wants her to go away. Cut to them outside. She wants to fix what's wrong with their relationship. He doesn't believe that she would ever do "that." Do what? "Hang out with other girls." Doesn't he, like, live with other girls? Speaking of which, we cut briefly to Genesis, who has briefly decided to drop in this week, telling Kameelah, "I can't stand the way he talks to her. I can't stand that."
Segue fun times ahoy! Montana, looking unusually haggard ["What is she, dead?" -- Wing Chun], stands in the living room and announces, "Guess what?" The rest of the present member (Sean, Elka, Genesis, Kameelah) respond distractedly as if to say, "Stop talking, ever. I mean, what?" She holds up her pager, "Vaj just paged me. He said, 'It's over. I don't love you anymore. Love doesn't mean anything. He can have you. You have one month to get your things out of my house before I throw them in the street." She takes her leave of the room and Elka follows. Genesis tells us in a confessional that Montana finally came clean to Vaj about her relationship with Matt, "and that would push any boyfriend over the edge, when he finds out that his girlfriend has been sleeping with somebody else." They all agree that they don't know why Montana would be surprised by this development. Meanwhile, Montana retires to one of the six hundred rooms in the firehouse with nothing more than a phone and a product-placed chair, and picks up the phone. And since this is one of the only truly memorable moments of this season not quite as hypnotizing as the spin of laundry drying, let's get this all down, shall we?
Montana: Vaj.
Vaj: What?
Montana: Listen...
Vaj: WHORE!
Montana: Listen...
Vaj: WHORE!
Montana: Vaj...
Vaj: WHORE!
Montana: Listen, I don't know what I'm gonna do with my stuff. I'm gonna have to come up there and get it.
Vaj: Well, bummer! I feel for you. I deserve a woman that isn't gonna say "Oh, I love you," then tromp off to Boston, immediately get into some hard-core relationship with some other guy...
Montana: Listen, if you're...
Vaj: I'M NOT IN YOUR LIFE ANYMORE!
Montana: If you're in a relationship with...
Vaj: I don't want to be in your life, and you know why? 'Cause you're a SELFISH! WHORE!
Did he say, "Well, bummer"? Big words for a small man with a tiny little name. I guess "You have cooties!" and "You stink, Mr. Poopypants!" got away from him in the pivotal moments of his fiery throes of anger. Oh, but then there's the whole "whore" thing. So I guess he got her pretty good, after all.
And so it goes. And goes and goes and goes. Montana cries (and, alternately, in some other shots, doesn't cry) while Vaj screams a litany of Too Hot for Real World epithets while the rest of the house sits in the living room judging Montana for ever thinking this arrangement could work to begin with. During which you can actually hear the fight taking place in the room, which offers a level of realism not often seen on a season so turgid that so much editing needs to be done to create a little linear drama that a character's hair will change color and style three times during a confessional. Five, if it's Jason. Like I need to explain all of this to you smart people. Montana ends up being the one to hang up the phone first.
Timber has blow-dried her hair and brought Jason a flower. Awwww. She cries some more in the firehouse, telling him that she's given him the benefit of the doubt so many times and now he's just "leaving [her] out to dry." She fills in a very important blank: "You have done this exact thing to me before." Good. At least she knows. Jason characterizes their relationship in voice-over form as "a pain in the ass," and we cut back to them on the bridge to a 'T' stop with Timber hugging him and crying miserably. Cut briefly again to the CCC, where Jason tells us that "something happens between childhood and adulthood." Yeah, it's called "maturity." And the world is still waiting for you to catch up. And back to the firehouse again, Timber begs him once more for Jason not to end the relationship. Pa. Thet. Ic.
Back to the "we get the parallel, now put down the mallet" Montana Situation, Genesis drops by for another cameo to helpfully confessionalize, "I think she genuinely was shocked that Vaj reacted that way, and I think it's really a sad thing that you cannot see this coming from a hundred miles away." Inside, Montana calls Vaj (collect?) and stilted small talk ensues. Finally, Montana gets around to noncommittally apologizing, but worries, "I just don't know, like, when you're gonna blow up about things again." Probably when she moves to another city and cheats on him with another long-term boyfriend. On television. Just sayin'.
Hey, it's Fiona. For such a relatively memorable episode, the music this half-hour has held up remarkably. Maybe I'll make a mix tape of the full versions of all these songs if this episode ever gets around to ending. Cut to Vaj and Montana in New York, talking about "what they're going through now." Can this marriage be saved?
Well, we've been waiting for the cycle-completing irony all day now, so here's where we finally get around to seeing Jason cheat on Timber. Yay. He's in a group of dirty hippie freaks we've never seen before in what looks like a dorm room at Sarah Lawrence after some great interborough nuclear holocaust, with about five guys playing acoustic guitars and howling. Jason doesn't play guitar, I bet. But standing near guys who do play the guitar and talking about music and smoking is akin to playing the guitar, right? There's even a really pretty French word that sums Jason's ability to play the Near Guitar and hang out with guys who think he's cool because he keeps telling them how cool he is. Wait for it: dilettante. Oh, and then he's kissing this ratty hippie girl. He tells us, "It wasn't a big deal. I kissed this girl. Sure, I feel a little guilty now. A little bit. But, with Timber, she kissed a guy, too. So I don't feel so bad about that. 'Cause it's no big deal." Clearly I don't need to waste all of our hard-earned leisure time commenting on the absurdity of this, do I? Didn't think so.
Nighttime in the firehouse, where Jason ties on his hick once more in that awful, awful wifebeater, which at least covers the naughty bits below the chest this time while still unable to conceal the lanky arms that appear in Figure 1-1 under the entry "Ninety-Eight Pound Weakling" in The Official Real World Encyclopedia. Yup, still there. He's on the phone with Timber, telling her never to lie to him again and making her cry all over, ending his preach with the truly unponderable, "If we don't have trust, we don't have anything. Nothing." All of which goes to prove once more the undeniable differences between genders, confirming for a world in the know that men are from Mars, women are from Venus, Timber should be from Betty Ford, and Jason is just a total, total shit.