Marry me, my Mysterious Hawaiian! We'll drink mai-tais, and lie and in the sun, and watch bad TV forever!
Fade up on the bitchy Bickersons, bantering back and forth about how they're completely and totally lost somewhere in the vast deciduous anvil tree forests of L.A.'s famed Griffith Park. Our intrepid (and symbolic!) couple has apparently gotten lost on a hike of some sort, and even though the Six Feet Under second unit is just over the hill shooting Ruth and Kathy Bates's hiking scene from a few weeks back, the Blairwitchersons both still express a worry that they might never find their way back to civilization. Yeah. Whatever. It's Los Angeles, people. Just walk south and you'll hit a strip mall eventually. The Lady Bickerson suddenly spies a rusted hulk nestled in a small valley amongst the gently waving anvil fronds, and they meander down the trail to investigate. It turns out to be the remains of an old VW Bug, and we immediately get our recommended weekly allowance of gimmick when they open the door to release a giant pigeon instead of the expected Ghost of Farfegnugen Past. "Why would someone have an accident and then leave their car to rot?" wonders Mrs. Bickerson. "Maybe because they're still in it," replies her browbeaten betrothed, as we pan over to see a set of skeletal remains wedged against the steering wheel. Farewell, William Aaron Jaffe. At least they didn't find you with your hand still on your stick shift.
Aaron: Yeah. So, I couldn't help but notice that this is the second time in as many seasons that you've killed a bitter, bad-haired Jewish guy named Aaron.
Alan Ball: Oh, I'm sure it's just a coincidence.
Aaron: Really? Well, is it also a coincidence that you've had a dorky, self-deprecating potential stalker mooning over Claire all season? Because he's got some pretty hinky hair himself.
Alan Ball: You know, you've got some serious issues with your hair.
Aaron: I have to look at Peter Krause all week, dude. That'd give fucking Dick Clark issues.
And speaking of our hinky-haired hero, here he is having a giggly little gab-fest with Claire in the back of Professor Olivier's art class. They're each working on a project, and Russell is gently teasing his beloved about the fact that she fell asleep while they were chatting on the phone the night before. We learn that Claire snores, which oddly enough endears her to me even more, and then Russell finally screws up enough courage to ask her to be his date for an upcoming family wedding. "I know it's kind of last-minute," he stammers, "but I was thinking maybe if you weren't doing anything, um, I mean, if it wouldn't be completely painful for you, to…come with me." Wow. You'd think a guy with that much grease in his hair would be a little slicker, but I guess not. Claire responds to this proposal so awkwardly that one might assume Russell had just blurted out, "Marry me, Lauren," and then agrees to join him with a resigned faux enthusiasm that geeky guys everywhere will instantly recognize as the only answer to "Will you go with me?" that's actually worse than "No." He tries to feed her the old "I would never do anything to hurt our friendship" line, but Professor Olivier interrupts to chastise them for all the "chitty-chat." Insert your own Chitty Chitty Bang Bang joke here. Olivier compliments Russell's work, telling him that he's finally drawing "what [he] sees, instead of what [he] thinks [he] sees," and I can't help but point out that what Russell is drawing is actually a picture of a very ugly, very evil-looking man. Heh. Olivier invites Claire up to the front of the room for a little conference, and Russell stares pointedly at them as she laughs and looks happy about something we can't hear. When Claire returns, she announces that Olivier has just asked her to be his assistant. "God, I feel like I've won something," she gushes. "I never win anything!" "Me neither," snots Russell, who obviously has some ideas about exactly what Olivier is up to here. Ahh, Russell. Don't feel too sad. At least you've actually won the right to stand to Claire and her super-cute Princess Leia hair buns. I'm still stuck here wearing out my pause button. Sigh.
Boy, David sure does love that coffin wall, doesn't he? He and Nate are standing there in front of it with the family of our long-deceased DGDJ, and David is taking great delight in preaching the virtues of various casket models. "I myself like the Deluxe Aegean," he suggests. "It's a little on the high end, but it's very calming. It's like a slow, lulling ride on…on the Aegean, I guess." Hee! Insert your own My Big Fat Greek Casket joke here. Struggling under the heavy load of exposition she's required to deliver, the DGDJ's former wife takes a seat by the window and explains that "Aaron" disappeared twenty-five years ago when he went out to buy a newspaper. She assumed that he had just deserted her, because they were "one of those horrible got-married-too-soon-for-all-the-wrong-reasons couples." Finally! It's taken us five whole weeks, but Six Feet Under has at long last gotten back to its roots. Once again, it's always all about Nate. "The strange part is where they found him," she adds. "That canyon was ten miles from where we lived back then. What was he doing there…looking for a newspaper on a dirt road in the middle of nowhere? I mean, do you think he was seeing someone else?" Cut to Nate, who is totally thinking "Oh, I don't know about the "someone else" part." Heh. The former Mrs. Aaron is still undecided about which coffin she should select, although she does mention that her ex-husband was Jewish, which causes David to sigh with barely concealed frustration and mark down her choice as "The Sampson." "It's plain cedar," he explains. "It's like a slow, low-profit-margin ride on the strife-torn banks of The Dead Sea." Seeing as how we've already hashed out the religious reasoning behind that selection here, I'll just go ahead and move on to the scene.
Which features Ruth, finding a box of mousetraps deep in the back of a kitchen cabinet she's cleaning. There doesn't seem to be any Ecstasy or any other illicit substances in there along with them, so I'll just go ahead and move on yet again.
Down in the Body Shoppe (StC = 435), Claire is explaining to Rico that she'll have to quit her "job" doing runs for them because she's been given "an amazing opportunity to learn from Olivier Castro-Staal, and maybe even help him with his art." Of course, by "help him with his art," she actually means "fend off his sweaty and pretentious advances while he waxes philosophical on the vast discography of Corey Hart." Rico doesn't exactly hide his lack of disappointment with this turn of events, claiming that they have "enough actual employees" at Fisher & Diaz, and therefore shouldn't have to pay anyone extra to do work for them. Um, I hate to burst your bubble there, Rico, but technically speaking, Fisher & Diaz doesn't have ANY employees. You're all partners, remember? Claire hands over a big box of bones before she goes, saying that she just picked them up from the coroner and that they belong to one "William Jaffe." Oh, now that hurt. I mean, really. Would it have killed her to throw the middle name in there? I'm not asking for much here, people! And to think that I was all set to hook the TiVo up to my computer so that I could digitize her dulcet tones whispering my name and run it all day on an endless loop over my portable mp3 player. "Aaron [click] Aaron [click] Aaron [click] Aaron…"
Heh. And you people think Russell might be a stalker. Please. That kid is bush-league at best. Oh, and feel free to insert your own "Say my name, bitch!" American Pie joke here.
Later that day, Rico has gathered his fellow "employees" together in the office to pitch a new idea: hiring an apprentice. "We were saving some by using Claire," he explains, "but we can save serious money with an apprentice. I crunched the numbers." "You can crunch numbers?" asks David. "Of course I can," replies Rico. "This week's StC, for example, is the lowest score for the season, and significantly below your all-time median of 754. Also, while your Fk coefficient has remained roughly steady all year, there has been a highly noticeable decline in both your Δ BS and POT * ∞ values. Looks like someone did some twelve-stepping during the hiatus." Nate doesn't like the idea very much, mostly because he doesn't want yet another person moving into the Fortress, but David seems quite enthusiastic. Ruth, however, interjects herself into the conversation to point out that she's the only one who "will be forced to co-exist with a complete stranger who could kill [her] in the middle of the night." And while that is a good point, we also shouldn't forget that at least he'd be able to properly embalm her afterwards. That's got to count for something, right? When she learns that Rico's "projections" indicate that they could save upwards of $10,000 per year, however, she quickly relents, with one simple caveat: "I don't want loud rock music in this house," she blurts. "And if he eats calamari, breaks any of my figurines, or talks about his nipples even once, the deal is totally off!"
David happily sits down with Rico to go over the résumés, but Nate follows his mom out of the room to tell her that she doesn't have to be "a martyr" all the time. "I agreed to do it for you. You need to make more money now that Lisa is a stay-at-home," she tells him, befuddling Nate and furrowing his brow deep beneath that giant jungle canopy of a forelock he's been sporting. Nate insists that Lisa is planning to return to work any day now, but Ruth seems pretty certain about this whole stay-at-home thing, even if she does admit to thinking it's "a horrible expression" that makes it sound as if "you have some bracelet on your foot that will ring if you leave the house." That's pretty funny, but on the other hand, you so totally know that Lisa would slap a GPS Lo-Jack on Nate in a heartbeat if she thought she could get away with it. Desperate to change the subject, Nate asks Ruth why she's holding a mousetrap. "I found a box of them," she reports. "Mice have germs. They deserve to die." Hee!
And speaking of germs, here comes The Ironic Segue Fairy, to infect us with an upbeat transition to the L.A. Gay Men's Chorus, bopping their way through a cheerful little ditty that seems to consist solely of the word "June." Since I'm still smarting a bit from Claire's failure to lovingly say my name a few scenes back, I'm just going be mildly narcissistic here and take that as a shout-out to my rapidly approaching thirtieth birthday. Send money, not gifts. Wailing Smithers concludes this rehearsal session with his usual flamboyant derision, and then calls David over for a private conference in which he counsels him about trying to make his solo sound "too perfect." "Just try to be more relaxed with it, okay?" he adds, without going on to mention that this same advice could really be applied to pretty much all aspects of David's life. No, that particular sad task falls instead to the Little White Sex Dork II and his new friend Sears & Ho-Buck, who have invited David out for a friendly post-chorus drink. These two also agree that David's solo could use a little work, although the Ho-Buck is a bit more descriptive than Smithers might have been. "It's prissy," he prisses. "It's like a little girl's dollhouse. It's like a kitty-cat greeting card. It's like a poofy white cutesy-pie." And he would know, I assure you. Noticing a cheering crowd of twenty-somethings gathered around the nearby foos-ball table, The Ho-Buck gripes aloud, "When did I become four hundred years old?" "On your last birthday," answers the LWSD II. "You know, in June." This is followed by an excellent little comedic bit involving a Cirque du Soleil reference, but unfortunately it's purely visual and wouldn't really translate into a recap very well.
The LWSD II excuses himself to hit the men's room and pick up their check, because he's "obsessed" with Trading Spaces and wants to get home in time to record some new Crying Pam sound bites for his upcoming banner ad buy. This gives The Ho-Buck an excuse to move in on David and dispel some of the awkwardness he's been perceiving. "I feel weird not acknowledging it," he says. "You know. 'It.' How we know each other." "From chorus?" replies a confused David. "Or did I maybe see you on C.S.I. this week?" Clearly offended by this lack of recognition, The Ho-Buck offers some additional details on their supposed meeting, which apparently involved David jerking him off eight years ago in the second stall of a men's room at Sears. Yeah. I know. And I was all set to launch in a long, morally indignant tirade about David's penchant for risky public sex, but then I remembered that (Recapper TMI Alert!) the first blowjob I ever received actually occurred in the men's room of a grocery store where I worked during high school. Fun bonus factoid: The girl in question is currently in prison. Anyway, David's expression of horror here is priceless, and he repeatedly insists that The Ho-Buck must be confusing him with someone else. This continues until the LWSD II returns, and David practically throws the entire contents of his wallet at the guy in an attempt to pay off the check and get out of there as soon as possible. Before he can leave, however, The LWSD asks if Keith will be attending their performance the night. David says yes, and the Ho-Buck offers an evil, poofy-white smirk as he smarms, "I can't wait to meet him." Dun dun DUN!
Aaron: Sears?
Alan Ball: So?
Aaron: SEARS?
Alan Ball: What's your point?
Aaron: I don't even know where to start with that one. Black & Dickem? Cum see the softer side of spooge? A quick "hand me your Makita" power tool/masturbation pun?
Alan Ball: Yeah, that's funny. And just what would you have used, Mr. I-Need-A-Cleanup-On-Aisle-69? Huh? Ball-Mart? Dave Sees Plenty? Montgomery Whored?
Aaron: Heh. Ball-Mart.
Alan Ball: Shut up.
The Boredello. Well, okay, it's not really The Boredello per se, but we had that damn nickname contest and I intend to get full use out of the results if it's the last freaking thing I do. Nate is struggling in the background to assemble a crib for Maya, and Lisa busy is in the foreground "circling problem purchases" on their Visa bill. Oy. Am I the only one who finds it odd that I could hate someone more for circling a few numbers in red ink than I would if I were watching them fuck the neighborhood teenagers two at a time? Yeah. That's what I thought. Nate questions some of the things she's marked as problems, most notably a lunch with David and the $80 he spent at a store called "Book Soup" because, as he puts it, "libraries are depressing." Okay, first of all, I'm not really sure why a library would be depressing, but that doesn't really concern me very much because using the TWoP Amazon link is so damn refreshing and invigorating. Buy something today! All the kids are doing it! And secondly, what the hell is Nate doing with $80 worth of books anyway? I mean, other than Charlotte: Light and Dark, I don't think we've ever seen him read anything more complicated than the Surgeon General's warning on his pack of cigarettes. It seems a little out of character, so I'm just going to assume this week's writer (Bruce Eric Kaplan, of cartoon fame) is friends with the owner of Book Soup and wanted to get them some free publicity. Anyway, Nate finally promises to cut down on his spending, although he does get in a nice little dig when he says that it's only until Lisa is ready to go back to work. Ooh, busted! "Um, actually, I'm holding off on looking for another job," she admits, looking guilty. Rallying what little remnants of pride he has left, Nate proclaims that she can't go around making decisions like that without his input. Lisa then proceeds to demonstrate that she totally can make decisions like that without his input by getting up to walk away without even pretending to discuss the issue. Run away, Nate! Run far, far away!
Crate & Quarrel. David comes home to find Keith camped out on the sofa as usual. Keith is dreading having to reveal that he's not going to be able to make it to David's concert because of a work commitment, but David, fearing the wrath of a Ho-Buck scorned, is more than gracious about the whole thing. "Thank you for being so aware that this isn't about you," says a grateful Keith, as they share an awkward embrace on the sofa. Heh. David and I actually rolled our eyes in unison on that line. Keith complains about his security guard job some more, bitching that he used to "make a difference" and "protect people's lives." Now he just "protects their stuff." Yeah, yeah. Whatever. I used to make a difference too, you know, and now I just recap other people's stuff. But you don't hear me getting all whiny about it, do you? Well, okay, sometimes you do, but that's not the point. "Work isn't everything," says David. "I give you some meaning, don't I? You give me meaning." "Of course," answers Keith. "But we can't be everything to each other. That just isn't possible." "Yeah, I suppose," replies David. "Now what do you say we head down to Restoration Hardware? I hear they just put new air fresheners in all their bathrooms. It could be fun!" Fade to white.
When we fade back up, there's a strange young man who may or may not be a distant cousin of The Addams Family wandering through the Formaldehyde Fortress. He makes his way down to The Body Shoppe, where Rico identifies him as "Arthur" and chides him for showing up "a little early." "Actually I was a lot early," answers Arthur. "So I walked around the block for a while. An elderly woman who was almost completely bald told me to get off her lawn." Heh. Bald women are always funny. Plus, they're good for my self-esteem. When Arthur asks what it was that made Rico decide to hire him, Rico explains that they thought he would "fit in" better than the others because of the way he spoke about his great aunt Pearl, who raised him after his parents died in a house fire. She "gave up everything for me," Arthur says proudly. "She home-schooled me." " Yeah, you seem a little…home-schooled," answers Rico. Hee! And also, wow! This is two weeks in a row that Rico has been likable. I mean, what's ? The return of a repentant Brenda? Yeah, right. Like that'll ever happen. Rico returns to the corpse he's been working on, muttering that "these collagen lips are such a bitch." Arthur is hilariously mortified (and do you get it? "Mortified"?) by this profanity, and admits that Aunt Pearl would have "tarred" him for using language like that. Oh, I think it's safe to say that Arthur is going to fit in here just fine, don't you think? And just to prove that point, here comes Ruth, asking Rico if he knows where Nate might be. If you look closely, you can actually see Arthur's face light up at the presence of a matronly authority figure. Insert your own Harold & Maude joke here, which many of you have actually already done.
The reason Rico doesn't know where Nate is, by the way, is that Nate is out shopping for CDs on company time. His bill totals $62.90 (and after the whole "Book Soup" thing, I'm totally trying to remember if we've ever seen Nate listening to music before), and for some reason his credit card requires approval from the store manager. At first I figured that Lisa must have put some kind of block on it, but then the manager comes out and it's actually Lisa herself, so I guess this must be a dream sequence. We haven't had that many this season, so you can understand why I might have been confused. "What are you doing?" shouts Manager Lisa. "Do you even listen to me when I talk, or do you just hear static every time I open my mouth?" Sadly, my best efforts to program the TiVo to do exactly that have failed miserably every time. But don't think I won't keep trying. "How on Earth do you expect Maya to go to college?" continues Lisa. "You're throwing everything we have together away for fucking Beck?!" Heh. She's a loser, Nate! So why don't you kill her?
Claire, meanwhile, is waiting for Professor Olivier in his classroom. She's obviously a little early herself, although I'm chagrined to report that there don't seem to be any bald women lurking in the background. Hell, I even would have settled for Pinky Tuscahairo at this point, but she's not there either. Oh, well. Claire checks out some of the random detritus on his desk, and even picks up a toothbrush and sniffs at it a few times. Ew. As much as I love Claire, the only person I want to see sniffing anything is my old pal Torquemada. Some people just have a special talent, I guess. Olivier finally breezes in, announcing that they need to leave immediately to go hit the Century City mall before all the good stores close. "You need an assistant to shop?" asks an incredulous Claire. "I need an assistant to drive me," answers Olivier. "My license was taken away by a jack-booted fascist. I don't know why I'm always persecuted." Oh, I've got a few ideas on that particular subject, my friend. But in the interests of bringing this recap in at something less than five hundred pages, I'll just say that Claire is crestfallen to discover that the only thing she'll be learning from this experience is Olivier's shirt size. ["And that he loved the Livingston Mall, which I am taking as the first of my two shout-outs in this ep." -- Sars]
Das Sargzimmer. David and Nate meet with the DGDJ's son, who's been asked to bring in some items that belonged to his father. "In situations like [this] we find it helps the family to put some of his belongings to rest also," explains David. The son hands over a tiny suit, prompting David to wonder, "Was your father a 'little person?'" Hee! "No, no," answers Aaron Jr., "This was the only suit of his my mother could find. It's from his Bar Mitzvah." I was actually planning to include a photo of me in my own Bar Mitzvah suit on this page of the recap, but unfortunately, the technological limitations of the internet prevent us from squeezing that much cheese into the limited bandwith we have available here. So instead, I'll just leave you with a few tantalizing hints: It was turquoise and beige, and if you can remember how popular Miami Vice was in 1986, then you've probably got a good idea of just how dorky I truly looked.
Anyway, the only other item Aaron Jr. could find was a Linda Ronstadt T-shirt that might not have even belonged to Dad in the first place. He then leaves to go back to work, and Nate finds himself depressed by the idea that a son wouldn't even know if his father liked Linda Ronstadt. "Do you know if our dad liked Linda Ronstadt?" asks David. "As a matter of fact I do," counters Nate. "When I cleaned out his record collection I found a copy of 'Heart Like a Wheel.'" Insert your own Bonnie Bedelia joke here.
Over in the kitchen, Ruth is giving Arthur the grand tour of what can only be described as an anal-retentive paradise. After listing which bowls are to be used for which meal, she stops for a moment to reminisce about David's "special yellow bowl," which he didn't like anyone else to use. Arthur thoughtfully agrees to keep that one "out of the rotation," and Ruth moves on to show him the carefully crafted chart she's set up to schedule mealtimes so that they'll never have to "suffer the awkwardness of both eating at the same time." Heh. You know, it's too bad Ruth isn't a computer nerd, because I get the sense that she'd be almost as much of an Excel junkie as I am. I can totally see the two of us bonding uneasily over named ranges and vlookup functions. It'd be fun! After slyly guilting Arthur into taking the early shift for dinner (and also making him initial that selection on the chart), Ruth moves to the laundry room, where she warns him that Sunday nights are off-limits because that's when she watches HBO. Or maybe she said that's when she does her linens. I'm not really sure either way. Then they head upstairs, where Arthur stops to admire the "warm light" which suffuses her bedroom. Ruth certainly can't have him looking into her personal space, so she slams the door shut and leads him into what I think must have been David's old room. Of course, the only thing I have to base that on is the fact that it doesn't look like the room Nate used when he first moved back home. In any case, she's left handy printed instructions on just about every available surface in the room, and Arthur looks as though he's died and gone to heaven. Or maybe he's died and gone to the Bates Motel. I'm not really sure either way.
Downstairs, Nate is fooling around in the office, pretending to work in case Rico comes up and catches him. And then just like that, the moment we've all been waiting five long weeks for finally arrives. Brenda is back, buddy-boy, and she's brought a kickin' new hairdo and a pleasantly remorseful demeanor with her. Just to get a few things out of the way up front, I'll also mention that she's not pregnant, infected with an STD, or inviting Nate to join any kind of a weird sex cult. I know some of you were hopeful on those fronts, but it's just not going to happen. In fact, if anything, she's surprisingly bland this week. But like I said in the recaplet, that'll never last. Anyway, she very politely asks Nate for the opportunity to speak with him for a few moments, and he reluctantly agrees to let her come along on a few errands he needs to run.
Cut to said errands, as Nate drives Brenda to an auto-repair shop in a hearse. ["Vine Motors. Shout-out number two. Thank you, thank you very much." -- Sars] She admits to having called him once when she first returned to Los Angeles, but she hung up as soon as he answered. Which is a shame, because she could have asked if they had Prince Albert in a coffin and then giggled madly when Rico got all flustered and embarrassed. "I just wanted to make sure that you were alive," she explains, although the closed-captioning indicates that she dropped the word "still" from that sentence. Nate tells her about the surgery, and the fact that his anvilitis ruptured right in the middle of it, and Brenda is appropriately shocked by the news of his near demise. The real question, however, is whether this little exchange should be taken as nothing more than two old friends catching up on each other's lives, or as foreshadowing for an eventual return of The (Schrödinger's) Cat That Changed Nate's Life. My money is on the former, but Erwin's little kitty has been known to be a fickle beast, so who really knows?
In another (lean, green) hearse somewhere across town, Claire is driving Olivier to the mall. And impressively enough, she's actually doing it without ever even once looking at the road in front of her. I guess she must have been confused by the fact that they actually shot this on a real street, instead of with the normal bad backdrop. I can see where that might have thrown her. After trying and failing to get into Claire's pants via the clever use of Bible quotes last week, Olivier is now attempting to seduce his student by telling her all about the time he slept with an older, married woman. You know, because nothing turns on a teenaged girl like hearing stories about grody old people fucking. "I was twenty-one when we first met," he sleazes. "The radio was playing 'I Wear My Sunglasses At Night.' Such an insipid song. But now it always makes my heart feel…squished." Oy. Never surrender, Claire! You can never surrender!
Nate, meanwhile, is showing Brenda a picture of Maya The Leviathan. And I'm not kidding when I tell you that the kid's head takes up more than three-quarters of the frame. Frankly, I'm surprised that thing isn't affecting the tides at this point. He asks what Brenda has been up to, and she runs off a lengthy list of towns she visited during her absence before revealing that she's moved back in with Ma Chenowith. "It's the hardest thing I've ever done in my life," she adds. Insert your own "I doubt that's true" double entendre here. Gee, does anyone else think it might be symbolic that they've been sitting on the hood of a wrecked automobile throughout all this? Yeah. That's what I thought. Anyway, the mechanic comes over to propel the plot…er, "tell them that he needs a half hour to fix the hearse," and Brenda suggests that they adjourn to a nearby restaurant to get a drink.
Which is precisely what they do. They're actually the only ones in the entire place, and now it's Nate turn to spill all the gory details on what he's been up to since last season. Seeing as how he uses the word "prison" at least twice during his explanation, and also can't come up with any superlatives better than "safe" to describe his marriage, I think we can fairly assume that even Brenda has noticed that things aren't going very well in Nate World. Then again, if anyone were to ask me what I've been doing since last season, I'd have to use the word prison a few times myself. But that's another story, and I'm more than happy to let the Couch Baron be the one to tell it. Anyway, Brenda gets in some quick psychobabble here to let us know that she really is back, and Nate responds with a quick "fuck" of his own just so that we know he's already slipping back into his old ways. Then the waiter comes by to check on them, and he not-so-subtly tries to look down the front of Brenda's shirt as he hovers over her. Like any guy would, Nate notices this immediately, but it's a toss-up as to whether he's thinking that Brenda might have slept with the guy or that Lisa never seems to get those kinds of looks. My money is on the latter, but Brenda never was much of a fickle beast back in the day, so who really knows? Once the waiter departs, Brenda finally gets down to the point of this little visit. "I apologize for having sex with other people while being in a committed relationship with you," she says. "For not showing up to our shared reality by altering my consciousness with various substances." Flick…ahh. Nate realizes that she's making amends, and Brenda admits that she's still involved with a twelve-step program. "My life is very complicated right now," she sighs. "Yeah, well, whose isn't?" answers Nate, as he reaches for the check. Not mine, I can assure you of that.
Back in The Lean Green Corpse Machine, Claire is still listening to Olivier babble on and on about his failed, tragic romance with the older blah blah zzzzzzz. You know what? I've got one word for you, Olivier, and it ain't "plastics." And actually, it's two words. Sing it with me, kids: "Shut up." Hoping to plant the seeds for a future sleazy seduction, he offers Claire this little bit of life advice: "If you get lonely, have sex. But if you meet somebody who you think means something to you, you're doomed." Yeah, yeah. Just remember that sentiment later, when Claire dumps my greasy doppelganger.
And now it's time to check in with Keith, who is sitting alone in his parked security guard cruiser. No, he's not masturbating. But I'm betting you were all wishing that he was. I know you people. He gets a call over the radio reporting an alarm going off somewhere in his neighborhood, and he's so excited to actually have something to do that he burns a little rubber pulling away from the curb.
Ruth, however, isn't going anywhere fast, as she sits in her bedroom and watches the numbers on her clock slowly tip over from 6:56 to 6:57. Hang in there, Ruth! It'll be time for dinner soon enough.
Back to Keith, as he screeches to a halt in a driveway that's already clogged with cars belonging to both the police and another security guard. After learning that the house was burglarized by someone with an intimate knowledge of its internal layout and also absorbing a little occupational taunting from the boys in blue, Keith introduces himself to the other security guard, who's a total HITG if I've ever seen one. In fact, I initially thought he was the one who was on C.S.I. this week, until I watched it a second time and realized that it was The Ho-Buck instead. Hey It's That Guard offers to buy Keith a drink, which causes the Big Black (S)Ex-Cop to raise his eyebrows a wee bit.
And while Keith is busy having drinks with another man, David is crooning his blessed little heart out at the big Gay Men's chorus concert. His solo is actually quite good, but I'm incredibly distracted by the fact that the cameraman seems to have sprained his ankle in the middle of it, because the shot suddenly gets all jittery and we end up with a really weird low-angle view that almost cuts off the top of David's head. It goes without saying, of course, that the lyrics David has been given to sing here are subtextually relevant to his relationship with Keith. He swells with pride as the solo comes to a close, and even The Ho-Buck has to turn and give him an impressed little nod. Aww.
Back at The Fortress, Nate is winding a bandage around a cut on Lisa's finger. Apparently, she sliced it on a nail that was sticking out the wall when she heard him coming in through the front door. "It was almost like somebody pushed me," she tells him. "Like some kind of invisible person wanted to hurt me." Yes! Thank God! After years and years of training and practice, I've finally reached the ultimate black-belt level of recapping, where I can actually influence events as they happen on the show! It must have been the Bene-Gesserit influence that put me over the top. Okay, now for the big one: naked Claire scene, naked Claire scene, naked Claire scene, NOW! Damn. Looks like it's back to the practice floor. Oh, well. Lisa gripes about the fact that she couldn't find Nate anywhere earlier in the day, and he immediately confesses that he went out for a drink with Brenda. As you might expect, Lisa doesn't take this news very well, even though Nate insists that all Brenda wanted was to "apologize for being such a crazy bitch when [they] were together." Hmm. Nate sure does like the crazy bitches, doesn't he? Maybe he and I have more in common than I thought. Lisa throws a hissy over the fact that Nate didn't even bother to introduce her to Brenda, and I sort of share her pain on that one, because I'd love to see the catfight that would be sure to ensue. And not just because Brenda could mop the floor with Lisa with both hands and her dildo tied behind her back. Well, okay, it is just because of that, but still. With his dwindling reservoir of testosterone completely drained at this point, Nate is forced to concede her point and apologize. Insert your own Schrödinger's Cat/pussy-whipped pun here.
So it turns out that Hey It's That Guard's idea of buying Keith a drink actually involves stealing a drink from the house they're supposed to be guarding. Keith doesn't like this plan very much, but HITG points out that the owners are on vacation, and also seems to have a level of familiarity with their itinerary that suggests he might have been the one who pulled the robbery here in the first place. The guy is clearly a bit unstable, in fact, because he goes off on a rant about "teaching these greedy rich fucks a lesson," and tries to convince Keith to help him trash the place. Keith, however, has other ideas, and most of those ideas involve pounding HITG into a tiny little smear on the floor. He forcibly restrains the guy from doing any further damage to the house, and then tackles him and proceeds to beat him pretty much senseless while HITG pleads with him to stop. Aww. Welcome back, Angry Keith. We've missed you almost as much as we missed Brenda.
David, on the other hand, is basking in the afterglow of his successful performance, as the Little White Sex Dork II lavishes praise upon him for the veritable virtuosity of his solo. Wailing Smithers comes over to drag the LWSD II away, and David takes the opportunity to sidle over to The Ho-Buck and apologize for pretending that he never petted his penis. "I don't know why I wouldn't just admit it yesterday," he says. "It just seemed so…" "Sleazy, repressed, not that pretty?" suggests The Ho-Buck. Well, personally, I'd have gone with "sordid, disturbing, and painfully embarrassing," but I suppose those three will do. David goes on at length about how difficult that period of his life was, but The Ho-Buck reminds him that he's preaching to the choir (sorry, chorus) on that particular subject. He also admits to having jerked off "a couple" of other members of the chorus, and he and David share a nice bonding moment as they giggle over their various tawdry exploits.
Just as David has finally conquered his shame, Keith has finally conquered his anger. He lets Hey It's That Guard up off the floor, and starts cleaning up the mess that they've made around the house. "You ever a cop?" wonders a badly bruised HITG. "No," Keith replies sadly. "Well, whatever you are," HITG tells him, "you've got a lot a of shit to deal with." Amen, brother. Fade to white.
Fade back up on the DGDJ's funeral, with a random guy (no one you know) delivering a eulogy. There's a giant photo of the deceased that's been placed beside him, and he's sporting a mustache and mutton chops that were probably the height of style when he died in 1975. Which leads one to wonder why Nate wore his hair almost exactly the same way in Season One, but we'll have to ponder that question another time. "Be glad you're not like us," says the guy, as we zoom in on "Aaron's" face, "tied to the old ball and chain." Bwa! I don't know if that's an intentional meta comment, but if it was, it was pretty fucking funny. Sometimes I think Alan gets a secret kick out of messing with my head. And he's pretty damn good at it, by the way. In the back of the room, meanwhile, David is almost falling asleep on his feet. Hmm. I doubt the concert really ran that late, so I have to wonder what he and The Ho-Buck might have gotten up to afterwards. "What trouble did you boys get into last night?" asks Nate, echoing my own thoughts. David claims he's just a little hungover, and excuses himself to go lie down for a while. Then he heads upstairs, which would seem to squash my theory about Arthur living in his room. Nate settles in to listen to the rest of the eulogy.
Out in the Tofutti Tenement, Lisa is doing laundry when she comes across the receipt from Nate's encounter with Brenda. She barely even glances at it before collapsing onto the bed and bursting into tears. Oy. I'm not sure whether she's crying because Nate spent thirty bucks on nothing more than a beer, some shrimp cocktail, and a cup of coffee, or because she's finally realized that she's got maybe two episodes left with him, and that's if she's lucky. If we're lucky, he'll dump her ass by the time the previouslies are over week.
Elsewhere in The Fortress, Kathy Bates is telling Ruth that she has to go out of town for a while to direct an episode…er, "bail her daughter out of jail in Montana." There's some griping from both women about needy vs. independent children, and then Kathy asks for that cup of coffee Ruth promised her before she leaves. "Um, can you wait seven minutes?" replies Ruth, as she checks her watch. Heh. The two women end up huddled at the top of the stairs, spying on Arthur as he brews some tea and sits down for lunch. I've got to believe that someone as anal as Arthur would have had the tea brewed long before he only had seven minutes left, but maybe that's just me. In any case, Kathy mocks him for not being what she would call "eye-candy," and then Ruth wraps her up in an incredibly tight embrace and starts gushing about how much fun she's had since Kathy came into her life. It's all very sweet, and also hopefully just sapphic enough to satisfy those of you who thought this plotline might devolve into lesbianism at some point. They giggle some more about the goofy apprentice, and then the scene comes to a close.
The funeral downstairs, however, is still going on, and now Nate is joined at the back of the room by the DGDJ himself. Proving that he really is just like me, Aaron's very first line of dialogue is a snarky comment about someone else's dialogue. "That's a load of bullshit," he says, in response to his ex-wife telling the assembled mourners that his son could have learned a lot from his father. "You met my kid, he turned out fine," he adds. "He didn't need a fuck-up like me to stick around." We get an unfortunate close-up of the mutton-chops, and then Aaron continues his little rant. "Seriously, Diane and I, we had a shit relationship. We totally would have screwed up that kid. Just like you and Lisa are going to screw up Maya." Ah, yes. Just like last time, the highest shout-out honor Six Feet Under can bestow is to make you all about Nate. I've never been so proud. Nate tries to defend himself, but (again, just like me) Aaron is utterly merciless. "You are so fucking trapped," he snarls (SttM = 2,885). "And your neck is really fucking hairy." Nate responds by elucidating the theme of the week: "The only way not to be trapped is not to have anything," he proclaims. Or not to get crazy girls pregnant and then marry them out of guilt. Either way, really. Aaron isn't done taunting him just yet, though. "You look me in the eye and tell me that sometimes you don't want to get in your car and just start driving and never look back. Come on, I dare you." And even though he doesn't say anything, I've gotta believe that's a dare Nate would be totally willing to take. After all, "driving" isn't really why he's been getting into the car lately, now is it?
Cut to Claire, arriving at art school with Russell trailing close behind. He finally chases her down as they enter the classroom, and cleverly tries to sneak a second date in under her radar by inviting her to come to the pre-wedding rehearsal dinner as well. "Russell, maybe it's not such a good idea for us to, you know, date," she replies. If you use your pause button, you can actually pinpoint the second when his heart rips in half. Russell tries gamely to cover his disappointment by saying that he feels exactly the same way, but you can tell he's upset by the fact that he's actually willing to touch his own hair in this scene. "So you're okay?" she asks. "Just staying the way we are?" Well, no, I'm not, really, but with the restraining orders and all, what choice do I have? Russell shares my dismay, if not my legal injunctions, and he looks even more crushed when Claire dashes off to deliver a few leftover purchases to Professor Olivier. Aww, don't worry, Russell. You'll get used to it eventually. It's taken me three seasons, and I'm almost there myself.
Ruth is clock-watching again, only this time she's got a full fifty-three minutes before it'll be her turn to eat. Incidentally, this recap is now exactly fifty-three minutes late. I live for those little coincidences. She finally allows her hunger to conquer her propriety, and she heads downstairs to find Arthur cooking up his lunch on the stove. "Oh, I'm sorry," he says. "Did I read the chart wrong? I thought you initialed the late lunch?" Heh. She explains that she just got hungry, and he seems genuinely happy to have the company. "Would you like a little frittata?" he asks. Well, who wouldn't? Just as they're about to sit down to eat, we hear a mousetrap spring shut off-screen, and they both walk over to check it out. "I was just fooling around," claims Arthur. "I never dreamed it would actually work. And it wasn't even my cheese." Then he delivers the kicker: "On the other hand, they have germs. They really do deserve to die." Bwa! These two were made for each other, I tell you! I want them to fall in love and live happily ever after and have millions and millions of repressed, anal-retentive babies!
David is making his own lunch back at his apartment when Keith finally drags himself out of bed to join him in the kitchen (StR = 3,225). In response to David's query, Keith explains that he got home so late the night because he was out driving around just "thinking" about things. So that's what the kids are calling it these days. He also reveals that he's decided to find a new job, because the security guard thing "was supposed to be temporary, but it's really starting to not feel that way." They also have a nice little chat about David's concert, and things actually seem to going pretty well for these two. Which means, of course, that they'll probably break up before Nate and Lisa do.
And finally, we cut to Nate, cruising down a darkened highway with the stereo blasting and Aaron in the passenger seat. He gets just enough time to stick his head out the window to howl at the moon before the subtextually relevant portion of the song's lyrics finally kicks in. "I'm not dead yet!" wails a testicle on the soundtrack as we smash cut to the Fortress driveway, where Nate is sneaking one final cigarette before he goes in to face his wife. And then we slowly fade to white as geeks all across America sing, "It's just a flesh wound!"
Aaron: [flick] Ahh…
Alan Ball: Those things will kill you, you know.
Aaron: So? You've already killed me twice.
Alan Ball: Good point. But hey, at least I've never trapped you in a loveless marriage, right?
Aaron: Oh, I wouldn't be so sure about that. They don't call me "HBO's Bitch" round these parts for nothing, my friend. Hell, I've spent more time with you, Tom, and Dave these past few months than I have with just about anyone else.
Alan Ball: Wow. That's…kind of pathetic, actually.
Aaron: Shut up.
Alan Ball: Awwww. Would a bong hit help?
Aaron: No.
Alan Ball: How about a quick trip to Ball-Mart?
Aaron: Get out. Now.