That's My Dog

No, seriously. We get it, Opening Death Sequence. We know that you're all about the big fake-out, the zig when we think you're going to zag, the observation that even our own fragile mortalities are most entertainingly ripped away from us to the sound of the grim reaper pulling his hand away from what seemed an inevitable handshake but instead becomes the reaper smoothing the hair on the side of his head and yelling, "PSYCH!" We know that even the most precarious series of activities (hot tub, tequila, fat man sex, etc.) will eventually undercut our expectations for the scene. We know we know we know. So you don't have to pull the rug out from under us every week, okay? I look forward to this opening segment finally cannibalizing itself to the point where one caricature looks at another and observes among a series of unlikely near-death moments, "Man, this whole thing is turning into, like, a bad Six Feet Under opening." At which point, I will rise from my couch, stride over to my window, and leap through it, leaving an exact silhouette shape of myself behind, Looney Tunes-style. My fall will be broken by a woman wheeling a grocery cart, who will collapse to the ground below me, surprised but unharmed. The two of us will attract the attention of a passing motorist, who will watch us enacting our slapstick stunt and take his eyes momentarily off the road. When he looks back, we will note that he is about to strike a squirrel who has wandered in front of his car, so he'll swerve madly and barely miss hitting a crossing guard and a group of second graders who are just beginning to cross the street. Once safely on the other side of the street, one of the second graders will drop his lunch. Another child will pick it up and hand it to the crossing guard, who will instantly lapse into anaphylactic shock and die from a peanut allergy. The fucking end.

Anyway, on to the actual show.

A young girl pets an adorable kitten. From seeming nowhere, an axe hurls itself into the frame and lodges itself in the child's back.

No, I'm kidding again. But don't tell me it's not possible.

The sounds of it's-not-murder screaming come from somewhere off-camera as we pan across a large outdoor swimming pool. Because this show is not to be taken the slightest bit seriously anymore ever, the crew must have found it simply hilarious that the prop department found a tiny floating life preserver coaster and placed a mixed drink in a plastic cup floating on top of it. The sound of screaming (my screaming, their screaming, everyone screaming for ice cream-ing) grows louder as we pan toward the origin of the sound. Inside an adjoining hot tub, we find dirty, dirty coitus. A large bottle of what I guess is moonshine (because it has no label) or caramel (because, fat guy) sits on the ledge of the hot tub, while inside it said gentleman grunts on top of a shrieking female. Lucky, we've checked in right near the end -- OF HER LIFE! -- and also or their dirty, godless love. He rolls off of her and she slaps her tingling legs awake again, while he breathes heavily -- BECAUSE HE'S ABOUT TO HAVE A HEART ATTACK! -- and tells her, "You went a little Showgirls on me there. Not that I'm complaining." Why, is there some kind of hot tub ombudsman who we can lodge formal complaints to on behalf of the searing pain currently jetting around my cornea? Because I'd be interested in writing some kind of strongly worded letter, if possible, provided I didn't slip on the pencil and accidentally jab it into my wrist, causing me to die of lead poisoning before I even got to the post office.

The man, a balding Gandolfini-ish type but with much, much less HBO screen time -- let's call him Tony Alto -- kisses the woman -- let's call her "toast" -- and she plot-develops, "Happy anniversary, baby." They dirty talk about how she wants him "all over [her]," which is scantly a challenge, seeing as he's pretty much all over me right now, too, and he and I aren't even in the same state. She climbs out of the hot tub with a coy "Let's go shower," and he leans back -- BECAUSE HE'S ABOUT TO HAVE A HEART ATTACK! -- and tells her, "Give me a minute." She grabs a towel and runs toward the house as he seemingly begins falling asleep, a common problem that has plagued all people who...KEE-RASH. Tony Alto wakes up with a start when he hears a scream and said crashing sound from inside the house, and he looks up with concern, asking, "Annie?" He jumps out of the hot tub and begins running across the grass, his big flabby ass momentarily driving out my continuing belief that he was going to slip on the grass and that she was going to walk out of the kitchen and be all, "Honey? Tony? I...aaaaaah!" But just when you're convinced they're going to zag, they zug. Tony reaches the house with increasingly concerned shouts of, "Annie?" He runs through the back door because his wife just died in a scenario that hasn't been played out so dramatically since I saw it in Final Destination, and with one final scream of, "Oh, my god, Annie!" we fade to white and learn that Anne Marie Thornton made it from 1966-2004 without ever having the chance to tell anyone she couldn't goddamn stand it when people called her "Annie."

Keith "Celeste Is More" Charles sits at the kitchen table with David "It's Been A Bad Day/ Please Don't Take A Picture" Fisher, enjoying a big, steaming bowl of Clunky-Exposition-O's, the nutritional cornerstone of every identical Keith and David scene that always comes at this exact point in the episode, when most viewers probably find themselves asking, "Yes, but what do the resident dysfunctional gays think of all this?" Wait no longer, fair viewer! David tells Keith how much he's going to miss him, which at least means that Keith is going far, far away. Yes, but for how long? "Three months is a long time," answers David. Only three months? With the length of time that seemed to elapse during my first viewing of this episode, by my calculation Keith will be back in L.A. fifteen minutes before this episode even ends. But we won't know it. And why not? BECAUSE WE'LL BE HIGH ON CRACK. Keith rises from the table and stage-directs his way to the sink, David fretting, "You're gonna get hit on by hot guys in every city." And while I myself have never been a hot, gay security guard -- well, once in college on this night I shouldn't talk about in case this is the week my parents finally figure out the name of the site I've been working at for the past five years -- but it seems like you have to get pretty low down on the entourage chain of command before you're all, "Someday my Safeguard Protection Agency situation defusing professional will come." Of course, I could be wrong. I usually just hedge my bets and make a beeline for the bassist.

Keith seems to agree with my line of thinking entirely, reminding us how the thinking man's gay man toooooooooootally transcends bullshit relationship hegemony such as monogamy or liking one another when he tells David, "It's been okay for both of us to have an occasional random fuck here. What's gonna be so different?" Well, they totally make 'em hotter in Cleveland then they do in L.A., for one thing. David frets on, "You're gonna meet some cooler, smarter, hotter guy who's a lot easier to get along with than I am." David, dude, he could do that without leaving L.A. Keith: "I could do that here." Mind meld with Keith! Well, something had to keep this episode from the tanking "F" grade it spends its latter half begging for. Keith reassures David that the money he's going to make on tour will be enough for them to buy a house "with a pool and a hot tub and a steam shower" -- even though we just learned from the opening that people don't kill people, pools and hot tubs and steam showers do -- "and room for kids." Keith's spoken-word version of "Wouldn't It Be Loverly" has the needle scratched off the gaily-rollicking LP by David's return to self-flagellating reality, as he responds, "All of which you'll be sharing with a cooler, smarter, hotter guy you're going to meet on tour." And y'know...I could be with someone who is hard to get along with. And I could be with someone who is a funeral director. And I could be with someone who makes a living guarding the world from Michelle Trachtenberg, and, in many ways, guards Michelle Trachtenberg from us. But I'm sorry. It's over the first time someone pronounces the word "tour" with two syllables. Shut up, David.

Keith wants David to shut up: "Don't you know that I ain't looking?" -- oh, he just loves you when you talk all street -- "I'm settled down. I found what I want." Keith begs him not to be insecure, and David must be on the crack pipe (oooooh, a little in-recap foreshadowing, for those fans of unflinching Aristotelian dramatic structure) if he honestly believes his own reply: "I'm not insecure." Keith plows on by telling David, "If you want me not to do anything while I'm gone, just ask me." David tells him to "be safe," insisting, "even with blowjobs, you have to use a condom." Keith laughs, like, "Ah, that old wives' tale again!" and thinks about those red, white, and blue pops you could buy from the ice cream man and how they were really only a refreshing bit of summer fun if you took the plastic wrapping off of it before you ate it, and how if you didn't, it would just kind of melt away and there'd be nothing left under it and after a while you'd just throw it away all unsatisfied and be like, "What the eff did I even bother with all that for?" Anyway, that's a totally unrelated story that has nothing to do with this scene.

The apartment buzzer, um, buzzes, and Keith straightens his jacket and asks, "How do I look?" David drools a puddle so sizable it would surely kill someone in the opening credits and sighs, "So fucking hot it's ridiculous." And I've said it before and I'll say it again. I just don't see it. They kiss much more chastely than one would expect of a couple about to part for three months -- and it's not even like I'm all jonesing for some hot man/man action between David and Keith, but it is weird that this show does sometimes default to Dick-Van-Dyke-and- Mary-Tyler-Moore-sleeping-in-two-twin-beds mixed signals during moments of all-male intimacy. They stand and stare for a minute, David telling Keith he thinks he's going to cry (a little crack always fixes that problem for me), and the sound of the buzzer breaks the mood and sends Keith storming out of the room with, "All right, bitch. Calm down!" How romantic!

I totally didn't hear this line the first line around! Nate "Go Ahead With Your Own Wife, Leave Me Alone" Fisher sits at the Fisher family kitchen table, reading the paper. He mumbles, "Bush just lies and no one cares" to my endless amusement, in a sparkling pearl of partisan dialogue that is like a gorgeous flower popping up through so much manure. That has been sent to the house. In a decorative box. Maya lies motionless in Nate's arms while Claire "Picture Imperfect" Fisher pours some coffee and Ruth "No Shit, Sherlock" Fisher idles at the sink doing things that ladies do in the kitchen. Wow. Three of-age Fishers voluntarily sharing space in the kitchen at the same time. That's gotta be a record of some kind. Claire turns back toward the table and notes that some of her faaaahncy art has food on it, and she freaks out and runs over, screaming, "You got fucking oatmeal on my prints!" Don't curse in front of the child! For good measure, Claire tacks on a directionless and muttered "asshole" just to make sure that whatever watchdog group that had already red-flagged this scene -- y'know, the one with the words "Family" and "Council" somewhere in its title -- will instead charge the network a billion dollars, shoot the canister containing this scene into space, and somehow find a way to blame the whole thing on Howard Stern. Ruth defends Claire and leans in with a motherly "Yes, Nate, they're for Claire's crit." Claire tells her mother, "Don't say 'crit.' It sounds weird coming from you." And I totally want to school Claire in the whole "respect for elders" arena, but then I'd have to take back everything I said through the tears of uproarious laughter the one time my mother unadvisedly decided to use the word "dis" at a family dinner.

Nate regards Claire's photos, which we see some quick shots of. One is of Claire sitting outside in a white, flow-y gown, because if you're looking to break new ground as a ahhhhhhhtist, the best way to do it is by cribbing the aesthetic tenets laid out in the video for Cline Dion's "It's All Coming Back to Me." Nate asks her if she's trying to be some kind of a model, and when she sneers that she's not selling anything, Nate Nates out in a Nate-ish kind of way, "Isn't that what you should be doing? Trying to figure out how to sell out to the highest bidder as fast as you can before your life blows up in your face? Because it will." Yeah. I'm gonna have to go ahead and call "leading the witness on that one." Claire ignores him and walks over to the sink, while Maya's head lolls around on its axis because she's sinking into advanced states of unconsciousness on account of not facing in the direction THAT THE AIR CAN BE FOUND.