As if in response to last week's latest in a series of slipped-on-a- banana-peel-and- then-died-of-cancer rug-pulling intros, Six Feet Under plays it straight this time, draping a festive "Now Under New Management" banner generated compliments of the Print Shop Companion and hung across the camera for the entirety of this episode. We fade up in a darkened room illuminated by the screen of a laptop, on which a Microsoft Word icon reading "SFU/ Season 4 Creative Direction.doc/ Please do not steal" is just barely visible. A hand snaps the computer shut -- but it said do not steal! -- and places the fancy slim volume into a bag containing many other items. If that were my laptop, it would be the only thing fitting into that bag, and even the bag might disappear if the computer were big enough to eat itself out, which I kind of suspect it is. Sorry. Computer envy. Because my computer weighs exactly eight hundred and seventeen pounds, and that goes up to eight hundred and eighteen if you count the hernia self-diagnosis guide that came separately entitled Your Portable Computer: Do Not Lift! At least my lack of overwhelmingly fancy things keeps a lid on masked gunmen holding me hostage as they covet and steal my material goods. But when the mere act of picking up your ostensibly portable computer leads to a reminder that the company's outmoded catchphrase may secretly be, "Dude, you're getting crushed by a Dell," you're going to start lusting after the thirteen-inch carrying cases they sell for iBooks at Urban Outfitters. And it will make you very, very sad. But I'm going to stop bitching about my computer now because I'm pretty sure that it can hear everything I'm saying.
The hand that apprehended the computer belongs, it turns out, to a comely blonde woman, who is zipping up a bag of loot in the hallway of an upper middle-class house. Said woman -- let's call her Reverse Santa -- is a Television Thief, a blonde white female robber baron who wears slinky black thieving outfits and is often interested in something besides just simple possessions. She more often wants a secret disc containing international CIA spy secrets or a passport to a post-Soviet bloc nation or the prized Baseball Diamond from the innermost sanctum of the Mallory Gallery. Or perhaps all she really wants is revenge. In any case, Reverse Santa emerges fully into the hallway, wearing a mink coat I'll bet she stole from the house as well. And, if so, the subplot develops further insofar as the house clearly belonging to the fashion-forward members of the '80s fur family, the Antonoviches. Ah...Antonovich!
Reverse Santa calls out a white, blonde, "All right, let's go," and makes for the front door. A phone rings just then, and an answering machine picks up, and we cut to a room down the hall to find a man tied to a chair with a strip of electrical tape across his mouth. Staring at him is a black-clad man with a gun -- let's call him Television Thief XY -- who points the pistol at the man's crotch (I don't know why, either) and then his head. A close-up shot I have to watch eight full times in order to fully reverse the calming effects of years' worth of post-parental-divorce therapy finds the bound man struggling to scream, but Television Thief XY is quick with the trigger. The bound man's head meets the white wall just behind him in a back-and-to-the-left kind of way, as The Television Thieves exit the house on their way to try and decode the NOC list before Ethan Hunt is sent to break up their espionage racket. Meanwhile, the answering machine picks up and we hear a woman leaving a message that she'll be home in "forty-five minutes or so," where she will discover that her husband, Robert Carl Meinhardt, made it from 1962 to 2004 before wandering into this ad hoc Gus Van Sant shot-by-shot remake of The Ref.
David "Get Crack To Where You Once Belonged" Fisher regards his square head in a mirror, dabbing his finger against the one scratch that remains on his face. That Jimmy Felon character must have a light touch with his kickin' boots (though not nearly as light in the loafers as David might have hoped, I'm just sayin'), because I'm pretty much thinking that the number of kicks David took to the head and chest should have landed him in the hospital and not in the cover-up section of the L'Oreal counter at his local CVS. Into the frame steps Keith "Shortest. Tour. Ever" Charles, who by his very entrance fails to answer the cosmic geography question of "Keith, how can we miss you if you won't go away?" He regards David worriedly, asking, "What are you doing?" David continues the face-painting ritual of his Gaylord of the Flies battle preparations, plot-developing for Keith, "Well, I can't go to work like this. The bereaved will freak out." From his invisible cuts and scratches. I can just hear the cries of "You're clotting too quickly, and my wife was killed by too much Vitamin K. I'm bereaved...and I'm freaking out!" Keith advises that David take a little more time off, but David shoots back, "Four days of daytime TV is my personal limit." Amateur. "If I see another triumph over weight loss, I think I'll kill myself." A "triumph over weight loss" is actually weight gain, David. And leave Starting Over out of this. Amateur.
Keith sports his "I came back from touring with Celeste and all I got was this continually emotionally unavailable boyfriend and, oh yeah, also this t-shirt" t-shirt (he wears it on the inside, people) as he continues on, "We can go out to the beach." Man, he really has been reduced to babysitting here. But the good news is that he can eat anything in the fridge he wants, and he's totally allowed to have his boyfriend over whenever he wants. But David's ready with the comeback, as he responds to Keith that he has to go back because "Rico is totally overwhelmed." Especially considering the prohibitive "You must be at least this tall to be a partner at Fisher & Diaz" sign they have in front of the house, featuring a cloaked grim reaper holding out a hand of death that measures forty inches off the ground. Which is, for those of you number-crunching at home, still a good six inches higher than Rico, even on his spikiest hair day. And his ever-lengthening nose doesn't count as height, either. David complains that he has to deal with "the family of the body [he] lost," even though once he gets to work we don't actually see him dealing with it at all. Which, come to think of it, might have been kind of interesting. Instead, Keith tells David that he didn't lose the body, and David writes off the whole event by reminding Keith and informing us, "Well, horribly misplaced, then. For several days. In the wasteland of Echo Park." Oh, stop that. Everybody knows that Echo Park is totally the new Eagle Rock. Which was totally the new Silver Lake. Which was totally the new Los Feliz. Which was totally the new Hollywood. Which was totally the new...I don't know, Pangaea? I seriously think Los Angeles is reversing the direction of manifest destiny, except this time instead of gold they're chasing new stockpiles of wheatgrass shots in a constant effort to gentrify eastward. When the Walk of Fame extends into Utah just to accommodate Vin Diesel's star, we'll know we've gone too far to come back. Either way, "Echo Park" is Spanish for "We have ATMs too, thanks." Few people know that.
David and Keith walk into the room, and like every week, the identical David/Keith scene that comes at this point is powered entirely by stage directions, which entice Keith to change the subject: "I just talked to Mitchell." What does that mean? Is that gay talk? "He said the prints they got off the van didn't bring up a match." David has seen enough episodes of actual cop shows to infer that this means Jimmy Felon didn't have a record, though maybe it secretly means that he waaaaaasn't eeeeeeeeeven aliiiiiiiiiive! Haunted van! And, wait. The Mystery Machine turned up? The hell? Keith soldiers on by saying he wants to look into the possibility that there was a camera at the ATM. In that ghetto deli? Oh, please. That thing wasn't even plugged in. And jerky tells no tales. David agrees that jerky tells no tales, taking this opportunity to stop putting on his tie and snap at Keith, "I think I'd like to not talk about this anymore." Keith is chastened slightly, as if realizing that his current job is less about "running those prints" and more about "run off and make sure nobody's messing with Celeste's personal Bedazzler," so he backs off with a loud, loud beeping sound and suggests, "Maybe we should call off your birthday for tomorrow night." It's David's birthday? No one else ever gets to have a birthday. David protests, but Keith raises a voice and tells David, "Pretending it was a robbery is bullshit," begging, "You should tell your family." David stares him down for a second and asks somewhat sardonically, "Would you tell yours?" At which point they should both turn to the camera and ask the viewing audience in slow unison "Would you tell yours?" after which the projector is turned off and we break up into our individual discussion sections to answer the nagging question, "Why Doesn't Cathy Eat Breakfast?"
Rico "Short People Got No Reason To Live" Diaz and his lovely wife Vanessa "Mother Superior Jumped The Gun" Diaz scurry about the Diaz kitchen while Rico regards several interchangeable children as an opportunity to mentally flagellate himself with guilt over the sorry state of the human condition. Vanessa tells Rico, "I got Cassidy for tomorrow night." What does that mean? Is that gay talk? Rico doesn't remember what the following night is, and Vanessa refreshes his memory in the please-don't-make-me-go-please-don't-make-me-go-please-don't-make-me-go cadence of the faux-supportive wife, "David's birthday dinner. Or did they cancel it?" Rico looks on in concern because he's turning into that urban myth about the guy who has two different families in two different states and so he gets really fat from having to eat two dinners every night, except he's the version who gets really short from constantly crouching low to the ground looking for the viewing audience's opinion of him as a character. "Oh, shit!" Rico calls out, because he's taken a page from The Nate Fisher Guide To Your Child's First Fucking Word, but Vanessa tells him not to worry: "It's okay. I got Cassidy. Julio's not in love with her, but at least she doesn't smoke." I guess we're just fulfilling the "equal time" laws of political coverage, what with Nate's espousing of a political agenda being penned by the DNC, so I guess they'll credit to that non sequitur to the newest Six Feet Under scribe, The Honorable Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg. But Vanessa tries to be the most weasel-y member of the animal kingdom -- well, except for the weasel -- by leading the witness: "Unless you think it doesn't matter if I go." But Rico creases his forehead in an attempt to look more distinguished and perhaps even stop his own children from referring to him as "the little boy in the blue suit" when he responds, "Maybe for David, y'know?" Vanessa picks up one of the children who apparently don't even see Rico, as he goes one step too far in the convincing process, adding, "It'll be nice for us to do things together." Vanessa totally calls him on his shit, so quickly enacting a 180 from her bitchy castrating self that her line is delivered with a hint of a Doppler effect, when she laughs, "Oh, yeah. It's a real romantic evening. Dinner at the Fishers'." Rico smiles and looks off, all, "Almost as romantic as getting a blowjob from a hooker. I mean, of course, NOT getting a blowjob from a hooker! Man, those sound almost the same. I...sigh."
Nate "Hey, Bulldog" Fisher is inside some sort of a kennel, the outside window of which reads, "Camp for Dogs." Oh, God. Camp for dogs. Is their corporate tagline "Anthropomorphizing Your Pet Since 1999, You Deluded, Childless Parent"? I mean, I'm totally not against having pets and I have a potted plant I feel so parentally toward that I'm actually planning to have it Bar Mitzvahed, so I'm not completely heartless. But "Camp for Dogs"? Until something shows me a dog that has the opposable thumb agility to make a lanyard bracelet, I'm not paying to send it to camp. Because if you're only covered in fur...well, worst panty raid ever. Oh, never mind, I'm sure the tagline is actually "We'll help your dog ruff it!" Shut up, "Camp for Dogs."
Inside, we find Nate sitting on the ground tending to dogs and speaking to them in cute, dog-like ways, all, "Lisa? Lisa? Are you Lisa? Lisa, which do you like better, Kibbles or Bits?" "Look at Garbo," says the head counselor of Camp for Dogs, a tall woman who is not Kristen Johnston. "She usually hates men." And were I just a bit smarter, I'm sure that dog would be starring in a Greta Garbo movie with a decidedly dog-punned theme, but even after casting a wide net around the internet, there is not a single Garbo title I can even pretend to have seen. Mata Hairy? Anna Grrrrrr-enina? It's almost impossible.
Head Counselor Not Johnston sits down and regards a clipboard, asking Nate, "Food co-op, funeral home. Nothing with animals at all?" He tells her that he has not worked with animals, noting in his defense, "But they're all related in a way, y'know?" Hilariously, she doesn't know, so he clarifies, "A dead dog is my wife. What are you, some kind of effing monster?" Okay, not really. He actually says, "People in grief, y'know, are a lot like dogs in that you have to be with them in a totally instinctive way." Yeah, tell that to my fern when I keep it home on Friday night to memorize the rest of its Haftorah Portion. Sniff. A shrub no more.
Nate continues on that he doesn't have a dog now because the one he had when he was young was killed and his mom was really sad. Head Counselor Not Johnston tells him that she's never hired anyone with no dog experience before on account of this not being "Camp for Newts," and Nate is about to launch into full-scale reasoning that he's qualified for the job because he faithfully reads Marmaduke in the funnies every damn Sunday. But instead he goes for that old TV compromise, "Why don't you just give me a trial run? What do you say?" And, just like how kids in movies refer to adult males as, "Hey, mister," the "take a chance on an unknown kid" defense scores where "Those without dog or dog-related experience need not apply" would more realistically suit the situation. Head Counselor Not Johnston goes on to tell Nate that the job doesn't pay much, and he responds that he doesn't need much because he still lives with his mama. "I just can't stand to be around people in pain anymore," he adds. Well, then get a job as a Good Humor man and try to avoid kids who are lactose-intolerant. What do you want me to tell you?
Before we get into a fight about it, Perfectly Legal by David Cay Johnston is a book exposing how the super-rich don't statistically pay the proper income tax. Johnston is an investigative reporter and a Pulitzer winner. He didn't just show up at a publisher's office all, "Hey, Mister Penguin Books! Why don't you just give me a trial run? What do you say?" Because that's not how people get jobs. Anyway, the book is radically not in favor of the top 1% of the population, so when George slams the book down in fury and Ruth asks him what's wrong, what's wrong is the same thing that's always wrong with George when he works himself autonomously into a pissy mood: he's mad about something boring. Ruth should know better by now. He snarls back, "The slow murder of the middle class." Because he's in The Political Chair, where everybody is allowed one snark a week. I can't wait until it's Claire's turn and she's all radical and Kucinich-y and just sits at the table all by herself, screaming, "If I were president, I'd legalize everything! Id let clowns marry bagels! I'd make ketchup a state! And I'd take pictures of the whoooooole thing." Speaking of Claire, she's sitting at the table also, refusing Ruth's offer of "some tuna salad" with the defense that she just woke up. George uses the rejoinder of "The Japanese eat fish for breakfast every day," and Claire shuts down his I'm-Walter-Cronkite- inside-the-big- Epcot-ball- and-I-have- three-and-a-half-minutes- to-teach-you-eeeeeverything speech with a dispassionate "Great." And while I've heard that their cholesterol is lower than ours and from that hilarious Michael Keaton movie they sure do seem like an organized bunch of fun-loving car welders, I'm guessing their fish consumption would plummet considerably if their only breakfast option were the "Ruth Fisher Roll."
Ruth changes the subject by insuring that absolutely everything she says to George, for the extent of this entire episode, is phrased in the form of a question. She asks him what he's wearing this evening. It's with a perfect amount of pompous class-consciousness that he responds, "Oh, you know. Academic cocktail attire." She says that she does not know what that means. What shirt? With which jacket? And no tie? The Japanese never wear a tie to their academic cocktail parties. Jim never has a second cup at home. Jim never vomits at home.
David enters, full of unconvincing vigor. He makes his way straight for the coffee, Claire asking with as much emotion as her angsty self can muster, "How are you?" Ruth asks if he's feeling tired or if he wants some lunch because she's going to be asking a lot of questions this week, see, and she follows him into the room and asks if they've found the carjacker yet. David responds that there have been no new developments since yesterday, but Ruth won't let it go: did he argue with the carjacker? Why would someone want to steal the van? She worries that it doesn't make any sense, causing David to snap, "Are you trying to find a way to make this my fault?" She apologizes and puts her hands together in an apologetic gesture and also to show that for once they're not tightly wrapped around her husband's nads. I'm sorry, I know George is a prig and I know Frances Conroy is a brilliant actor, but if Ruth were my wife right now I'd be making plans to cook her bunny and found my local chapter of the "No Ruths Allowed Club," which would make me not only the president, but also a member! ["If Ruth were your wife right now, the world would be different in so very many ways." -- Wing Chun] David assures Ruth, "Sometimes bad things just happen and it doesn't make sense. But at least, y'know, I'm okay. And it's over now." Ugh. Camp for Dogs. I'm still mad.
Justin Ther-neaux opens the door to the apartment of one Brenda "Charlotte Light And Snark" Chenowith, a pad which has become much, MUCH nicer since she moved in because your architecture just naturally improves over time when you're in loooooooove. Joe carries a large musical instrument in a case we'll call The Soprano In-Lieu-Of- Further-Character- Development-O-Phone. Brenda asks, "How was the scoring session?" Nowhere near as fulfilling as her own upcoming scoring session with Nate, I imagine. Eh? EHHHHHH? Joe prattles on about it a bit as Brenda flips some pages in her fancy, fancy smart book, and he brings her back to the tethered-to-suburbia present with the hey-look-at-me line, "I found us a house." She looks at him momentarily like she forgot his name or he said something drug-fueled and nonsensical like "Freemasons run the country!" or "Did you know there's a place in this city called 'Camp for Dogs'?" She collects herself quickly though -- rumor has it she is very, very smart -- asking, "A house?" ("Camp for dogs?") He tells her he made an appointment for them to look at it the following afternoon, and she asks, "This would be for, like, now?" He responds that they're going to need a place to put the kids, adding that she doesn't want to walk across the courtyard every time he has to change a diaper. But then you're two doors separated from all the poo! She asks if he thinks they're ready for this or if they're "talking out of [their] eggs," to which he responds, "I'm not talking out of my eggs. I'm talking out of my basket." What does that mean? Is that gay...oh, never mind.
The lovely and Lisa Loeb-ish Mrs. Former Robert Carl Meinhardt sits with David at Fisher & Diaz. David asks if she would like to include the cause of death, and you say she talks so all the time, "No, thank you. Just say he passed away suddenly, please." David asks with his sensitive we-might-actually- make-it-to-the- funeral-this-week timbre whether he should contact a clergyperson for the service, and she basically tells him, "You say I only hear what I want to," saying for what sounds like not the first time, "We already went over this. We're atheists." Do people really use that word to describe themselves? Especially as a descriptor of what makes them unique as a couple: "We like drives to the country, fondue parties on the deck, and atheism"? She continues on with her speech, driving the point home: "And if I wasn't before, I sure as hell would be now." But really she's just under duress. 'Cause she thought he'd like forever. But now she's not so sure. She's try to tell him that she's clever. But that won't take me anyhow. Or anywhere. With you. Mrs. Former Robert Carl Meinhardt dabs her eyes and thinks of the first conversation they ever had. Let us have a moment of silence and behold the burgeoning passion of two atheists in love. "Don't you just hate God?" "Who?" "Exactly!"
Downstairs, Rico's actually doing some work! He's just installed the brain of one Abby Normal, and he stuffs the Former Robert Carl Meinhardt's bloody head cavity with a whole lot of cotton, pulling down the hair and snapping the missing head piece back into place. It's just like that scene in Hannibal, but now featuring 100% less Ray Liotta. Just like the Lord (were there one) intended. David enters and puts down a pair of shoes, telling Rico, "I polished his shoes." Yeah, David. Thanks for dealing with the grunt work. What are you going to do while Rico stands there covered in blood, trying to make the dude look like anything besides the box from the board game Cranium? Hide his stash of pornos? Alphabetize his baseball cards? Render his likeness in pipe cleaners and paste? "Do you have his certificate? I can't find it." Ah, yes. Paperwork. When too emotionally unstable to face your own mortality, why not act as middle manager to the afterworld instead?
Rico asks David what happened to the dude -- well, I ain't no deathtician myself, but from the looks of things it appears he might have gotten shot in the head -- and David tells him that the wife didn't volunteer it, "so it must be a suicide." Rico notes that he must have been "pretty desperate," but David feels more for her, noting, "What an awful thing to do to your wife." This reminds Rico of...Rico. He tells David he needs to make a quick call because, I guess, no, this can not wait until after class, and he leaves David to gawk at the Former Robert Carl Meinhardt and think, "Sucks for you, having such a pretty computer."
Outside the room and away from Cottonhead's judging, prying view, Rico places a call on his cell phone, hears an answering machine, and leaves the generic message, "Hey, it's me. Um, listen I can't do dinner tomorrow night. I have to work. But I'll call you later and we'll figure something out, all right?" All right, Rico. And I respond to him directly on account of the fact that he accidentally called me.
Coach house, which Claire now calls home. Claire makes art while Anita moves in (the hell?), apologizing, "It should only be for a few days, hopefully." Mena Suvari enters just then, regarding Claire's photos on the wall and complimenting them. They're basically a past-episode flipbook rendered on celluloid: sacrificial bonfire in the back yard. The basement vomiting pre-blowjob blood. Claire worries that they're "pointless," because things in real life are so much more important than art. Like David getting beaten up and kicked by quick-healing shoes that dispensed bactine even while they dispensed whoopin'. Like "some old lady spits at you and it seriously affects your outlook on things." Claire turns the conversation to Mena Suvari, telling her that her work "happens to people. It's not just some image hanging on the wall doing nothing." Mena Suvari counters that she thinks Claire's pictures do more than nothing, suggesting, "We should make something together. Like some kind of mixed-media thing." This is what lesbians refer to as "foreplay."
In another life I totally wanted to be a college professor and have people find me really, really, really smart all the time, so I don't entirely buy into the academia-as- bastion-of-snootishness I feel like they're trying to turn it into. We're at a house so made of tweed and port and thinking that the big bad wolf could just blow it right over. George and Ruth walk in, and George introduces her to "the famous Dean Kekalos." Title Dean or first name Dean? Perhaps academia's greatest unsolved mystery. Dean Kekalos (or, alternately, Mr. Kekalos) shakes Ruth's hands and thanks "the famous Ruth Sibley" for the "calming effect" she's had on George, and I half expect her to blurt out in surprise, "If he were any more calm, he'd be an exceedingly boring kind of rock he'd soon insist on telling me all about. With slides!" George waits seconds before running off to greet another (male, I think it's significant to say) colleague, leaving Ruth alone with D.K. (or, y'know, Mr. K. I really don't know). She thanks him for the "Geode nut dish," which is either some professorial archeology joke or she's just making sure to thank everyone extra-kindly who didn't send her poo.
Left on her own while George goes off to schmooze with men named Seamus and Bartholomew and maybe Dean, Ruth shuffles off alone and marches right into a nearby episode of Three's Company. In an adjoining room, she overhears a conversation two women are loudly having in plain sight of a lot of people who know everyone in the room. "I didn't tell you this?" one asks. She speaks with a somewhat indeterminate accent, so it's clear she comes from the sovereign nation of Foreignia, the hailing spot of all of the foreign people who aren't from anywhere in particular. She goes into detail: "We'd been dating for six months, and he called me from his car and starts saying something like, 'Maybe we should be seeing other pe--' and he loses cell reception...the parting words of George Sibley." Overheard idle chatter at a cocktail party? I call cheap shortcut, especially with George there. Hell hath no fury like a woman from Foreignia.
Back at Diaz & Diaz (which would probably be a better name for their house should Vanessa ever actually be made an equal partner), Rico sits on the floor and stares into an old time-y looking microscope because in his free time he likes to cure polio. Vanessa comes in and sits on the couch behind him, complaining, "Didn't you say you have to work tomorrow night now? On the machine?" Whoops! Looks like that's what happens when the words "whore" and "wife" show up to each other on the ol' cell phone autodial. So Rico backpedals with his best filibuster as he backs up onto the couch and tells her that the plans haven't been changed at all. Rico blames the whole thing on David and says he kept changing a viewing time, "changing their minds back and forth, these people!" Vanessa just wants to know if she should get the babysitter back, but Rico is too concerned with whether he should being "going...outside...to stalk...Lenny and Carl."
"Did you hear him go on about global warming?" George asks Ruth in the car. Ruth, whose life has been warmed plenty by the hot, steaming piles of poo George has invited into their life together, wants to hear nothing about it, cutting right to the point: "Was one of your ex-girlfriends at the party?" George says he doesn't think so, and when Ruth accurately describes Chrissy's or Janet's or whosever accent as "curiously international," George recollects that he dated a woman who worked in the Archeology department. Ruth grills him for how it ended, and he tells her that he really doesn't remember. He thinks they just "drifted apart," but Ruth says that she overheard the women's conversation, which causes George to correctly reply, "Well, that's not the best way to get information, is it?" He just wants to talk about global warning, but everything I ever needed to know about global warning I learned from The Day After Tomorrow. Warming makes it cold!
Click clackity clack clack! David sits at an unstealable computer not loosening his tie. Nate enters and asks after David, handing him some kind of topical ointment, telling him, "This helps the bruises. It's homeopathic but it works." David takes the tube and puts it to him in a noncommittal way, perhaps exactly as convinced as I am that something a little stronger will be required to heal getting beat up than bee pollen and rainwater.
Nate and some other woman run around couches and play with dogs. She wants him because all women on this show find Nate curiously irresistible, so she cracks right in with the intimate chatter: "So, do you want to be a trainer?" No, actually he wants to find the reincarnated soul of his dead wife Lisa. Making her heel would only be reinforcing the patriarchy. The other woman -- let's call her Suzie Superfluous -- tells Nate that she wants to be a vet. She pries when she tells him she heard he worked in a funeral home, and asks if it was "kinda depressing." He pauses a minute, petting maybe-Lisa and volleying, "Kinda." Dead pause. See, on television, quiet and brooding men are considered "mysterious," whereas in real life they are labeled "social retards" and subsequently ignored. Nate drops the baby bomb and asks if she thinks it would be all right to bring "his little girl" in. Suzie Superfluous says she didn't know Nate was married, because she was looking for a ring because she's hitting on him, and he tells her, "I'm not married. Anymore." Suzie Superfluous smiles broadly because she doesn't know that sex with Nate makes him go to his white desert wasteland place.
Oh, man. Okay. Claire, Anita, Russell, the Matthew Barney of LAC Arts, and Mena Suvari sit in Claire's room talking about all things art. They want to know what their interactive "art" will say and do and that they want to make a difference before they all go off to that giant art wank in the sky, and the Matthew Barney of LAC Arts tells them that his work is about "American bloat. Our national compulsion to consume food, energy, and the rest of the world until we're so fat we literally explode." Well, thank God the Matthew Barney of LAC Arts is here to explain the American inclination toward conspicuous consumption, or I might have missed it in other cultural touchstones including the Crowded House song "Chocolate Cake," the symbolism of the exploding Augustus Gloop, and the eighty-one McDonald'ses I have to walk past to get to that one place in New York called ANYWHERE. Shut up, the Matthew Barney of LAC Arts. And shut up he does, when a pregnant pause is followed by the Matthew Barney of LAC Arts sharing with the rest of the group: "I brought some AMT." Alpha-methyltrypatmine. I looked it up. Claire notes that it's 2 in the afternoon, and wonders if it's a little early for drugs, but Russell notes, "You have to do hard drugs during the day. That way, you can sleep off the harsh landing." It's also known as "Foxy." It's fake ecstasy, and if raves were still all the rage, you could get it there and think it was ecstasy but you'd be wrong. See? I'm cool. I'm with it. I'm seen Go. Also, I looked it up.
Brenda and Joe walk through a big, empty house speaking of domestic things. She tells him that she wants to host "fabulous dinner parties," and he tells her that he needs a set of pots and pans. For some reason, this incites him to ask her if he sounds "like Lucy Van Pelt," whom Brenda claims to have never heard of. Joe continues the metaphor, learning Brenda real good that Schroeder was the musician and that Lucy "was an aspiring psychoanalyst, actually." I guess that would make Mena Suvari the Peppermint Patty character. They dance around the living room as Joe sings a song that I guess Lucy sang to Schroeder. I find it disturbing and off-putting. They walk into another nondescript room as Joe suggests, "I think we should get all new bedding." She sits down on a ledge where one day nothing will go because this can never, ever last, telling him, "You are such a little bride!" He moves in for the love, and I quickly realize in this intimate moment I wish I were not sharing with them that there is no real estate agent to show them the house because, I think, they've already bought the house? And put it in Escrow? And closed on it? Otherwise, how could they just be roaming around by themselves, willy-nilly? Joe mounts Brenda in the echo-y living room, and she stops him by asking if he has a condom. "Do we need one?" is the reply. "New house, new life." She pulls the shade down behind her as the metaphor completes with Lucy banging on Schroeder's tiny piano. The doctor is bored.
Ruth hangs up balloons and streamers and a banner reading, "Happy birthday" and looks around I-hate-my-husband-ily.
And, drugs. I love how people on this show get the exact kind of high you'd get if all drugs resulted in making you feel like the first bullet point in a Google search about said drug. Ecstasy: euphoric. Crack: wack. We're back the coach house, where Claire paints the words "TERROR STARTS AT HOME" in all capital letters on the wall, while her mother instinctually rues the day she ever allowed her daughter to move into that space while she wanders around the house proper in an I-hate-my-husband-esque fashion. The Forehead That Dares Not Speak Its Name rears its, um, head for the first time as everyone sits around all fucked up and reminds us why drugs are lots more fun to do than they are to watch. Unless it's in a 1970s social training film. Hosted by Sonny Bono. Because then everybody just wants to go to a pot party and check out and get all freaky-deaky. Death Cab for Cutie proves it's not just for Seth Cohen anymore, making the leap to cable in the form of the song "Transatlanticism." Mena Suvari shares her singing chops, which resemble her acting chops only in that I could have done with a full spin around this mortal coil without ever taking the time to learn about either of them. The song hits the lyric "I need you so much closer" and then goes on an AMT bender and maroons them all singing that line over and over again. I didn't think this part of town had any AMTs.
Joe and Brenda lie in post-coital bliss on a carpet that already needs to be shampooed. The market value of that place has already plunged as a result of Joe sharing his DNA with the living-room rug. I didn't think this part of town had any DNAs.
The happy two couples -- Ruth and George, David and Keith -- sit around the Fisher kitchen table, David punching in about a million numbers on a cell phone. Ruth asks him why he's making "all those beeping sounds," and he says he's programming his new cell phone. I thought the cell phone stayed in his pocket. Or did it get thrown clear during David's covert visit to the Monster Truck Show? ["Jimmy Felon smashed it in the parking lot." -- Wing Chun] George genuinely tries to ingratiate himself in all the wrong ways, saying, "Well, that's the one good thing about getting robbed, right? It's a great excuse for getting a new gadget." He called it a "gadget"! Awwwww. I feel a little sorry for him, like if he'd been like, "I just keep all of my important information on mimeographed dittoes!" But David doesn't care because every scene needs its martyr, and David mumbles, "I hope it happens again so I can get a new Palm Pilot." Well, if you hate him that much, why not program it in your room? On second thought...why not program it IN YOUR ROOM? I can't count the number of times I've been on the subway listening to some idiot choose his new cell phone ring, going around and around and around, inflicting Mary-Hart-like seizures on everyone else in the car because Johnny New Phone can't decide if "Fur Elise" or "Nokia Default Ring" better represents his personal style.
Russell and the Matthew Barney of LAC Arts play a drug-fueled game of "No, you're a genius! No, you are!" for a brief spell, but they're interrupted when Anita washes her face and realizes aloud, "This is so incredible. You guys gotta come take a shower with me." Russell and the Matthew Barney of LAC Arts are so there, which leaves Claire and Mena Suvari to immerse their hands in jars of paint because that is what Foxy Roxys on Foxy do.
Worst. Birthday. Ever. First of all, let the dude take off his tie, for Chrissakes. David sits at the head of the dining-room table, accompanied by Keith, Rico, Vanessa, and George. Ruth asks where Claire is, and Nate jumps up to call her because it's easier than suffering the rest of those people for any length of time and maybe on his way to the telephone he'll find a dog that contains the reincarnated spirit of his dead wife Lisa. Rico sits down at the table and asks Keith what touring with Celeste is like, and Vanessa sings a lick of a song that goes "Gimme gimme some of your candy," exhibiting vocal strength that far surpasses Michelle Trachtenberg's or that of any of the barely veiled pop icons she so cumulatively portrays. George asks what other cities are on the tour, and Keith basically makes a list of where the heart of rock and roll is still beating, saying he looks forward to Austin, Boulder, and Miami. Naming cities is fun! It's Iceland. Or the Philippines. Or Hastings. Or...or THIS PLACE!
"Claire, I don't know if you have friends over there or what, but dinner started and you should really get over here." Russell, Anita, and the Matthew Barney of LAC Arts subvert the dominant paradigm by mounting each other on the bed, and Claire laughs at Nate's message and screams, "Oh, fuck! My brother's birthday party is tonight!" Claire thinks that is hilarious, and you know what else is really funny?
Juxtaposition! In the staid, drug-free, silent dining room, Nate takes a bite of a lentil-y looking soup concoction and asks Ruth what it is. She volunteers that it's a "pumpkin mulligatawny," which is the most fun thing ever to say and makes me want to write David's birthday card to him entirely in rhyme. Luckily for all involved parties, I am not going to do that. Claire comes barreling in just then and apologizes for being late, her excuse being "We were making art." Which would totally not fly at my family's dinner table, either, what with my grandmother repeating it in a loud voice -- "You say you were 'making art'? Is that what he said?" -- and then suggesting another course of action for my evening instead, ie. "Why don't get yourself a job where I understand what you're doing. I tell my friends you write about the television, they say Muriel what are you talking about." And so on.
Rico asks Nate how his job is, and he shares that it's "amazing" and "awesome." Rico asks if it's a kennel, and George helpfully notes that it's "a canine retreat." It's Camp for Dogs. It's right on the window. Unless you're inside, in which case it's backwards so it's -- well, "redrum," I guess. David asks what's so great about it, and Nate tells them, "It makes me feel like I'm twenty-five again and life is simple and nothing horrible has ever happened to me." Every time in your life will make you remember another time as being simple, I guess. Show of hands if you remember twenty-five. Yeah, me too. It sucked. Nate notes the manifold wonders of working with dogs, to which Ruth responds, "I've always been a cat person." Claire starts to speechify that Ruth should totally get a cat, asking, "Why do you deny yourself so much?" Because drugs rule, Claire adds that everybody should always have what they want in life, zoning in on David to the horrified glances of all surrounding them: "It's your birthday. You just had this awful thing happen. You so deserve to be happy." David regards her after a long look and says, "Thank you, Claire." Ruth suggests to Claire that she help her clear the table, and Claire responds, "I'd love to, Mom. But I can't have it be just the women that clear." Keith and Rico stand up as well, and Claire further critiques, "Now it's just the women and the people of color who are clearing." High-five, racial pride! Nate stands up and George does not, and Claire thanks her brother and announces to those people of color and women across the table, "He really gets it." Drugs. The mind-altering chemical rush that makes all of your social interactions feel like the first time your saw your reincarnated dog bride.
Ruth cuts a ham in the kitchen and just effing blows it. Standing to Vanessa, she launches right in: "Oh, I met your friend the other day. Sophie?" Vanessa asks who she's talking about, and Ruth further describes her as "a very outgoing kind of a person." Vanessa asks where she might have met her, and Ruth says she came to the house, adding that she thought Rico said that Sophie was a friend of Vanessa's. Confusion and paranoia reign. See? This is why the men should have done the clearing instead. Because if they were in the kitchen, they'd just be talking about guns and trucks and Jeff Foxworthy and penis-vagina porn.
Gifts! Gifts! Gifts! Keith gives David a fancy watch. Claire takes back her gift because it's not "meaningful enough" and because she has to give it to him at a more pivotal emotional moment. George has also bought something for David, and David opens the box to find a white gravy-boat looking thing he thinks is...well, a gravy boat. George explains that it's a "neti pot," which is used to clean the sinuses. You put warm water and salt in it, and George explains that he's done it every day for thirty years. "Every day?" Ruth asks. "I've never seen you do that." He tells her that he does it in the kitchen when he gets back from his morning walk. Ruth objects to the fact that he does it in her kitchen, asking with an edge, "Where do you keep your nostril pot?" He tells her that he keeps it on a high shelf so that it can be out of the way, and Ruth blows up, "You just want it to be one of your nasty little secrets!" But just at this moment, the Matthew Barney of LAC Arts busts through the door wearing his boxers and holding a video camera, asking Claire, "Could you help me find something tart?" Yeah, I'm gonna let that one sit right where it is, thanks.
Ruth and Keith wash dishes together, Ruth asking after David's well-being. Keith tells her that there's a lot more insanity in the world than people realize, noting that he's surprised that the world hasn't spun off into total chaos. He should be in the rec room drugging with the children. Downstairs, David stares at the body of the Former Robert Carl Meinhardt, whose consonant blends were so unique.
Claire comes back to the coach house to find the Matthew Barney of LAC Arts doing push-ups. Mena Suvari seems somewhat bored by it all, telling Claire, "I just want to roll in the grass." Claire tells her, "We have some amazing grass outside," and they take off for parts lesbian-er.
Keith is doing that could-be-written-better phone call thing where he's getting one side of a phone call and is all, "Tonight? Isn't there any way I could catch up with you in Portland? Replace me for the whole tour?" What is that you saaaaaaaaaaay? He terminates the phone call and tells David, "I told them I didn't think I could make it in tonight." David tells him that he doesn't want Keith to lose his job, but Keith is all super-boyfriend when he tells David that David's more important than a job. David responds that he doesn't want Keith losing his job over this. They hug chastely because it's only pretty when you're making a baby.
George lies in bed reading his boring tax book, turning off the light while Ruth stands at the mirror brushing her hair. I know. Totally almost as fun to watch.
Mena Suvari rolls around in the grass while Claire takes some pictures. Mena Suvari yells, "Come here! You have to feel this right now." They lie in the grass and talk about the meaning of nature and its ability to create grass. Mena Suvari climbs up on top of Claire and asks, "Did you ever play rolling pin when you were a kid?" Claire says no and Mena Suvari rolls over her tantalizingly.
The Former Robert Carl Meinhardt lies in his casket, his viewing in full swing. A small woman who looks like wacky neighbor Mrs. Poole comments, "Wow. Can't even see the wound." A woman to him asks where he was shot, and Mrs. Poole continues her plot development, "Point blank in the head. They had him tied up for hours. And then they just shot him in the head." Mrs. Poole asks David, standing close by, if they can tell from the autopsy if he suffered. David flashes back to a black-and-white shot of the gun pointed at his head, swallows hard and says he hasn't seen the autopsy, and excuses himself quickly with a dramatic loosening of the tie and calls 911 from the back office phone. He responds that he can't breathe and puts his head down on the desk, praying for homeopathic heart attack medicine.
Brenda pushes a shopping cart down an aisle at Restoration Pottery Pier and Barrel and Beyond, stopping to look at sheets. She compares two kinds, the looks at a third. She becomes quickly frustrated with the whole enterprise, looking up at an exceedingly high shelf as the walls begin quaking and the sheets come cascading down in a slow-motion metaphor for the domestic torture that awaits you if you stay with Joe that we've been warning you about for weeks.
Back in the office, David answers a paramedic's questions. No, he does not have history of heart problems. Yes, he is clammy, cold, and/or sweaty. Yes, he has been under unusual stress lately. He starts to breathe again and calls the medic off, and a shot later he's lying on the couch in one of the Fisher's fourteen living rooms. Claire finds him and enters in a concerned fashion, asking him if he's okay. He sits up and she sits down, and he cops to the fact that he had a panic attack. "I called 911 because I was dying." Claire adds, "I thought I was dying when I woke up this morning," and David asks her what she was on last night. She fails to tick off each and every entry on the periodic charts of elements required to make up alpha-methyltrypatmine, so she settles back onto the couch and changes the subject vaguely: "It's fucked-up to get carjacked." Taking this opportunity, David admits, "It was more than that." She tells him that she can see that, and he points to his wounds and adds, "It was more than this." Claire sits up on the couch and expresses something just like genuine concern, and David spills, "It went on for hours. At first I thought he wanted m...at first I thought he was a cute boy in distress." Before ample time to learn that he was neither. Claire comforts him in responding, "I've fallen for like fifty cute boys in distress." David piles on that it quickly turned into the nightmare, saying, "I tried to do everything right, but it just made him want to torture me more." Claire asks what that means, exactly, and David tells her, "He poured gasoline on me. And put a gun in my mouth. Long enough for me to think my life was over." His mind kept spinning but his mind couldn't grab onto anything. "Nothing was enough. I forgot to pray. Can you believe that? I totally forgot to pray." Claire responds, "It's okay. God saved you anyway, right?" And that's what killed the Reinhardt man. Thanks, show. Claire hands David a package, which he unwraps to find a photo of himself standing in front of the sacrificial fire from a few weeks back. It seemed strained at the time. But it does seem to work in the pictures.
"I'm not goin' back," Nate tells Claire, up in his bedroom. Claire tells him that David "cannot deal." Nate suggests that they hire someone, and Claire responds that having some stranger come in isn't going to solve the personnel crisis at Fisher & Diaz. Nate volleys, "Well, it would have been nice if Mom hadn't fucked our only intern." And...cursing-in-front-of-the-kid continuity hits an all-time low. Nate calls up to God, "I finally got a life I can stand," but Claire levels him with the one line, "He would do it for you."
And back downstairs we go, to find Nate resuited and ready to go, standing to a relieved-looking David.
Is this book written in Hebrew? Because George seems to be reading it in reverse. He sits at the kitchen table with his copy of Perfectly Legal, and Ruth asks, "Are you available for chopping?" He tells her, "If you so wish," and she's mad already, asking, "What does that mean?" He stands to tower over her, telling her that she'd appreciate it if she'd just ask him directly if he'd help her. She tells George he's been mean to her all day, and he tells her, "I have not been mean to you. I've been upset with you." Ruth asks what she did wrong, and George complains that Ruth embarrassed him in front of her whole family instead of just telling him what she's mad about. Ruth says that she did confront him, but that she felt like he had no interest in being confronted. They fight further about George pretending he didn't remember something that happened less than a year ago, and he raises his voice, "You forget things that happened yesterday." He pulls back a bit and tells her, "The past is not important to me. I just want to be here. In the present. With you." But Ruth isn't done, barking that the woman at the party went from being in the present to being in the past without even realizing it, and she wants to know, "Why would you leave so many --" and he screams the words, "Because they asked too many fucking questions! That's why!" Ruth storms out and George looks worried that his acting exercise of the final scene of Barton Fink didn't go as well as it should have. Just kidding. I actually thought that scene was great. But, y'know, "without pity" and all that.
"'A very outgoing girl named Sophie,' she said," Vanessa tells Rico in their kitchen, fully primed to not believe a damn word he says. "Oh, Sophia!" Rico shoots back. "She's a young mother from church that I'm helping." Vanessa repeats the words back to Rico in basically drawing a diagram that reads, "Shitty Lie, Figure 1-1" in the textbook of lies in the house of lies he's insisted on turning his own house into. She stands over him, quizzing him on why she wouldn't have known about this at all, and he tells her, "It was between me and the Father." She sits down and doesn't believe him, asking exactly what kind of "help" Rico is giving, and he tells her that he's giving them food, clothes, "toys and stuff, like from the Fishers." Ooooh, cheater check. Vanessa busts him that he's giving her stuff from the Fishers but that Ruth doesn't know about it, and Rico catches himself by saying that she didn't know that "Sophia was the young mother in need." Vanessa is confused that she didn't know anything about it, and he tells her that he started doing it "when [Vanessa wasn't] that easy to tell things to." She's concerned that he would start helping somebody else when his own family needed him the most, and he guilt-trips her season-long guilt trip with the almost-snark, "Sometimes it helps to make your own problems seem less bad when you help someone even worse off than you." She stands up and storms out, because that's what hysterical women do.
Nate sits alone in the office, fully ensconced once more in the bureaucracy of death. Good thing he started working there again, or he wouldn't have been available to see Brenda walk through the front door and into the office. He asks if she's okay and she says she doesn't know, launching in, "Maybe it's just who I am. I don't think that I can change." Nate stands up and goes to her as she continues on, "I don't think I can become this totally different person, living this simple, happy life." Nate's almost on top of her when he says, "Neither can I." They hug and then they kiss and then they kiss for longer, and their chemistry is amazing and it will doubtlessly be good for the action of the show, even though both are their characters are just kind of suddenly deplorable, a little. Because Joe, for all of his character's vanilla-flavored powder, doesn't want Brenda to be anything less than her crazy self. He doesn't want her to bake cookies or wear a hairnet or join the PTA or to cut her hair like a soccer mom. Well, any MORE like a soccer mom, at any rate. He wants her to go to school and study what she wants and become a Doctor Lite and maybe, once, buy them sheets. Her decision to step out on a brand-new house and a maybe-baby doesn't make her unconstrained from the mores of a society that binds her. It makes her a tramp.