This episode starts rather strangely, with a shot of an assembly of Power Ranger-esque Japanime-style robots. What is this, Glark's room? ["Heh." -- Wing Chun] A synthesizer noodles tunelessly. Does it matter why? Then we segue into the living room, where Melissa is reading the newspaper (go Miami Herald!). She's reading a story about the Unabomber, and Cynthia is like, "GIRL, I KNOW him. Kaz-what? Yes. I. KNOW. HIM. Yes! I am TELLING YOU." You have to love Cynthia. One of Cynthia's girlfriends had him as a professor at Berkeley. Wasn't he a professor only until the 1970s? Oh, whatever.
The synthesizer bleats on as we segue to the street, where Joe the tiny Lothario (tm someone from the boards) and Mike are getting massages. They are met on the sidewalk by and shamelessly flirt with their cute blonde masseuse. Boners are popped all around. Geez, you'd think Mike hadn't just had a threesome the other day, and that Joe didn't already have a big, huge, ugly girlfriend. Mike is trying to understand what his "options" are for a massage. I think they offer a hand release. Just kidding. I read that somewhere.
We get an early-morning shot of garbage getting picked up. Joe and Mike are nowhere in sight. Now we're back in the living room with Melissa and Cynthia, who talk about the theory of six degrees of separation. That's fun to play. Anyway....
The synthesizer has not yet stopped. Now we're at the beach with Flora and Sarah, who are wearing bikinis. If I were a horny guy, I might make some kind of "yowsa!" noise, but since I'm not, I won't. There's, like, a minute of totally gratuitous beach bikini babe footage. I'll bet some people are into it.
Bleep bleep bleep. Living room. Cynthia is offering to call the authorities on Kaczynski. Melissa laughs that they already have him in custody. Cynthia is like, "Oh, they have him? Oh, all right. I need to work with the damn FBI -- I know nobody but criminals, girl." I love Cynthia.
Finally, we bleep bleep bleep on over to Dan. He's rollerblading shirtless. We get some voice-over to the effect that he feels he's the odd man out and "not clicking with people, and it's as much their fault as it is [his]." Then, he's out in the back of the house, bitching to Landon that he just wants to say what he wants to say, and why is that so hard to understand? Because most people are stupid, that's why. But Dan does talk a lot. Now we cut back over to Flora and Sarah at the beach, for some reason. Back and forth until Sarah totally breaks the fourth wall and says to the camera, "Hey, and you know what? Dan's a jerk, man." Finally, a fight.
Back to the dock. Dan says he's trying to start a business "with a group of children who sit there and bicker about how much I talk." We get a montage of Dan running his mouth and all the other roomies rolling their eyes. Finally we land at a Sarah and Dan conversation, during which Dan lectures Sarah on responsibility and Sarah says she doesn't care, "because Mike blew off work for two days." There's a shot of Mike getting massaged. Gross. Dan starts running his mouth about the business, and wham, we land back at the bikini scene, where Sarah and Flora unilaterally bust on Dan. Sarah bets that "Dan will not spend the four weeks on the business," and Flora wonders where Dan "even gets off bullshitting like that." Where, indeed, you hussy?
At the outside pool table, Sarah and Dan fight. The synthesizer goes off. Melissa raises her eyebrows, and finally Joe comes over and pats both Dan and Sarah, saying he "wants love." Dude, we know. Sarah and Dan are like, "There's plenty of love." Except that there isn't. Then we see Joe with his hands on his head, and then sipping tea, and then we hear him make the rather obvious point that he "lost sight of what was important" to him, and then? We get a horrifying montage of various Joe-and-Ick embraces. She is totally a monster. Damn. In the confessional, Joe says that he really loves Nic and wants to be with her. Get thee to an exorcist, Joe.
Dan's sunning himself on the dock. Then, we're back at the bikini beach scene, and Sarah is showing Flora her new tattoo: a baby alligator busting out of its egg. There's writing underneath it, but I don't think it's in English. Flora whines, "I thought you were getting the dinosaur." Oh, what do you know about cool tattoos, Flora? This episode has the worst structure ever.
Mike and Joe are packing and racing off to the airport. I hate these running-through-the-airport scenes. Oh, it's Joe's graduation. He says that Ick may be at the airport or may not. Hooray, or not. And it's not.
Okay, Sarah had given Dan some paperwork ("The Definition of Being Actively Involved") and asked whether he had shown it to the other roomies; he said yes, but he was lying. Now Sarah, Flora, and Melissa are all talking about what a huge liar Dan is, and asking why he would bother to lie. We get a few shots of Dan vamping for the camera, and there's your answer: Drama Queen. Now we're back at the extremely revelatory bikini beach interview, where Flora and Sarah call Dan a huge liar some more. In an interview, Dan goes "aaah!" and then, "Frus-tra-ting!" Then we see Sarah talking to Dan about getting space for their business in a hotel lobby, and then we're back to the shirtless rollerblading sequence, only this time Dan is taking notes as he peers into hotel lobbies. A bikini-clad Sarah complains, "He took my journal and wrote in it! And he ripped out pages! That is sacred ground he's treading on!" So Flora backed over Dan's glasses with her Jeep. Good thing Dan's glasses aren't sacred ground.
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Melissa gives us some voice-over about the six degrees of separation thing some more as we zoom out of Miami and into New York City. What were the editors smoking when they put this episode together? Pass the dutchie, you all. Now we see a horse...no, a guy with a whip...no, it's a horse again...no, wait! It's a horse and a guy kissing! No! It's Joe and Ick making out in a horse-drawn carriage! Nic gets the Hip, Squiggly Font (tm Djb), but don't we already know her? Toss her back to Monster Island, already. Ick asks who "the kissy, kissy person" might be. Might it be Joe? Might it?
Now Ick and Joe are sitting on a bench. Joe says that they "did a lot of communicating...a lot of communicating...and I absolutely know Nic is the person I could be with for the rest of my life." Nice use of a qualifier: "could." Now Ick busts out the baby talk, saying that she hadn't "heard what it was that [he] might have said." Joe plays along and says about a million times that he loves Ick. There's a shot of the carriage driver, earning his money with a bitter look on his face. Actually, it kind or resembles the look I'm wearing right now.
Okay, so Mike is throwing a party for Joe's birthday. First he said he would be taking everyone out, but now he's asking people to pony up $20 each, and Flora is refusing. Why? Because Mike said one thing first, and then changed his mind. Shut up, Flora. Mike passive-aggressively says that Flora "isn't a bitch, but she can be a real bitch." She says that she gets in fights because she says stuff to people's faces. Oh, is it not for being impossibly demanding, inflexible, pushy, and rude? My bad. Then Flora says that Mike has no balls because he couldn't even tell her he didn't want Mitchell in the house, and Mike says he said that because Dan said Melissa told him that Mitchell hit Flora. Are you following this? Without addressing the Mitchell-as-physical-abuser thing, Flora says that she's going to get Melissa and Dan in there to find out what's going on: "I'm going to spit in [Dan's] face, and you're going to watch me." I hate Flora.
Flora's on the phone with Melissa, who denies ever saying that Mitchell beat the shit out of Flora. Flora plots how she's going to call Dan out and say he gives "gay men a bad name." Melissa says that she wants to be there. Flora, you give Russians a bad name. Bitchovsky.
NYC. We get a shot of the exterior of Tiffany and Co., then Joe running with a little blue bag. Gee, I wonder where we're going with this. Ick watches Joe try on his graduation gown. There's a shot of the Statue of Liberty, then the house in Miami. I guess the editors just took another hit. Flora's in the kitchen, and Dan and Johnny (the Cuban Pat Smear!) come up the walk, completely unaware they're about to have a can of Russian whoop-ass opened on them. Flora says that she has to have a very important conversation with Dan, and that when she's done in the kitchen, she will "address him." Dan is like, "Oh, will you." Meowski.
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Graduation. Ick is sitting in the audience, wearing a red suit with a short skirt. It looks like she's trying to walk up to Joe as he accepts his diploma, but he coaches her to stay seated. "Hail to the Chief" plays, but I'll bet you a dollar it's the editors adding it in and not the Fordham graduation committee's idea. After Joe accepts his diploma, he runs offstage and hands Ick a little blue box. Please let the box explode. Nope. She opens it and "oh my god"s. Joe takes out the velvet box inside and sinks to one knee, which means his head is at her knee. He stammers his way through a pedestrian speech ("you mean everything to me, it would be the happiest day in my life," blah blah blah proposalinapublicplacecakes), and Ick says in her scariest, most emotionless voice, "Yes." Yeeps. Congratulations?
We rush over the water back to the Miami house. Dan is denying that he ever said that Melissa said Mitchell hit Flora: "It was alluded to. I pick up on things because I was worried." Flora says she thinks Dan "is only worried about his ass." A plane flying overhead ruins her mean speech, but she manages to get in that she thinks Dan is "a poor excuse to represent the gay community." That's totally untrue. Dan is very cute and mature in the way he handles his relationships with people outside the house, anyway, besides which the Russian Community called; they think Flora is a giant bitch. She leaves, and Dan watches her go.
Mike picks up Joe at the airport, and they go the party to which Flora refused to contribute. Joe announces his engagement, and the roomies cheer, mostly. Cynthia smiles, tight-lipped. She has "nothing to say" about Joe's engagement, then goes on to say that she thinks Joe can do better and that she "doesn't believe in" celebrating it. Over on Monster Island, I'm sure they're throwing a hell of a bash.
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