The Self-Importance of Being Carlos

Look, I don't like this any more than you do. An entire episode devoted to King Doofus, Carlos Nieto? I would rather empty a can of True Value Hardware paint into my anus. I would rather watch rabid cheetahs destroy my Sopranos DVD set. I'd rather set fire to one of my toes. Nevertheless, we're stuck with this one, because Bobby just died, and the Third Watch writers have our sympathy and our curiosity. So, I tell you what. I've got a nice bottle of Don Julio tequila here. Why don't you grab something similar, pull up a shot glass, and we'll get through this together?

Ready? (Gulp.) So am I.

Previously on Good God, How Am I Gonna Get Through This One?: Bobby died, and Kim wailed about it on the street to her mother. Firefighter Lombardo punched Jimmy in the face for having sex with his girlfriend Linda during the Jimmy/Brooke engagement party. Oops. Carlos whined to Doc about when one of the guys got shot and everybody came together like a family. Carlos didn't feel like he's part of that family, but that has more to do with the fact that he's an ass. To quote Livia Soprano, "Oh, poor you." At a bowling alley, Carlos got dissed by a teenager he's hitting on. Later on, Kim told Carlos she admired him, and he got all big-headed about it. (Actually, now that I think of it, either Carlos's ears are growing at an alarmingly Will Smith-esque rate, or his head is shrinking. I'll go with the ear-growth theory. That way I can call Carlos the "Not-So-Fresh Prince of No-Where.")

The episode begins proper (or as proper as an episode featuring Carlos can begin) with an artsy crane stop-and-go shot of a bad accident scene. The camera zooms, then slows on Yokas, who is thinking about the drunk guy who probably caused the accident. We hear her thoughts as she tells us she can smell the liquor on the guy. "If I had two minutes alone with him..." she mutters in voice-over, but she totally doesn't mean it in a sexual way. We then go to Jimmy, who opens up a car hood and thinks, "We got here just in time. Another couple of seconds and..." Could Jimmy's thoughts be any more boring? Jeez. He's just eye candy, ladies. Nothin' but eye candy and empty calories. Sully's on the Camera 'o Character Development. He's upset that people are standing around and watching the accident like it's a movie. Then it's Doc, who spouts off the medical stats of some guy lying on the ground. His inner life has all the vitality of a chemistry textbook.

Our dear Carlos is . And instead of thinking about the scene at hand -- where he's helping someone on the ground -- he's instead looking at an attractive girl who bears a striking resemblance to Maya Rudolph, formerly of City of Angels. ["She's on Saturday Night Live now." -- Wing Chun] "That girl is hot," Carlos thinks. "Would you look at her ass?" Fine, if you insist. She's wearing leather pants and leaning over talking to someone. Carlos muses that if Jennifer Lopez and Janet Jackson had a love child, "it'd be that chick." Such a mystery is the mind of modern man. Carlos is suddenly upset, because he thinks Doc is showing off by saving a guy's life. Carlos starts trying to get Doc's attention by making medical small talk to impress the woman. Doc's not impressed. The great foreshadowing Bird of Lame swoops in to declare this scene, "Awwk! Stupid!"

Luckily, the scene's over. At the hospital, Carlos and Doc are standing at a nurse's station. Carlos is leaning in, all intense, focusing his gaze on the pretty nurse before him. He says she's "girl--door kinda hot." Then he says the woman would be the love child of Helen Hunt and Mary Tyler Moore ("when she was still hot") and that nice, sweet women are hot. Right now, a fire hydrant in a Wonderbra would be hot to Carlos. Carlos muses that he should throw this young lass some attention. He winks crudely. The nurse asks him whether there's something wrong, because he got all squinty-eyed and may have a headache. "No, I'm good," Carlos says, and then is impressed that she was concerned he might have a headache. Carlos is happy to rent a condo on Planet Deluded.

At the station, Carlos is studying at the dinner table while Doc and Jimmy talk about ideas for supper. Carlos complains -- in his now familiar and incredibly grating inner monologue -- that he's tired of hearing the constant non-conversation of his fellow employees. There is one tiny funny moment when Carlos wiggles his eyes and thinks, "Duy." "Duy" is funny no matter who says, it most of the time. Carlos speculates on whether his co-workers have a life, or whether they lock themselves in oxygen chambers at night. He gets interrupted in mid-stupidity by a question he didn't hear. He answers, "No," and when the others ask whether he was listening, he goes on a little tirade about how he's studying and doesn't have time for their stupid conversation. Turns out they were talking about their recently deceased buddy Bobby. Oops. A call suddenly comes in, distracting everyone from his huge faux pas. "Saved by the bell," Doc says, as they all walk off.

Pour shot. Gulp. Repeat.

Deep breath. Okay, that wasn't so bad, right? We made it all the way the opening credits. We're cool, right? Oh, man, who am I kidding? This is gonna suck. I've put my cat, Cosa, in protective custody, because to keep her in the house while this episode is on might constitute animal cruelty.

Back from commercials, and some fire trucks are rolling down the street, sirens blaring. Holy crap, this episode guest-stars Eric Bogosian! Maybe he'll turn this into a one-man episode, playing all the parts, including Carlos. One can only hope. Oh, damn. It's actually Carlos and Doc arriving at the scene, where a huge RV is teetering on the edge of a bridge. I thought this only happened in wacky sitcoms and bad road movies. Sully and Ty tell the others that an elderly couple was driving along when their RV slipped on some ice, and all of a sudden they're a physics mystery. Bravo, Third Watch. You've yet again managed to trick the forces of reality. Sully asks Jimmy whether there's any way they can stabilize the RV. "Well, I could have sex with someone," he responds, then corrects himself: "We can get some lines on it." Cocaine? No, just steel cables. Carlos bravely says he'll stay outside and coordinate, to save weight. Wuss. Doc overrules that, and tells Carlos to bring his Will Smith ears with him.

Carlos and Doc enter the RV through a convenient waist-level hatchway. An elderly couple is wedged inside, among a bunch of scattered mismarked butterfly ballots and copies of Tom Brokaw's The Greatest Generation. Clearly, this is a big mess. Carlos slips, and the whole RV tips a bit, causing the elderly woman to scream. Things calm down just a bit. Doc asks whether the man is okay, and he's honest enough to say he's "not real good." Doc carefully crosses over to them, seeing through a panel below that it's a long way down to the street. The RV groans as movement inside makes it teeter. Outside, Jimmy watches as a single steel cable just isn't helping too damned much. Inside, Doc sees that the old man is pinned. He needs his leg freed, but they can't pull him out. Carlos tries to lift the man, but he just screams in pain and completely fails to reconfigure his body structure to accommodate this. Oh, now the writers of the show obey the laws of physics. Carlos uses all of his training to deduce that something needs to be done, here. Doc calls Jimmy on his radio and explains the situation. Jimmy advises the two to get the hell out of Dodge. "She's too unstable," Jimmy says, but I don't know if he's talking about the RV or someone he just slept with. Doc goes back to the sweet old couple and tells them that he and Carlos are going to have to come back once the RV is stabilized. He tells the woman, "We need to get you out of here." In classic TV elderly person style, she says she's not leaving. "Are you nuts?"Carlos spits at her. Doc tries more diplomatically, but the woman tells the husband that she married him and she's not walking out on him now. The sweet tinkly "old person death wish" music plays. Carlos looks disgusted. Doc says that they'll be back. Yeah. Right. And physics is a real science. Just as Doc gets out, the RV tips some more, violating a few more laws -- but hey, who's counting at this point? Cables snap. The couple inside is shown holding each other tightly, their hair blowing in the lack of wind. More tipping. More snapped cables. Doc yells, "Come on! Come on!" like he's challenging the RV to a fight. RV tips. Sweet shot of the couple embracing. Then the damned thing flips over and lands on its top, crushing itself completely. Everybody looks stunned, even the physicists watching in outrage at home.

At the station, everybody's moping. Except Carlos, who says in a voice-over that it's no big deal, and that everyone should just lighten up. He thinks (in patented Carlos Self-Absorbo-sound) that his co-workers don't know how to deal with tragedy. Like the way he obsessively cleaned the blood out of the ambulance and zoned out last week as Bobby was dying. Carlos decides that it's his personal mission to cheer everybody up. God help us. He asks if anybody wants some pizza. "I'm buyin'," he adds, charitably. Doc asks whether it looks like anybody wants pizza. (Quick guess: "No.") Suddenly, the grizzled, wizened, chapped (and did I mention grizzled?) captain comes in and tells Carlos and Doc that they're done for the day.