Episode Report Card Jessica: B- | Grade It Now! YOU GRADE IT Trust, Lust And Must
By Jessica | Season 1 | Episode 6 | Aired on 11.01.2006
In a hurry? Read the recaplet for a nutshell description! Finished? Click here to close.Ignacio needs to pay a lawyer a whole bunch of money to avoid being deported, so Betty starts selling Herbalux at work. This goes about as well as you would imagine: with Hilda's help, she makes a total killing selling the product to the weight-obsessed Mode staffers, but Wil shuts the little side business down. Wil also gives Betty the money to pay the retainer, in exchange for a favor to be named later. Betty realizes that this is bound to end in her being forced to screw over Daniel, and gives the money back. Luckily, Hilda has made friends with Debi Mazer -- playing a sassy, bialy-loving Queens lawyer -- which I suspect will come in handy in the future. Speaking of Ignacio, he and Betty have it out, because she feels totally betrayed by the whole Lying About Being in the Country Legally thing. She eventually apologizes and tells him that he doesn't owe her an explanation, but he gives her one anyway, and it is a doozy: apparently, Hilda and Betty's mother was first married to a rich but abusive man in Mexico, and Ignacio was their chef. Ignacio eventually murdered the abusive first husband (I know!) and he and the girls' mother ran off to the United States. He never applied for amnesty or a green card because of how he's a MURDERER! It's SO soap-operatic, I love it. Meanwhile, at the office, Salma Hayek is incredibly hot and has a great rack. Naturally, Daniel wants to have sex with her A WHOLE LOT, and hits on her shamelessly. She, however, turns out to be a best-selling author and a high-powered new editor at Meade, who is shamelessly manipulating Daniel and also about a hundred and ninety-six percent smarter than she is. It's kind of genius. Daniel's basically having very bad luck with the ladies. When he continues to treat poor Amanda like crap, she eventually confesses that she hates being his booty call, and breaks it off with him. We're all very proud. As for Wil, she's got her hands full with Nico, who's decided that she wants to go to school in New York instead of Paris, and who also decides to do a whole lot of acting out to get her mother's attention. It doesn't work in the sense that Nico simply can't outsmart Wil, but it does work in the sense that Wil seems to be having some second thoughts about the way she's parenting her child. Does this mean we will see Nico again? I imagine so. On the Fey Sommer Mystery Tour, it's Fey's birthday, and guess what happens? She reappears, just in time for Bradford to catch a glimpse of her hanging around her tomb. Want more? The full recap starts right below!
So, remember how Ignacio told us last week that he's in the United States illegally? Yeah, it turns out that he could be deported, according to the lawyer the family visits. As you can imagine, Betty is not happy about this: "He has a family. He pays taxes. He's a Mets fan," she tells their Immigration Lawyer. Immigration Lawyer needs a name. I shall call him Mercutio. "He's in Oprah's Book Club!" Hilda says. Ignacio is TOTALLY in Oprah's Book Club. I can see him standing over the stove, stirring a pot of something delicious and reading some tragic book about a woman who dropped her baby down a well or something. Mercutio tells them that Ignacio has been "red flagged." In other words, the government is investigating whether or not they need to send him back to Mexico. Delighting all the posters who have been debating this very point, Mercutio then asks Ignacio why he never applied for a green card or became a citizen during the Amnesty period in the 1980s. Ignacio defensively snaps that he was "a little busy providing for [his] family." He's wants to talk about what they're going to do NOW, anyway. "How much is this gonna cost me?" he asks. Mercutio explains that this meeting was pro bono, because of how much his wife loves the Herbalux that Hilda's been feeding her, but in order for them to keep him on retainer...he hands them a sheet of paper with the costs on it. "Twenty GRAND?" Hilda asks, reading it. Ignacio holds up his green parking ticket. "Do you validate?" he asks. They'd better, for twenty grand.
It's morning in Manhattan. Daniel and Amanda hurry into the office together. She asks him to slow down. "After last night, I think I need a walker," she snickers. Daniel ignores this compliment and just complains that they're going to be late for Wilhelmina's meeting about the "Must Mode" issue. In my vast, vast, vast, vast, vast experience, if you compliment a man on his sack skills (a piece of terminology I learned from Cosmo, thank you very much) and he responds by talking about work instead of saying something like, "YOU KNOW IT," your relationship is in deep and terrible shit. Amanda shrugs that "Cruella de Vil can wait," and then hesitantly wonders if he ever figured out which of his many, many sexual partners had been holding his watch for ransom. Daniel, bored, says that Betty never told him who had it, and Amanda responds that she wants to talk to him about that whole thing, and she starts yammering and he starts totally ignoring her, because Salma Hayek just strolled past him, holding a cup of coffee and mesmerizing him with her boobs. Daniel cuts Amanda off and tells her they better take "separate elevators," so as to, you know, protect their privacy. He is so full of it. And Amanda knows it. "Right," she says. "Because my panties stuffed in your paper shredder didn't tip them off," she sneers, as Daniel gets into the lift with Salma. I really do like Daniel, but his behavior in this particular episode is kind of unpleasant. I mean, for one thing, it's generally a bad idea to sleep with the receptionist at your office, if only because if things go wrong you will never get your messages, but it's a particularly bad idea to sleep with and then dick around someone at your office. While I don't have a problem with Daniel wanting to have sex without strings, I do have a problem with him not listening to Amanda when she says she wants to talk to him and then ditching her for a hot girl, especially after last week, when she clearly just wanted to spend time with him.