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God, I hate my entire family and wish they were never born. Don't you? Or better yet: wouldn't it be better if nobody existed whatsoever? Just perfect fucking Ugly Betty, casting aspersions and pointing fingers at reruns on SOAPnet, with nothing but our robot masters to tell us what to do and what to find funny? Because dude, El Inequívoco, you have managed to the joy out of basic things. BASIC things, like this show, which we used to love and which have been sucking for a while now, without apology.
The gay jokes just seem like gay hate, the Betty jokes seem like Betty hate, the Wili jokes seem like lady hate, and every line out of Daniel's mouth pretty much sounds like person hate. Thought they knew where that line was, but... this shit is halfway through the season. Literally.. And you don't care. There is a fine line between snarky humor and outright tone-deaf bitchy squealing like some unfulfilled old queen at the bar in the gay club who can't understand that his horrible personality is the reason that nobody will ever love him. Which, somehow, is what this show has become.
Remember when Ignacio had his heart attack or his heartburn or whatever? Because there's a little-known scientific fact that this almost makes you completely stupid. So whatever happens throughout the episode, it's amped up considerably by the fact that suddenly Ignacio can't find his way from Manhattan to Queens. Which is only shocking if you hate Ignacio and assume that his old stupid ass can't find the subway, which I do, but the show does not, so it's this horrible tragedy.
Hilda's all, "Why weren't you there fifteen weeks ago when Papi didn't die!?" and Betty's all, "I wish I was! Neglecting my career is all I'm about now!" Pretty much the most worthless, backward, ugly, nasty storyline this show has ever put on us. Now, for a season and a half! Which begs the question, why the FUCK are we still watching this show? I'm getting paid. What's your excuse?
I don't care about one fucking thing that happens in this show. I used to care, I used to love this show and I haven't cared for approximately a billion years, and even still this episode managed to make me care half of that zero fucking amount. My friend Sarah the playwright came by toward the end, and she was like, "OMG what is this show? It seems like the most boring thing that ever happened on TV." Imagine my shame when I told her it was Ugly Betty, which used to be one of my favorite shows.
Daniel and Molly, and Wilhelmina and Connor, canoodle in various high-profile places and then freak out when people take pictures of them. That's their source of drama this week: they went to celeb vacation spots, and vacationed there with celebs, and then uh-oh. But who can blame them? Three of them are famous magazine editors and the other one is a kindergarten teacher, so obviously they can just gallivant all over the place weeks at a time. So Daniel and Betty have to book it to Jersey, where the secret life of that Suzuki dude from Entourage is exposed: he's a family man, and not a worthless bitchy gay stereotype at all! Betty and Daniel beg his pardon, and head back to Manhattan.
Not that Betty was ever there, because she was taking vague "care" of Ignacio the whole time, which seems to mean 99% "being fucking irritating" and 1% "doing anything a child could do." Ignacio spends the whole time coughing and cheating death like a dick, persisting in his fucking uselessness well past his expiration date, and on a similarly uninteresting front Wili sells out her assistant Marc to cover her ass for a lost meaning, and then buys him something to make up for it, and the show acts like this is not something that happens every single day and that suddenly Marc being an assistant is asking for it.
Hilda throws a made-up fake fucking fight... Seriously, get this. Claire Meade offers to loan Betty her billion dollar cardiologist, and Betty manages to be ungrateful about that, but then she tells Hilda, who manages to be a dick about it and act like Papi getting sick and her own fucked-up poor-ass pointless life actually exists because she's there to take care of Ignacio and not because as a mother and nearly 40-year-old human being she hasn't managed a life where she has her own apartment, but somehow this is Betty's fault.
And the show goes, "You know what? That is Betty's fault. Fuck her for having a life, or a career, or anything like a human existence. And while we're at it, fuck Wilhelmina for even wishing. Whatever, fuck this show. As much as I love Betty's scenes with Amanda, and Marc's stories, I'm annoyed to a point I can't even tell you about how misused and toxic the entire rest of the cast has ended up being written. And honestly? If it were just Betty stuck in the middle of a horrible, mean-spirited, unintelligent and unfunny cartoon world, that would be okay. Because that was S1, which rocked. But the fact that Betty has managed to get stupid at the same rate or faster than the rest of these idiots means there's no reason to watch at all.
Want more? The full recap starts right below!This will be my last weecap of this show, the very simple reason being that it is incredibly difficult to write about a show if you're refusing to watch it. Although writing about this show in particular without actually watching it would be sort of apropos, since this season -- at whose halfway point we now are -- has been like watching somebody blindfolded assembling episodes of Ugly Betty following the oral instructions of somebody else. Somebody who's actually seen the show, but is maybe not so gifted at verbal communication. Even though Fred Allen performed with a ventriloquist's dummy, which is usually a dealbreaker for me, he got a few things right. "Television is a medium because anything well done is rare." I see what you did there, Fred Allen. I read you loud and clear.
During an Elliott Smith interlude that seems to last two weeks, which is how long narratively it does, we learn that Ignacio's not even dead, just malingering on the couch and looking even more like a scary old woman than usual. The girls hector him and climb around on his ass bothering him and treating every sniffle like it's the harbinger of doom and not, you know, a thing that happens. Q: What is Ignacio currently refusing to die from? A: Myocardial infarction. Solution? Quadruple bypass. Because you can't just have a common surgery on this show, you have to have all four of them, to prove how deadly serious it is that Betty has an apartment and a job and a life of her own as a grown-ass woman. How much of a bitch is Betty for having dreams and making them come true? Quadruple amount of bitch, that's what.
Because one of the themes of this episode is that Ignacio is apparently a doddering old senile freak who can't manage to tie his shoelaces and thus must never be left to his own devices, Hilda and Betty chase each other around the apartment talking about how they keep seeing this bluebird out the window, which is code for not talking about finances or matters of importance in front of Ignacio. Also dumb. He repeatedly explains to them that they are not fooling him, just lying and patronizing like big old assholes, but they don't care. Whoever wrote this piece of crap actually thinks this is hilarious, and it happens about thirty times throughout the episode: "Did you hear that bluebird?" "Yeah, I think I saw it in the kitchen." It's not funny, it's just dumb. It comes from nowhere and goes nowhere.
Oh, and Betty keeps leaving obnoxious post-its everywhere instructing Hilda about basic shit. Hilda just can't handle the fact that Betty is trying to make sure all the bases are covered, but then it turns out that Hilda actually is pulling some Betty business of her own, wanting to do more stupid shit for her boutique, and Ignacio gets in the way of that, but since this show is evil that makes Hilda a jerk, too. It sounds more complex than it is. Basically: if you want anything, do anything, have any skills or abilities for which you think you should be compensated with a career and a place to live, you're an asshole. Particularly if you're a woman. If you're a woman, you might as well just climb in bed with your parents and never leave, because if you do anything else, you're disgusting. Oh, and if you're a woman with any kind of business savvy at all, you probably will completely lose your mind and start acting like you're on meth the first time you see a dick. And if you're a gay man, you're asking? To which I respond, A what?
Amanda throws herself on Betty when she finally gets home: "Betty! Oh my God, you look fantastic! How many times did I tell you to stop eating that fatty Mexican food? You are too young to have a heart attack!" Heh. She continues to attack Betty for making her worry, which would by funnier/make more sense if she hadn't been gone for two entire weeks, and then remembers to pretend to be concerned about Ignacio, and then informs Betty that while she was gone Amanda allowed the house to fall into such disrepair that they now have roaches, with whom Amanda has reached a détente. "At first I was scared, and then I tried naming them... That's Little Betty. She's just like you: a survivor." And then, I think, we are to assume that everyone at Mode took a two-week unpaid vacation, which is either verrrrrry convenient or it's just the case that they literally shut down the entire magazine while Betty was off doing the important lifesaving work of watching her Dad lie on a couch and talking about that fucking bluebird.
Molly and Daniel spent the holiday sunning on beaches and running into effing Speidi all over the place. Which would be funny? Except really it's just setup for the "payoff" of Connor finding out that Molly ... went to a beach. After they mutually broke up with each other. Scandalous! Daniel lets drop a joke intended to make us believe that he watches The Hills, but it's so generic and clueless that it's clearly written by someone who has never seen the show, so it's lame in a whole other way. Mabius you should thinkius about leaving this crappy showius. They talk about how Connor is going to freak out that they're together, and pretend that they actually care about that at all, but as lazily as they've done everything else since they met. "A picture of Connor. Look." "I know. Should we tell him that we are dating?" "I don't really care one way or the other." "I love you because of your pectoral muscles." "Oh. I love you because your hair is yellow."
Betty throws her arms around Daniel when she sees him, because he's a better family to her than anyone else on this show, and they talk about how he sent Ignacio twelve dozen flowers. He gives her the vacation photos that he was just discussing with Molly how they should never fall into the wrong hands, and then Wilhelmina comes in with different photos so that Betty can mix them up, obviously, from the Halston cover from last week. If you care enough to even remember that there have been episodes before this one you're currently watching, which -- if you do care enough to have seen the show before, and are cognizant enough to remember what it was like -- I daresay this is the week you just stop watching this bullshit altogether, and invite you to join me in deleting it from our DVRs and TiVos as a group. And then as a group pouring salt and ashes directly into our DVRs and TiVos, so that no offensive, brainless, hateful piece of crap like this will ever grow there again.
Wili has a goggle-tan from skiing on her break, so she looks like the Hamburglar in reverse. And then so does Connor. And Daniel's like, maybe he's going to put it together that they were off skiing together, and how shocking, because he was off with Connor's ex-fiancée at the same time in some other, unrelated location. Wili tries to fuck Connor in the bathroom and acts like a drug addict some more, and he makes fun of her for being so boy crazy, and she cracks a tasteless joke about how even the "special" boy in the mailroom has them figured for a couple of Hamburglars in love. Then she applies mystery cream to Connor's sunburn ("You're not allergic to panda, are you?") and then Marc catches them coming out of the bathroom, and pulls her skirt out of her panties for her, because Wili can no longer even dress herself.
Hilda has been invited to create the hairdos for an entire quinceañera, fifteen girls, and because she is excited and moving forward with her career, Betty must stomp all over her shit and tell her she's being irresponsible for succeeding at her job, because how can you be working and earning money in a fulfilling fashion when you could be watching your stupid old father sit on the couch and turn slowly into a lady. Like, where are your priorities. Hilda takes the opportunity to point out that working for money is what people do, so they can then exchange that money for goods and services, but Betty's having none. She tells Hilda that simply saying the word quinceañera is like murdering their father with words, and calls her sister a failure who should have been drowned at birth, and hangs up so she can be a bitch to Claire.
Betty mixes up the photos, obviously, while she's on this call, and then Claire says you only call your doctor by his first name if you're a drug-seeker like she used to be, and Betty should not be taking Ignacio to "Dr. Steve," but instead to this specialist who is a family friend. Betty hems and haws about this for a sec, and then accepts with much more grace than you might have expected. Betty heads home to Queens, and learns that Hilda's version of taking Ignacio to the doctor means calling Dr. Steve on the phone and having him say everything's fine. Because after a quadruple bypass, it's possible to be this stupid.
That fucking bluebird is sighted, and Betty drags Hilda into the kitchen to thank her for being so effing stupid all of a sudden in order to move this disgusting plotline along. Then she bitches at her for taking the quinceañera job, as though this is even minorly close to being any of her fucking business, and then bitches at Hilda even more for not de-linting Papi's sweaters. But lest you think she's being an insane asshole, which she is, she is also vindicated by Hilda being an even bigger asshole, like, has forgotten to give him his pills. Then Papi limps into the kitchen to get some tea -- so apparently he can handle boiling water, okay, but not taking a pill on his own -- and that fucking bluebird goes around to some other stupid area of their stupid house, and they have even more of this same exact fight.
Hilda gets mad at Betty for getting Papi an appointment with the cardiologist. Gets mad at her, because -- somehow -- it means that she can't do the quinceañera job. Nobody thinks to explain how or why this is true, because it's that stupid. ["And wouldn't the quinceañera be on the weekend? When Betty would be home? And the doctor wouldn't be working?" -- Angel] Then Hilda tells her to fuck off because she's always working so how dare she tell Hilda how to take care of their dad, and Betty says she has to be "Betty Bossypants" because if she doesn't, Hilda's stupidity and laziness will cause the entire borough to burn down around their ears, starting with Papi. Who is a GROWN MAN who is STANDING RIGHT THERE and can obviously do BASIC SHIT like take a cab to a PLACE.
Then it weirdly and even more stupidly turns into some kind of double-dog dare where Hilda says Betty can't possibly juggle work and family responsibilities, and Betty's all about to make her eat her words and whatnot. And the way this show used to be, which is good, there would be a bump or two in the road and Betty would work it out through her ingenuity and sunny disposition, and you'd want to hug her, and it would be great. But because this show is now sucky, instead it's going to be about humiliating her and knocking her down a few pegs for thinking she deserves anything whatsoever. And worst of all, Ignacio Suarez will live on, refusing to die and getting more obnoxious and judgmental with each passing day.
There's a signed photo of Dick Cheney on the wall at the cardio's office that says, "Thanks for being discreet." Very droll. The doctor is played by that hottie from that show about the gay aliens where the guns are like gross seafood bracelets you can never take off. Do you remember that show? It was one of those weird syndicated Saturday-afternoon Cleopatra 2525 kind of shows. I've always had a soft spot for those. There's one right now that I've caught a few times that seems to be about a bunch of dirty nuns running around in the forest talking all British, and then somebody will dress up in leather and tie somebody else up. Then -- I have already seen this happen eleven times in the ten cumulative minutes of this show I've seen -- one of the dirty nuns will look somebody in the eye and do some voodoo shit on them, and then they're all, "Mistress, order me around. I am now your slave." I'm serious, that's what the show is about. Unabashed catnip for that certain kind of nerd that isn't actually that much into sex, but knows that he's supposed to be, so it has to get all weird and twice-as-kinky in his head and now he's going to require two girlfriends and to get tied up, and maybe you should yell at him in Klingon while you're fucking. Before the internet, those guys would have died virgins but now it's as easy as directing your telnet to alt.low.self.esteem and finding some girl who's like, "Yeah, I'm desperate enough for a boyfriend that I'm willing to pretend other girls' tits are a turn-on, and the constant tickling and weird infantile cuddle-behavior is not totally fucking creepy. Thanks, internet."
Anyway, maybe Papi's cough is because of something bad, so it's good that she brought him into the office rather than just calling him up on the phone. Or texting, that's probably the thing Hilda's going to do to show how much more of a fool she is than you already thought. "Inflammation of the pericardium LOL." Wili and Connor come into her office talking about how awesome they are, and she calls Marc a "big gay flagpole" for just standing there when he could be scampering off to get champagne for her, and he leaves, and they say numbers at each other, and get horny, and then they fuck. Because talking about negotiation is sexy. Marc, snagging the champagne, runs into some Germans that Wili's meeting with, who have shown up early. They are humorless and scary and Aryan, and have no time for Marc's mess. He takes them back to Wili's office, sees her boning Connor in there, and tells the Germans that it's an American tradition to circle the building several times. Dumb.
Meanwhile, Betty's talking to Hilda about how maybe something else is going on with Papi but it's probably fine, and Hilda's like, "Don't tell me you're leaving Papi there alone, because I am up to my ears in teenagers right now! I cannot just run off." Creating even more stupid conflict and fakery, because now Betty is going to be all, "I have to stay with my Dad or else something terrible will happen, so I have to make some phone calls!" Amanda calls her and she hangs up on Hilda. "Some guy from a photo lab called and said you messengered your phone bill to him. If he pays it, can I send him our other bills?" Because Amanda still rules, no matter how harsh the rest of the show is sucking. So I guess that she had more than just the two sets of photos, but other things that also needed to be mailed, so everything's going to the wrong place, but most of all the Halston dress photos were supposed to be leaked to Suzuki St. Pierre of Fashion Buzz, but instead they were Daniel's super-secret vacation photos that nobody must see. Amanda gets the impression that Betty is having another heart attack, and she repeats that she never had the first one, it was her Dad, and Amanda is simultaneously caring and oblivious: "I know, Betty, but these things get passed down. They're generic."
Marc tells post-coital Wili that the Germans are gone, and she says he should have stalled them. He says that yes, he tried, but the point is that -- "mince when you walk, not when you talk," this fucking show says -- "the most talented woman in fashion is missing meetings because her head is... elsewhere." Because how on earth could anyone respect a woman with her sexuality intact? Whatever, this is stupid. She doesn't really care about any of this, because that's part of her completely losing the plot because of boys.
Betty checks in with Daniel, and notes that she needs to get his vacation photos back from Suzuki. Daniel immediately gets panicky, and she realizes that they are special photos. She assumes they're filth, because he's asked her to print out filth before, but of course it's much worse! He's dating a girl! He quickly confesses this to Betty, and she keeps calling Molly "Connor's Molly," and he swears that they are totes in love, whatever bleh, and he freaks out because Molly wanted to keep it a secret, and even though Betty is standing in a hospital far away from them, she promises to get them back, so Daniel doesn't have to interrupt his busy schedule of standing around looking hot and not doing anything for himself. Betty tries to get in to tell Papi she's leaving his ass there, but she can't go in because they're doing tests on him, and the nurse tells her it's going to be at least four hours, so just go do your thing. The nurse promises to tell him where she's at, and she goes to visit Suzuki.
Whom I've always found annoying because he's a grotesque unreal stereotype that teaches us to assume the worst about gay men, which is that they're unintelligent and shallow and consumed with fascination for women's clothing and eternal youth, which is why they don't deserve the rights that adults in the country deserve, such as marriage, because it's laughable to presume that two gay men getting married would be any less disastrous than Juliette Lewis and Giovanni Ribisi getting married, in real life or in the film The Other Sister, because they're not really adult men like regular adult men, they're weird bitchy aliens, the best shopping buddies, the ones who always say what we're thinking but can't say out loud, because our opinions actually matter and would have consequences: Every king needs a jester, and every girl needs a Suzuki St. Pierre. And it's nothing I've not said before, but if you told me there was something even more annoying that could happen with Suzuki St. Pierre, I would have called you a liar and boxed your ears. And that would be uncool of me, because you would have been right.
So Suzuki tells Betty, rightly, to eff off because he's not interested in playing nice, because pictures of Daniel Meade having an affair with his CFO's fiancée are, at the least, sort of interesting. Sort of. Betty's all, but they broke up so it's not even scandalous! But Suzuki saw that quibble coming, and says that it could be even more scandalous because what if he stole her away for a sexy Caribbean getaway, and she asks him to kill the story as a personal favor. Of course, he asks her if he's supposed to know who the heck she is, and they do the whole song and dance about how they've met like a hundred times. Which would be funnier if they hadn't all happened in this season and we weren't getting callbacks to shit from five seconds ago.
What does it tell you that the best part of the episode is a wordless montage of Amanda playing in the Mode Closet? She dances past Wili and Connor fucking, and yuckily Marc is somehow in there too, while they are fucking, and then he grabs Marc and whisks her away. Um, it's Amanda. She's not going to notice. And if she notices she won't care. And if she cares, it will be random and creepy and not about what you think it's about. Anyway, he acts weird enough that she puts it together, and then he threatens her with badness, and she doesn't care, but the reason that he cares is because God "tests the pretty people so much more than the regular lumpy people," meaning that things are finally going his way: YETI, Wili's finally a EIC, etc. But now he can't ride her coattails because her coat is on the floor in a pile because she has lost her way: "It's just I've never had to deal with a boss who cared more about sex than work. Actually, maybe this is what working for Daniel is like."
Betty discusses all this crap with Marc for awhile, counseling him to "see those moments as career opportunities" and "step it up" and show everybody what you can do, and it's like: it is ugly. And it dresses like Minnie Mouse in a k-hole like Betty. And it talks, what it's saying right this second, is kind of like somebody's idea of what Betty would say, I guess. But it's still stupid and meaningless and glib. Just glib, just gestures toward something real that used to exist. This show is like a zombie, you know what I mean? And the people are so talented, and I'm going to miss these characters and actors so much, and so much of the qualities of its individual parts are still wonderful, but at the end of the day no matter how much makeup you slap on a zombie, it's still gonna have dead guy breath.
Anyway, they go track down some sad gay guy named Fabian to get dirt on Suzuki, but he won't dish about it because Suzuki is super famous. Amanda understands the need for discretion, because she dated someone famous and never told anybody: Jeremy Piven. "He goosed you on the subway once, Amanda. You talk about it constantly." Amanda threatens Fabian with starting a rumor about him having ambiguous genitalia, "like a Ken doll," which she characterizes as "the kind of stank that don't wash off." He gives them a random address in Jersey and they run off to put a few more nails in the coffin of this show.
Betty lies to Hilda about how she didn't just leave her adult father, who is in possession of his faculties and is a reasonably intelligent man, in a state-of-the-art medical facility where tests vital to his continued health were being performed under presumably professional supervision. People will do anything to avoid admitting they're in Jersey. Daniel pushes forward lamely on the whole work vs. family conflict this show has settled on, all, "Guess my photos aren't all that important in the big picture," and she's like, "Um, they are, give me a break." Then they read the mail at the address they got from Fabian, and learn this address belongs to a Byron Wu. They think about how maybe that's his boyfriend, but it's not.
Suzuki St. Pierre is actually a totally made up homosexual "character" being played by Byron Wu for reasons that make very little sense, and basically come down to spackle over the central idea that it's inherently hilarious that a man lucky enough to have a wife and children and the normal healthy sexual predilections God gave him would choose for any reason to live publically as something as disgusting and shameful as a Sodomite. What a wacky mixed-up fuckin' world!
So then there's an unbearably long, offensive sequence in which we're asked to believe that there's a huge quantifiable difference between "Byron's" naturally high, effeminate voice and Suzuki's unnaturally high, offensively effeminate voice, while he does and says things you might think your average heterosexual would hypothetical do and say while standing around in the yard. They throw footballs around, I heard, and say things like "That's my boy," so he manages to do that in the middle of the conversation. It's so clueless and fucked up and stupid that everything he says starts seeming like some kind of mistaken heterosexual signifier: he says he got his journalism degree from "Columbia J-School," mentions Woodward and Bernstein, and he might as well be talking about testicles or trucks or tits.
So he wanted to be a regular J-person, but the only jobs available were "Britney this, Angelina that," which he hates sooo much but in order to be a J-person he has to ... This is so fucking stupid I don't even want to talk about it. He's an unattractive, squat man, and legitimate journalism is out the door, so the only thing that makes up for his lack of charisma is acting like a disgusting nasty stereotype of somebody else. "As a fabulous, bitchy queen, the fashion world welcomed me with open, well-toned arms!" he says, in his creepy Suzuki voice, and then grills some bratwurst and scratches his genitals and watches ESPN and has trouble relating to his wife on an emotional level, because she is from Venus.
Wili's prepping/pep-talking Connor for their meeting with the weird Germans, and tells him to flirt with her -- because Connor has literally no personality beyond being hot, have you noticed that? -- and he's like, "I can't just flirt with people," and yes he can we've seen it, and Wili's like, "Do you mean I'm special?" And yes, he does, so they fuck, which means when the weird Germans get there she's not available, so Marc panics and yells French at them and they become friends. Maybe the Germans are French. Maybe these are different people altogether -- no, Collette is a French name, so they're a Franco-German company. Which is scary, if that's even true, but I can't tell and maybe made it up during one of the fifty times this exact same fucking scene happens in this episode. If you honestly think it matters, congratulations: you officially care more than this show does.
Betty swings by the hospital to see if her father has survived the battery of routine noninvasive tests that are performed every day in this cardiologist's office, and her dad is gone. Just wandered the fuck out into the street. Which is, for me, ideal because he's horrible, but Betty has to throw a big fucking weird-out, and then immediately call Hilda so she can bitch and moan about it and they can both look like total idiots.
In a half-assed attempt at a sudden B plot, two-thirds of the way through the episode, Marc is charming the Teuto-Gallic Trio and being awesome and charming the shit out of all three of them, and Wili runs in and makes an ass of herself, throwing Marc under the bus in such a lame, hamfisted way that it's completely unbelievable: "I had no idea you were here, which is particularly tragic since I specifically told my assistant to call me as soon as you all arrived. This is... beginning to be a problem. So if it happens again, it'll be back to spritzing perfume at the makeup counter. That will be all, Marc," she says. "Nice to look at, but you could sit a Picasso behind his desk to do the same job," she says.
Which I guess if you're basing your ideas about business or the luxury industry based on a sloppy viewing of The Devil Wears Prada and a handful of Sex & The City episodes, that kind of behavior might seem realistic, but if you've ever been around people or enjoyed the company of a person then it just comes off as classless and tasteless and pointless as the majority of the episode. Try treating your assistant like this in front of a possible client and see how fucking far it gets you.
Hilda beats it into Manhattan so that she can throw her huge fucking fit for no reason. It goes like this:
Hilda: "You lost Dad!"
Betty: "I know, sorry!"
Hilda: "You lost Dad!"
Betty: "I know, let's go find him."
Hilda: "Or we can stand on this street corner and bitch and fight and cry for no reason, for the rest of our lives."
Betty: "Hey, there's the doctor! Randomly! Does he know where Dad is?"
Doctor: "Two hours ago I did, but he's on the move I bet. He seemed like he went senile off-screen in this episode and thus that would make sense as a source of narrative tension we're keeping secret from the audience in order to show disrespect both to our viewers and to the basic concepts of storytelling. But I wouldn't worry about it, two strange girls I don't know and am not getting paid to deal with, because he just had a QUADRUPLE BYPASS and thus isn't moving SUPER FAST."
Hilda: "It won't matter how slow he's moving, because I am going to stand right here yelling about how much I care about him, instead of actually looking for him, until the sun goes down."
Doctor: "Oh, I forgot to tell you the results of those tests that we completed hours ago. Your dad is fine."
Hilda: "THAT MAKES ME EVEN MORE MAD."
Betty: "Really? That's sort of stupid."
Hilda: "No, Betty. Not this time. You're not getting away with it. It's your fault our mother is dead, it's your fault our father had a heart attack, it's your fault people get sick and die, it's your fault we took him to the doctor and got this wonderful news, and it's your fault that our father is such a fucking douchebag that he wandered out into the city for NO REASON AT ALL."
Justin: "Oh, Grandpa just came home. I thought I would call you on your portable cellular phone and let you know that, although Grandpa thought otherwise for some reason."
Betty: "I'm so sorry that I'm such a terrible person that I let you be in charge of yourself for five seconds."
Hilda: "I hate how controlling you are, but at the same time I also hate how you won't wipe my ass for me."
Betty: "It's like I'm inventing new ways to be worthless."
Ignacio: "Now that I am suddenly infirm and have lost my formerly agile mind, I'm going to get a nurse."
Betty or Hilda, who cares anymore: "But we can't afford that! I sell candles/am supporting a schizophrenic receptionist!"
Ignacio: "I went to the Medicaid office and found out that they'll help pay for a part-time nurse. The More You Know."
Betty: "Okay, let's stop fighting."
Hilda: "Okay, I forgive you. For having a job and a life and career of your own, something your sister and father simply refuse to do. Which is also your fault."
Betty: "It feels good to be forgiven for working hard to get the basic shit all people deserve."
Wili brings Marc a watch or something from the Franco-Teutonic client, and he calls her out for being gross with him earlier. She explains to him that it's normal human behavior, and instead of explaining that it actually is not, tries to explain the concept of being humiliated. She makes the somewhat valid point that they aren't there to be pitched by an assistant, they're there to get a pitch from Wilhelmina Slater. Which, Marc points out, wouldn't have even happened if she'd keep those knees together and stop ignoring her job and responsibilities for her new calling of acting like a whore. Because this show agrees that Wili having sex is evil and leads to madness, she offers to fire Marc and that straightens him up right quick.
Meanwhile, in an even less interesting scene, Molly sees herself on Page Six. This is terrifying because if Connor sees it, he will know that Molly owns a bikini, or that beaches exist, and then he will break up with her even more breaky-uppier than he already did and will move on to his new relationship even more move-onnier than he already has. Daniel's like, "Oh my God, what a serious problem this supposedly is, although you wouldn't know it from my nap-like demeanor" and Molly's like, "If I could possibly summon the energy to care about any of this, I would be having some serious anxiety right now." Then Connor sees the picture and investigates it more closely, because she's wearing a one-piece and holding somebody's hand in that picture, and how dare she when he's fucking Wili all over the building.
Wili takes off for lunch with Tom Ford and tosses Marc the opportunity to lead an ad meeting, because one paragraph ago he educated her in the ways of the human heart. I love Tom Ford, but I don't want him around my food.
"Cable we can totally just steal from upstairs. Oh, and we both have cell phones, so we don't need a landline, plus I gave that number out to too many weirdos anyway... There's electric and gas and maintenance and Bergdorf's. God, it is so hard to know which one to sacrifice, you know?" Betty says some portentous thing about how she has to tell Amanda something, but Amanda already knows: she is moving out. And why? No reason whatsoever. "Because your family needs you right now... And you're good like that."
But this show's not. So toward the end of March, they're putting this show on hold for a couple months so they can do an hour-long comedy block before Meredith/Addison, because 30 Rock finally won enough awards that the clueless old white dudes who run the entire universe were like, "Comedies with strong female characters and critical acclaim? Sounds good on a Thursday night." And I don't know if you've ever seen Samantha Who?, but it's recommended.
Have you seen it? It's about a girl trying as hard as she can to be kind to those around her while figuring out what she wants her life to be like. She's innocent in some ways, naïve even, but she has insight into the human heart that gives her the upper hand. Her family is a piece of work, but she loves them, no matter how much she's got going on. She doesn't want to be materialistic, but she does love shiny things and bright colors. She gets in over her head all the time, and spends as much time cleaning up messes as she does making them. Some of her friends are shallow and scary, but that's only because they're hiding depths you'll be excited to learn about slowly, over time. She is a good person, a woman with faults, and areas of blindness, but an accompanying faith in herself and in others that is as inspiring to watch as her wry sense of humor, her belief in fighting for what's right, and her capacity for joy.