Episode Report Card Jacob Clifton: F | Grade It Now! YOU GRADE IT TV Is A Medium
By Jacob Clifton | Season 3 | Episode 12 | Aired on 01.22.2009
In a hurry? Read the recaplet for a nutshell description! Finished? Click here to close.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 InequÃvoco, 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 previous 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?