Episode Report Card Jacob Clifton: A+ | Grade It Now! YOU GRADE IT I Am Highly Flammable Right Now
By Jacob Clifton | Season 5 | Episode 4 | Aired on 06.29.2009
...Now I can't stop thinking about the hamsters. That is some sick shit, and you know, it's totally true. Not like actual hamster rape is an epidemic, but it's so true that demonizing a natural thing like that makes you ten times creepier and weirder about it than if you just got raised right. Don't think about the elephant. And actually I was thinking about it from the other direction, the other day -- and maybe this applies to Shane, in a way -- about how we came up in the age of Madonna and "Justify My Love" and that SEX book and Blue Velvet and Udo Kier sitting on a bullet thinking of power and all that stuff, right. And of course this was all very self-actualized submission-is-power 1990s stuff, reacting to the nastiness of the 1980s and pushing the edges of sex, and being very proud of themselves.
But between that and Rocky Horror, all I can really remember of sex in high school, besides having it, I mean, like as a topic, was this immense pressure to be terribly interesting. It took me a long time to realize that no, everybody doesn't have fifty fetishes and a bunch of accoutrements stashed all over the place. I would wager that 99.9% of grown adults, much less high school students, who claim to have an "oral fixation" have neither an oral fixation nor the body of knowledge necessary to explain what that is. Dress a girl up as Lara Croft or a naughty dominatrix or whatever's clichéd, throw her in the middle of a bunch of arrested-latency nerds who don't actually care, and half of them will lie about their crazy boners and they won't even really know why they're doing it.
Most people just like to have sex, because sex is awesome. Seems simple, and in fact I wager that it is. I believe that in our hearts of hearts, the majority of us mostly don't really need a whole routine. But we assume everybody else has these Byzantine rituals and trapdoors and surprise parties, because the '90s re-centered sex, just like the SATs when an 800 became a 600, and we had no idea that what we were learning was normal was in fact previously thought of as pretty left of center. It was just that the people making the entertainment had become so incredibly boring that they needed to get tied up and peed on in order to get a job done that, frankly, animals can accomplish with little to no fuss.
But who's going to explain that to us? It's where all the information came from anyway. It's like thinking Seventies Bush is something you have to like cultivate, because all you ever saw in Hustler were landing strips, or how a thousand years from now all the gay guys will be flying around with jetpacks still convincing each other that Liza Minnelli and Barbra Streisand are significant. So anyway, that's why Star Trek TNG people are always tying each other up and wifeswapping, and that's also what being Shane Botwin is like, I think, all the time. Tremendous pressure to be as weird as everybody he knows. And it's working.
Silas comes downstairs looking dapper in a jacket/jeans combo, looking like a million basically, the same way mommy would, and grins at Nancy fussing with the swing. "Nesting phase." He worries that he's showing race bias before asking if this is, in fact, a new Mexican bodyguard, and she's like, "Brand new!" Silas says hi/hola, and Ignacio -- from the table where he's watching a laptop -- informs him, with much mirth, that "The cat is Milo, the dog is Otis. The cat is crazy! And the little dog just follows..." Ignacio laughs, and Silas cocks his head, but at least it reminds Nancy to ask where Andy is. In the garage, and with a cute grin Silas adds, "Working out?" Go, little dog! Ignacio says. Go!
She's wearing those cowboy boots, he's pumping iron in the tiniest little shorts you ever did see. "Hey, just in time to spot me!" says Otis, and she asks if this is all about him pissing himself last night. Three answers to that one (No. Yes. He cheated.), and she asks for his help with her "Zen Baby Erector Set." Man, those shorts are tiny. Not in a good way. He pulls on that chest thing with the springs, and says he can feel a High Noon coming, and he wants to be ready. Where did this crap come from?
"This is my stuff," Andy nods. "My athlete stuff." He shoves a Thighmaster into his armpit and goes to town. "It's Judah's," he admits. Judah, who was good at sports, while Andy was good at fleeing. She laughs, honestly, more brightly than she's been in a long time. "I have a bodyguard? I don't need you to crush my foes in your armpit." So then what, being given his tenuous opening, does she need from him? She smiles, because he's got game whether it's working or not, but Ignacio appears: the doorbell's barking. He grins widely at Andy: "You look like Jamie Lee Curtis in Perfect," he says, squinting, and Nancy laughs from her belly. So normal! So real! I forgot she could laugh. "That's what I was going for," Andy grumples, as Nancy and Ignacio take off, still laughing. He pounds one fist into the other, wearing a boxing glove, and comes out with a little, wizened bank book and a shitload of wacky tinkling impending-caper piano.
"Celia. What a wonderful surprise." Really? "Nooo. Not wonderful. Not a surprise..." Celia shoves past Nancy and into the house, growling at Ignacio. She's like the herpes, he spits. Keeps popping up. Nancy doesn't waste much time telling Celia to GTFO, which frustrates Celia terribly because she's got a whole canned speech planned that Nancy won't let her say. "I was kidnapped!" She thanks Nancy for the ransom, and explains further that they were going to sell her gall bladder to the Japanese, but "fortunately, my body is a toxic pit." Nancy doesn't know what to do with that. "Then, I escaped. Heroically! And now I am homeless."
"Celia, I am pregnant." She stares at Nancy. "With a baby?" Her face goes soft, and open wide, like this is still Agrestic and there's a baby, like her friend Nancy is having a baby. "Which means I need quiet and calm and -- thank you," Nancy says, regarding Celia's ever-so-quiet and calm steepled prayer hands, "...And happy thoughts around me, as much as possible." And this whole time, Celia's been creeping, lofting, sort of floating toward Nancy with this beatific not-quite-smile on her face, as though she's going to force them both into some amazing movie of love where they're friends and she's just scared to show it, to be the one that gives in first and stops being mad, or maybe doesn't even need to show it, so all it takes is one fabulous sort of Moment and then all our problems go away.
"You, Celia," Nancy says, pushing her back, "Are not quiet. Not calm." Celia nods, she knows these things, she agrees: "You are so terribly, miserably thoroughly, unhappy that if I pricked your finger, you'd bleed a fucking raincloud." Celia leans forward and asks, not quite conspiratorially, whether it's Andy's baby.
Cut to Celia, and her luggage, being thrown onto the lawn, by a spirited Ignacio; and pull further back, to Roy Till watching the house still, holding a 2005 photo of himself as Swayze and his dead "partner" dressed as a terrifying Jennifer Grey, with "Very Dirty Dancing!" scrawled across the bottom, and then he says something so unutterably retarded, writing of such badness that I can't even believe it, and refuse to recap it. Fucking try harder. That shit shouldn't have made it out of the first draft, and maybe the only reason it did is it got lost in the 75 other lead balloons this script keeps sending up.
Here's one now, a mean Asian lady showing Silas and Doug a drycleaners that they hope to rent for their pot club, once they -- as Doug says -- "Jew these folks down." Silas likes it, and says he'll take it, and responds to her question that it will be a Compassionate Care Club. She's like, "Oh. Gym for fat ladies?" and he shakes his head, because no. Medical marijuana. She starts freaking out about how the Feds will take away her building, and Doug responds that