Episode Report Card Jacob Clifton: C | Grade It Now! YOU GRADE IT I Hope They Serve Beer in Helsinki
By Jacob Clifton | Season 6 | Episode 10 | Aired on 10.25.2010
isode is pretty useless, he describes a different costume than the Sammy Davis Jr. one that obviously he should be describing. But since it's Silas who, gorge rising, asks to see pictures of her, I guess we're just dropping that whole thing altogether. Schiff's been carrying a picture of Nancy around in his wallet for the last twenty years, of course, and lies about it, of course, and then he runs off to fetch yearbooks so they can really get down in the dirt with this bullshit.While he's gone, Silas teases Shane about his inability to focus and play the mind game -- "Maybe it only works on positive energy," he says, which: total burn -- and they discuss how probably the locked room contains an entire Nancy shrine. Then we finally get to the point of this whole storyline, location, moment: All the pictures of Nancy with her boyfriend, Lars Guinard (quel guignon!), have his face scratched out. What does he look like, Lars Guinard? With a name like that, I'm guessing something like the hot dumb ex-husband Bobby on Cougar Town, which by the way contains no cougars, only a small amount of towns, and much better jokes than this episode of a show. Schiff admits to scratching out the boy's face: "The loser, asshole, do-nothing boyfriend of your mother's from the middle of junior high all the way through high school." As if we are retarded, he adds: "I deliver his mail." And just as Shane gets the ball to float, Schiff describes Lars to Silas: "Blonde-haired, lean, chisel-faced. He looked like you."
Which makes the whole bang the drum thing about that this season a little less irritating, but also a little moreso. And then we've got the big graveyard scene, which was unfortunately in this episode and thus written poorly, even though the last two seasons have sort of made it a major pivot of the entire show. Luckily, Nancy is played by Mary Louise Parker, the best actress of all time and the hottest, so whatever the script can't manage to do, she will take care of. And I mean, I don't want to keep harping on this, but I can't imagine it's merely my personal aversion to the kind of merciless antisocial tone of this episode, which is a huge thing but also not quite as huge as these jokes I can see my grandfather making. Well, not my grandfather, but somebody's grandfather. Yours.
And lame jokes aside, the intent and tone and vector of every scene is the same problem. It's like... U-Turn, it feels like U-Turn when the whole world was sick and ugly and gross. Not depressing, or mournful, but just... Diseased, and I don't know why that's happening this time. Or maybe it's the kid rape jokes. (Next week is way better, in both respects.) But U-Turn world was so aversive and nasty that I nearly stopped watching the show -- in fact, took this gig so I'd have an excuse to maintain my interest in the show -- and I looked at the past scripts by this writer and yeah, pretty much nasty and hateful right down the line. And maybe he's a great guy in person, loves dogs and hugs, maybe he's really strong in the room, I don't know, it's not my business, but: The banality of human weakness is not inherently interesting, that's what makes it banal, and that's really all we get this week.
Nancy says hello to her dead parents (Arlene Price 1933-1998, Sherwood Price 1931-1997), makes subtle fun of Jennifer Jason Leigh for getting the cheapest possible stones, and then introduces them to Stevie. (Wait, so if the Mom's born in 1933, she's 36 when Nancy is born and dies at 65, when Nancy's 29. Nancy is born in 1969, repeatedly raped by the hilarious, good-natured Mr. Schiff starting at 14, attends high school 1984-87 and goes off to Paris 1987-? Around 22 she marries Judah and Silas is born; she's 25 when Shane is born, an orphan at 28 and a widow -- for the first time -- around 38, I think. Check my math but I'm pretty sure about this. I mean, usually I would say it doesn't matter, stop being a nerd, but this show has been on for half a decade of our lives and we still know nothing about its protagonist, which makes it more interesting and less OCD.)
Mary Louise, how you do impress. "Sorry you never got a chance to meet Silas and Shane. In retrospect, probably a mistake. But you started it. You think my marrying a Jew was bad, you should meet this little guy's father. Long story, didn't work out so well, won't bore you with the details." She thanks them for their new, silent, nonjudgmental attitude and says she'd visit more often if she weren't fleeing the country. She sweetly leaves a box of Anderson's Butterscotches on her father's grave, and can't quite look her mother square on, for her parting shot: "Mom, sorry. I didn't get a chance to stop by a liquor store."
Yeah, Nancy had an alliance with her dad against her mother. Color me shocked. Yeah, Nancy's mother was an abusive addict. Shocked again. Yeah, Nancy full-on murdered Judah's grandmother to get possession of the master bedroom. Unless you've had a truly terrible mother you probably think it's cartoonish and nasty, but let me tell you: This is the one interaction this episode got 100% correct. Nancy and Stevie say goodbye to the Prices and take off but are approached by some kind of douchebag beardy Klosterman with rumpled jacket and Ben Franklin hair that looks like he smells like mildew and sandwich shop. I don't know what the TV has against Radzinsky's natural hotness but inevitably they collude to make him look like a pisher just begging for a punch. Life's hard for the character actor specializing in nebbish.
Dude asks Nancypants for assistance locating the main office, or a map, because he's visiting his parents too. He stammers and acts all weird and finally admits that he, Ellis Tate, was a freshman when Nancy was a senior, and that he had a huge crush on her, she didn't even know he was alive, etc. She thinks about how this could possibly be of advantage to her, realizes that not only can it be of no use, but also it's a fucking problem because now he's seen her and recognized her and is obsessed with her, and I presume wants to punch him in the fucking face just for looking like he looks. I certainly do.
Nancy makes gentle fun of his stupid bald head and hates the entire situation, and he's painful and sweaty-palmed and self-aware and awful: "Do you want to get a coffee or something? Relive the old horrors and humiliations of high school?" Sounds great, Daria. Nancy has learned the value of honesty in these situations: "Well, that sounds like no fun." Word! Maybe it's just the self-obsessive anomie of the Cobain Generation that is so off-putting about this episode. Misanthropy has been masquerading as cleverness, unexamined, for a good long time now, it's become part of the noise. But if you hear it once and pay attention, you really can't go back to ignoring it again. Slacker bullshit is like Whoopi Goldberg's missing eyebrows in that way.
Nancy tries to take the hell off so Ellis Tate starts soliloquizing about parents, how they fuck you up -- "fill you with the faults they had, and add some extra just for you" -- and because he is an adult who thinks this is the extra mile and that sitting around klosterfucking about your sad Gen X life and blaming your parents and complaining about the Twitter is what everybody like really wants to do, he tries to nail her down for the date to which she literally just said no, again, so she gets awesome on him: "That's very sweet, Ellis, but... You're a freshman, I'm a senior. It'd never work out." And as she makes her way across the cemetery, in fringed boots and denim hotpants and wearing a babybjorn across her front, she whispers to herself, "...Dork!"
More racist adventures with Andy, and some guy finally grabs him and steers him down the street to have a private conversation about passports. For $100 guy sends him to 84720 Michigan Avenue, and to ask for "Sam," who is the guy's uncle. Andy heads for the Jesusmobile, repeating the address over and over to himself, and of course Doug derails his train of thought and Andy gets all pissed at himself, like hitting himself in the head, but then Doug memorized the address while he was interrupting, because of his accountant's gift with numbers, so it's okay. Of course, 84720 Michigan Ave. is the passport office in Dearborn, and the guy's uncle Sam is yours too.
Doug and Andy rail on A-rabs for awhile and then back up into a car where Michael Moore lives, and his entire family of three-toed mutants tha