Episode Title: Bottom of the Bottle: Part Two
Season 01, Episode 13
Episode 013 of 344
Written by John Pleshette
Directed by Roger Young
Original Airdate: Thursday,
March 27th, 1980
The Plot (Courtesy of TV.Com): Gary and Richard
get drunk. A drunken Gary takes an unconscious Richard home. Gary passes out
and Laura offers Gary some coffee. Gary wants a drink and is very aggressive
towards Laura. Laura calls Val as Gary tries to
break into Laura's liquor cabinet. After Gary slaps Val in the face, she
commits him to a detox ward. Kenny has an affair with Sylvie and his marriage
with Ginger is strained. They make up at the zoo as Kenny turns up in a gorilla
suit. Gary escapes detox and goes to the bar for a drink. He is reminded of the
doctor's trick when she made Gary choose between having a drink or Val. Gary
decides to go to AA.
You wanna know why I’m so
excited to discuss Bottom of the Bottle:
Part Two? The answer lies within the
man who penned the script for today’s episode of discussion. See, even though this is our second
Gary-centric episode in a row, the script was actually written by Richard Avery
himself, Mr. John Pleshette! I’ve
already talked at some length about how much I enjoy the character of Richard
and The Plesh’s brilliant acting and charisma, but this is the first time we’ve
had an episode he also wrote! In addition to acting and writing, he will
even be directing some future episodes, starting with Homecoming in 1983 and concluding with Simmer in 1991. Interestingly, his directorial efforts on KL all occur after he left the main cast of the series. It’s nice to know he continued hanging around
enough to write and direct episodes even as late as the 12th season,
no? Anyway, I love The Plesh and I love
all the episodes he writes, including some really great ones coming up in the
next few seasons, and this is his very first script for the show, so can I say
hallelujah?
Before we get started with the
episode, we have one of those hilarious recaps where the narrator, rather than
just saying, “Previously on KL,”
instead says, in an extremely slow manner, “Here are some scenes from the first
part of tonight’s story.” Then we get a
long recap (I think over a whole minute?) and then, “In a moment, this story
will continue.” I do enjoy this old
fashioned style of storytelling for the dramatic nighttime series, I must
confess; it makes me feel all warm and fuzzy inside.
Now, before we get back into our
drunken Gary saga, we gotta spend some time with my two very favorite characters, Kenny and Ginger! See, Kenny is having another groovy party
(with another groovy public domain record blasting from the speakers) and
Ginger is having none of it. Actually,
maybe this isn’t one of Kenny’s groovy parties after all, is it? I think the scene concludes with Ginger
saying she is “Going home,” which tells me this party is happening elsewhere,
not at the Ward house. Anyway, she is
grumpy and leaves, which obviously plays right into Sylvie’s hand; now she has
all the time and privacy she needs to seduce Kenny!
Next up, Richard finds drunken
Gary hanging out in some dive bar. Now,
I do have some questions about this
scene, specifically regarding how Gary is paying for all this alcohol. We saw the street toughs (Jason Voorhees,
remember?) stole his money in the previous episode, yet he’s drinking at this
bar and appears to be well on his way to blackout drunk. How has he been paying? I have a hard time believing that the
bartender would let him get this drunk without seeing any money first. Is he really just letting Gary keep a tab
going? Or did he perhaps become privy to
the fact that Gary comes from the famous Texas Ewing dynasty? Maybe he assumes the money will be coming
because the drunken mess in front of him is a rich drunken mess? In any
case, I suppose it’s not all that important; what’s important is that Gary is
here and he’s still drinking and he’s still very, very drunk.
Who comes wandering in to take
Gary home a moment later? Why, it’s
Richard! Unfortunately (but rather
comedically), things don’t exactly go as planned because Gary convinces Richard
to have a drink with him and, well, the next time we see them, Richard is passed out on the counter of
the bar. Again, I remind you that The
Plesh wrote this episode, and for him to immediately present his own character
as such a shit, to the point that he can’t even get the hardcore alcoholic home
safely without getting drunk himself, well, I love it. This shows such insight into his own
character, such understanding, and he makes no bones about writing himself as a
real heel. I love it!
There’s also a bit of
misdirection in this scene. See, Gary
steals Richard’s wallet out of his coat and uses it to pay the bar tab. Next, he grabs his car keys and heads out,
and obviously I’m thinking he’s gonna take the car for a joyride and crash it
or something. No, instead, Richard gets
tossed out on the street by the bartender and Gary comes rolling up in the car
to pick him up and the two miraculously make it home safely.
They both stumble drunkenly into
the Avery household, where Laura is a little alarmed to find the two of them in
such a state. There’s a lot of wonderful
authenticity in this sequence, such as Gary losing the keys and then realizing
he left them dangling in the doorknob of the house, hah hah. He’s also crawling around, trying to figure
out how to unlock the Avery liquor cabinet, while Laura is running off to the
kitchen to prepare some black coffee (that’s a myth, by the way; what you
really want to get for a very drunk person is lots and lots of water).
This is a very intense scene,
actually, and I even gasped a little at one point. See, Val comes running in, and at first she’s
relieved that Gary is alive and, I guess I’m not gonna use the word “well,” but
she’s relieved that he’s alive, in
any case. But Gary is having a hell of a
time trying to get that liquor cabinet open, and while Val is sorta hovering
over him, trying to get him to come home and go to bed, he just punches right
through the glass of the liquor cabinet, cutting his hand up, and then he sorta
punches Val, which I did not remember
and which legitimately shocked me. I
guess it’s not a huge punch, but damn, we’ve never seen Gary get physically
violent with Val before and I don’t think we ever do again; to my knowledge, this
is an isolated act of violence. Anyway,
she goes flying backwards onto the ground and spends the rest of the episode
sporting a nice big black eye.
Some medics arrive to take Gary
away, and Val tells them he needs to enter a rehabilitation center if he’s ever
gonna get better. At first, the medics
are like, “It has to be voluntary, it has to be voluntary, blah blah blah,” but
they mention how they could commit him if
he had attempted suicide. At this
point, smart Laura jumps in and says he did
try to kill himself. “Look at his
arm,” she says, insisting that Gary was cutting his wrists and trying to off
himself. Thanks to Laura’s clever lie
(she thought up a lie and she thought it up quick), the medics haul off Gary and
send him to a rehab center.
Back over in Storyline B, Kenny
is continuing to cheat on Ginger but she hasn’t quite realized it yet. I do have one rather significant compliment
to pay to an early scene featuring the two toxic bores of Seaview Circle. See, it’s during another boring “Are you
having an affair?” scene, but there’s this really artistic shot that struck me,
something far more artistic than usual shot compositions on early ‘80s
television. See, Ginger is mad at Kenny,
and she sits down at her big-ass mirror, and there’s like a total of three
mirrors, okay? So you have Ginger framed
in the center mirror, but you have a reflective image of two Kennys being framed in the mirror on the very left and the one
on the very right. I actually paused
this shot and turned to My Beloved Grammy and was like, “Look at this shot; it looks like something out of a Brian De Palma
movie!” I became very excited about this
shot, which is framed like this great work of art and really elevates a
terribly dull scene into something much more interesting. I note again that KL was unafraid to display a little more cinematic flair than its
parent series, which always tended to be shot in a very bland, very flat way
(sorry, Dallas). So hats off to the director of this episode,
Roger Young; you actually made a Kenny/Ginger scene visually interesting to
watch!
Later, Kenny is staying late at
the recording studio to record a “hot” new album with Sylvie. The only problem is that her singing is
awful. At first, I wasn’t sure if her
singing was supposed to be awful (after all, Afton Cooper’s singing over on Dallas was dreadful, yet everyone acted
like she was this great singer on the level of Bette Midler or Karen Carpenter), but I quickly
realized this was intentional. She hits
her high notes in a very painful way, and we get some shots of Kenny cringing
along with his record-spinning pals, and then they finally give up for the
night. However, Kenny and Sylvie hang
around the studio after everyone else is gone and, you guessed it, start to
screw. They don’t get very far, however,
before Ginger comes walking in and catches them red-handed.
I’ll confess this scene was not that bad, and there was even some
moderate intensity, although My Beloved Grammy did turn to me during it and say, in
regards to Kim Lankford’s “acting” abilities, “I don’t think I’ve ever seen
acting so bad.” So as you can see, not
only do the toxic bores of Kenny and Ginger annoy me and send me into a coma,
but they are hardly the favorite characters of My Beloved Grammy, either, and
she’s a smart lady and knows her shit!
I’ll confess that I actually found her indictment a little harsh. True, neither Kim Lankford nor James Houghton
are fantastic actors, but this scene was okay.
Follow me along, here.
See, Ginger immediately rushes
home and does what women tend to do when they’re mad at their man: destroy all
his most valuable possessions. She runs
in and just starts destroying his record player, the stereo, his collection of
amazing public domain records, all of it.
He comes running in after her and is like, “I can explain!” Obviously this is just rhetoric, as Ginger
caught him without his shirt on (and I think without pants on) attempting
re-entry on Sylvie; it’s kinda hard to back out of that one once you’ve been caught. But anyway, as he runs up to her, her big old
bug eyes just bulge out (rather frightening) and she turns red and screams,
“GET OUT!” Again, I don’t care and the
acting leaves something to be desired, but I’d still rather watch this
storyline act out versus, say, the exciting story in Home Is For Healing where Kenny wanted to throw a party and Ginger
didn’t want him to.
Let me focus for a minute on why
this entire storyline ranks so low for me.
First off, as I’ve stated ad nauseum, Kenny and Ginger just aren’t very
interesting characters, and I’m starting to think it’s a combination of their
limited acting abilities mixed in with the writers barely even attempting to turn
them into interesting characters. No
matter what their story is, they always feel isolated to me, like you have this
cul-de-sac full of interesting, richly drawn characters, and then there just
happens to be this one couple who are unbelievably boring. In addition, the third player in this little
drama is also just not interesting.
That’s right, I’m looking at you, Louise Vallance as Sylvie! Sylvie is such a boringly generic bitch
character. She’s wicked and she’s
conniving, but she’s not wicked and conniving in an interesting or a fun or a
campy way. Remember Katherine Wentworth
over on Dallas? Now that
was a wonderfully wicked character, pure evil all around but so deliciously
campy and fun to watch. In contrast,
Sylvie is just sorta a bitch; there’s no fun in her performance, just the same
boring evil shenanigans that we’ve seen in a million other shows.
However, you sure won’t hear me
complaining about Storyline A, which heats up nicely as Gary is committed to
a little rehab center run by a friendly Transmorpher. Yes, ladies and gentlemen, the rehab center
is run by Dr. Kramer, played by Diana Douglas.
I note with interest that she was, from the years 1943 to 1951, married
to the legendary actor Kirk Douglas, but I also note that she appeared in the
1983 Dallas episode entitled The Letter. She will also be back on KL for one more episode, one coming up pretty shortly entitled Remember the Good Times (season two,
episode three).
Anyway, Dr. Kramer has some, um,
questionable methods of alcohol detox, I must say. See, we get to a certain point in the episode
where Gary is speaking with Dr. Kramer about his problems. The thing he doesn’t know is that he’s being
recorded and Val is in the other room, watching everything. Dr. Kramer pulls out what she claims is a
small bottle of whiskey (it’s actually tea, spoiler alert) and then a
dime. She says, “You can have one of
these: A sip of whiskey or a dime to call your wife; which will it be?” The music swells and there’s this really
agonizing couple of seconds in which Gary has to decide where his priorities
lie, but finally he just yanks that bottle out of her hands and guzzles it down
before spitting it out and hilariously yelling, “IT’S TEA!”
When that line came up, I almost
peed my pants laughing, and I had to explain to My Beloved Grammy that I am not
laughing at Gary. I care for Gary and I want him to get over
his drinking problems and improve his life.
The reason I laugh is because pretty much every time my brother or I prepare a cup of tea, one of us will take
a sip of the tea and then scream “IT’S TEA!!!!!” really really loud. So, when Gary delivered that amazing line, I
just thought of my brother drinking tea and it made me laugh really hard. Oh yeah, I also laugh because it’s a bit of
campy, over-the-top delivery, but again, I remind you that I say all those things
with love. I love KL for lots of reasons, but the campy nature of the stories and
acting is a huge part of that, and
when I point out campy acting, I am always pointing it out with love.
To be serious for a moment,
however, I do think this little display is almost crippling for Val. She has now seen first hand that Gary is so
deep in his bender that he would rather have the quick fix of a sip of whiskey
versus a relationship with her. With all
their history together and their long love affair, at this moment in time, it’s
more important to Gary to have a sip of whiskey, not to attempt to rebuild a
relationship with Val. In all honesty,
watching this scene, it feels like this may be the moment that they break up
and get divorced, but surprisingly that doesn’t happen until 1982 and the
conclusion of season three (thanks in no small part to Abby’s interference, of
course). I suppose Val is smart enough
and knows Gary well enough to recognize that this behavior is a manifestation
of his disease and not a true reflection on his feelings towards his wife.
Next up, we have Gary shooting
pool with this black guy. What’s the
deal with this black guy? Can someone
please explain it to me? The guy’s name
is like Mohammad or something, and he’s speaking with Gary as if he’s some wise
old sage, like Yoda or something, all about how he conquered his own drinking
problems and blah blah blah. Okay,
that’s all well and good, but then why are you here? The guy is dressed in a robe just like all
the other patients of the rehab center, and he appears to be in the same boat
as all of them, yet he speaks as if he conquered all his problems decades ago
and has since moved on. So is he a
patient or is he just a guy who hangs out at the rehab center cuz he likes
wearing the sexy robes? Well, I
certainly can’t figure him out, so any information on this character would be
appreciated.
Sid comes to visit Gary while
he’s playing with that black guy in the pool room. At first, Gary is kinda hostile towards Sid,
I guess feeling like he’s only receiving a sympathy visit from Saint Sid, but
when Sid is about to give up and leave, Gary is all like, “Guess what; I’m
going to my first AA meeting tonight!”
Now at first, I thought he was just making that up as an on-the-spot-lie
to make Sid think he’s improving. Turns
out I was sorta half right; Gary made up the AA story, but he fully intends to
escape from the institute in a few hours rather than attend the meeting and
admit to his problems.
Our next scene is Gary’s Great
Escape. As tends to be the case with
television shows of this era, his escape is remarkably easy. All it requires is for him to put on a
business suit underneath his robe, wait for the lady working the front desk to
get distracted, and then sneak behind the desk to steal some keys (as well as a
bit of cash from the lady’s purse).
Using the keys, Gary unlocks a back exit and escapes into the
night. He returns home to Val, acting
more like someone who’s just done a few lines of coke. He’s hopping around, acting way too excited,
and he’s all like, “Oh Val, I feel great!
Everything’s gonna be great! I’m
so happy!” When the phone rings, he’s
all like, “Don’t answer that, Val!” Val
is sharp enough to recognize what’s going on, that he wasn’t released from the
rehab center; he escaped.
Since KL was originally conceived as, essentially, Scenes From A Marriage set on a cul-de-sac, sequences like this are
very important. Here we have Gary and
Val experiencing real marital turmoil, and this is, for me, when the show
really shines. Throughout the fourteen seasons,
maybe that original conception of the show dissipates, but it never disappears
completely. Here we are seeing two
people who are struggling. Val is
struggling with her love of Gary, a love that goes back to pretty much the
first time they ever met, along with her feelings about his behavior, his
drinking, his temper, all that crap. On
the other side, Gary is struggling to be an independent person without help
from his rich Ewing family, but now he’s disappearing back into his old, bad
habits, and he’s not yet ready to admit that he has A PROBLEM. At this point, he’s still telling Val that he’s
got his problems licked, that all it takes is his own self motivation. Again, she is smart enough to not accept
this, instead telling him that he needs to
return to the rehab center to deal with his issues.
The Gary storyline is coming to
its conclusion, at least for the confines of this episode, but hold your
horses, cuz we have at least one more scene between Kenny and Ginger that, I
suppose, we need to discuss. See, at
this point Ginger has thrown Kenny out of the house and told him she never
wants to see him again. How do you deal
with a marital spat like that? If you
answered, “Dress up in a gorilla costume and harass your wife at a zoo,” then
you win the secret prize! You see,
Ginger is taking her kindergarten class (including that super cute black kid
who I love, last seen in the episode The Constant Companion) out for a field trip at the zoo. As they observe the monkeys, Kenny enters the
scene dressed in a gorilla costume.
Endearing? Mmmm, not so
much. Ginger tells her entire
kindergarten class to just, um, sorta run off, which is a questionable decision
for a teacher of small children in a busy public zoo, but whatever.
She and Kenny have a little talk and she tells him she just can’t see it
working out; that probably they should get a divorce now. Boy, how nice would it be if the two divorced
and moved off the cul-de-sac right now and we didn’t have to look at them
anymore? Sadly, we still have three more
years with them, but don’t worry, cuz then they go away and we have ten, count
‘em, ten glorious years without them!
How is the episode going to
end? Don’t worry, cuz we’re almost
there, and like I said, we don’t end on a cliffhanger the way that seasons two
through thirteen will. Gary goes to a
bar, but he’s not drinking anything stronger than club soda. He’s sitting there, sorta introspective,
reflecting on things, holding a dime, clearly thinking of calling up Val or
something. From there, we cut to a fun
filled session over at Alcoholics Anonymous where a very depressing middle aged
woman is talking all about her drinking problems. Val is there, as well (which kinda confused
me; isn’t the AA rule that you can only attend if you are, yourself, an
alcoholic?), looking sad and forlorn.
Anyway, things are about to wrap up at this session when none other than
Gary Ewing himself enters. He walks into
the room, there’s a long, drawn out silence, and then he announces, “I’m Gary
and I’m an alcoholic.” Everyone starts
to clap, Val is extremely relieved, and our inaugural season of KL comes to its conclusion.
Pretty fucking great, huh? I’m so glad that our season finale for the
first season was allowed to be a two-parter, because it definitely helps to
make it feel a little more epic, a little bit more the part of some grander
story. At the same time, I noticed lots
of fascinating talking points regarding these two episodes as the conclusion of
the season. For one thing, I got the
strong sense that the writers were covering their butts and making this be,
possibly, the series finale.
Again,
Dallas finished the 1979-1980 season
ranking at #6 in the ratings (and it would jump up to #1 during the next
season), while KL finished at #30,
just barely making the top thirty by an inch.
Because of that, I definitely think the writers, producers, and creators
probably were unsure whether they would even get a second season, and that’s probably why this season doesn’t
end on some grand cliffhanger but rather with a sense of some resolution. Pretending that KL just ended here, there really aren’t a lot of dangling threads,
are there? The only one I can think of
is that of Kenny and Ginger and Sylvie, but nobody cares about that,
anyway. The Gary and Val storyline
actually feels like it reached some conclusion at the end of this episode, that
they will work out their problems and try to move on.
Thank
God we got thirteen more seasons, by the way, because we would be missing out
on so much classic television without those.
However, now that we’ve finished the abbreviated first season, I gotta
say I enjoyed it much more than I remembered.
Yes, I think I would rather take later seasons over this one easily, but
I really found myself loving this first season almost all the way through (with
the glaring exception of Land of the Free,
of course, although that one still made me laugh a lot). Seriously, this was a
delightful surprise; even while starting the series, I warned My Beloved Grammy
that the show doesn’t really get good until the fourth season, but then as we
started working our way through the first season, I was like, “Well, that
episode was great, and that episode
was great, and so was that one.” Maybe it’s just the warm and fuzzy feeling I
get from visiting with my friends on the cul-de-sac? That feeling of seeing these people for the
first time and knowing what wonderful adventures they are about to embark
on? I dunno, but something about this
first season changed for me upon this viewing and I just thoroughly loved
it.
Now,
next week I am gonna post "A Reflection on Season One," where I kinda give my thoughts on the season as a whole (I plan to do this at the end of every season), and then before we proceed with the second season of KL,
we’re gonna return briefly to the land of Texas and all the wheeling and dealings
over on Dallas. That’s right,
it’s time for another two “Brief Dallas
Interludes.”
See, while Gary was getting drunk and going on a bender, J.R. was getting shot and television history was being made over on the parent series. In my research, I found that before KL started its second season, Gary and Val crossed over for two episodes of Dallas to make sure J.R. was alive and well (and, of course, to remind viewers of that series that there was now a spinoff on Thursday nights that they could also enjoy). So, please join me for two Dallas eps in a row when we discuss both No More Mister Nice Guy: Part One as well as No More Mister Nice Guy: Part Two. After that, we’ll get started with the second season of KL and meet a lovely new neighbor, Miss Abby Fairgate Cunningham Ewing Sumner (although when we first meet her, she is just Abby Fairgate Cunningham), with the KL double whammy of Hitchhike: Part One and Hitchhike: Part Two. Talk to you then!
See, while Gary was getting drunk and going on a bender, J.R. was getting shot and television history was being made over on the parent series. In my research, I found that before KL started its second season, Gary and Val crossed over for two episodes of Dallas to make sure J.R. was alive and well (and, of course, to remind viewers of that series that there was now a spinoff on Thursday nights that they could also enjoy). So, please join me for two Dallas eps in a row when we discuss both No More Mister Nice Guy: Part One as well as No More Mister Nice Guy: Part Two. After that, we’ll get started with the second season of KL and meet a lovely new neighbor, Miss Abby Fairgate Cunningham Ewing Sumner (although when we first meet her, she is just Abby Fairgate Cunningham), with the KL double whammy of Hitchhike: Part One and Hitchhike: Part Two. Talk to you then!