Episode Title: Remember the Good Times
Season 02, Episode 03
Episode 016 of 344
Written by Diana Gould
Directed by James Sheldon
Original Airdate: Thursday, December
4th, 1980
The Plot (Courtesy of TV.Com):. Gary meets Judy Trent who wants his help in getting her husband
support from AA. Abby begins to show her manipulative nature (Already?) as she takes
advantage of Eric and tries to seduce Kenny. Karen confronts her about this.
Remember the two
episodes that formed the conclusion of season one of KL? Of course you do,
because they were Bottom of the Bottle: Parts One and Two and they were extremely exciting and memorable! Well, we’re just a few episodes away from
those, but it’s time to explore the issue of Gary Ewing and his alcoholism once
again.
At the head of the
episode, we have Abby Fairgate Cunningham Ewing Sumner lounging in her pool, “working on her
tan,” in her very own words. Can I just
say that it’s moments like this that make me wanna just climb into the TV and
live in the same world as these characters?
It’s the middle of the afternoon and Abby is sitting on one of those big
inflatable water chairs that come equipped with a drink holder and
everything. She’s wearing her bikini,
lying out in the sun, looking generally fabulous. I think she’s even drinking alcohol, and if
she isn’t, well, I’m disappointed.
Anyway, in
addition to Abs working on her tan, we also find out that Gary has been going
to AA five times a week. Hmmm, five
times? I don’t know a whole lot about my
AA, but how often is one expected to go if they are just starting to get clean
and sober? Doesn’t five times a week
seem a bit excessive? It’s no wonder
Gary is shown to be bored and disinterested later at the meeting; if I had to
listen to a bunch of depressing alcoholics five times a week, I’d get
irritated, too.
But anyway, we
follow Gary and Val along to one of these lovely meetings, where we get to see,
once again, Diana Douglas as Dr. Kramer.
You’ll recall that we last saw her in Bottom of the Bottle: Part Two, helping Gary along with that
hilarious “IT’S TEA!” sequence. I told
you she’d be back for one more, and now here she is. She tells Gary that she is an alcoholic,
which I think is new information to the viewer.
Did she mention this in her last appearance at all? I can’t remember, but I think it’s a
revelation here in this particular episode.
Also at the AA meeting is a rather unattractive and somewhat lesbianic
looking broad named Judy Trent. SPOILER ALERT for all those new viewers out there, but Gary is going to start having an
affair with Judy pretty shortly; it’s not in this particular episode, but it’s
soon. I have to ask what in particular
draws him to this woman, as she is not particularly attractive in either her
personality or her looks. Judy is played
by Jane Elliot, who I note is still a busy actress even up to 2016, apparently
as part of the cast of General Hospital. Good for her, but as far as women I would
choose to have an affair with, Judy would not be making the top of my list (as everyone knows, if I was gonna have an affair, it would be with that luscious specimen known as Pat Petersen circa 1985 or so, mmmmmm).
What’s Judy’s
story? Well, it’s pretty important to
the events that unfold over the course of this episode. Judy has a husband named Earl who has a
serious alcoholism problem, yet he is still not in the stage where he can admit
it or try to seek help for it. She wants
Gary to be his sponsor, to take him under his wing and help him deal with his
issues. Now, I again have to question
the realism of this scenario. As I said,
I am no expert on the rules of AA, but I am fairly certain that you are not
supposed to sponsor anyone until you have been clean and sober for at least
twelve months, just like you’re not supposed to take on a significant romantic
relationship within your first twelve months of sobriety. Gary says right here that he’s only been
sober for three months, so I don’t think he would even be allowed to do
this. At the same time, at no point do
we see Gary speaking about this with his sponsor,
so maybe he just decided to go on and do whatever the hell he wanted, all rules
be damned.
We meet Earl
pretty fast, and he’s played rather delightfully by Paul Rudd. Now, before you all perk up and lean forward
to see if you read that name right, let me do some explaining. This is not
the Paul Rudd we’ve all enjoyed in numerous comedy movies throughout the last
twenty years or so (the Paul Rudd who starred in such movies as Halloween: The Curse of Michael Myers). No, instead this is the other Paul Rudd. This Paul Rudd actually died back in 2010, but he was a busy little character actor for
years, and I’ve seen him in a myriad of random television work, like an episode
of Murder, She Wrote. Anyway, as Earl, this guy is a delight. He’s one of those classic arty alcoholics
that’s, like, trying to be a great writer but is too busy disappearing into the
nearest bottle. Everything he says is
laced with a nasty, sardonic wit, meaning that I would not care for his company
in real life, but in an episode of a nighttime soap, he’s perfect. I wish I had written down some of his lines
in my notes, because he really has a great acid tongue and puts it to full
effect throughout the course of the show.
Judy wants Gary to
help Earl get clean, but it’s clear right away that Earl has no interest in
that. He’s not ready to admit that he is
an alcoholic or that he has a problem.
However, a little later in the episode, Gary gets a call from Earl while
he’s lying in bed reading Judas Squad. I noted that because the camera seems to be
making an effort to make it clear what he’s reading. Is there any significance to this? I’m not sure, but I did some research, and
while Judas Squad offers absolutely
no results on Wikipedia, I did find it available for one penny on Amazon. The author is James N. Rowe and I guess it’s
a book about, like, nuclear terror, or something. There’s only one review of it up on Amazon,
but it is a five star review and the reviewer seems very enthused by the
story! Perhaps I’m reading too much into
this; perhaps the prop guy on set was reading the book and decided to have Gary
use it as a prop during this sequence, who knows?
I think I might be
getting a bit ahead of myself. Really,
the first thing to happen is that Earl comes drunkenly stumbling in to bother
Gary at Knots Landing Motors. From
there, Gary takes him home to sleep it off and enjoy a nice dinner. Rather than sleeping, Earl sneaks a bottle
out of his shoe (clever boy) and manages to stay drunk. When Val prepares a nice meal for everyone
(including Judy, who is invited over), Earl kinda ruins everything with his
drunkenness. First he’s just mean and
nasty verbally, but then he starts breaking things, including some plates that
Val just purchased and was so excited
about using. Then he pretty much leaves
the house.
Following all
those events, it’s a little bit later that Gary is reading Judas Squad in bed when the phone rings. Earl is hauled up in some dive bar or
something, so Gary comes to rescue him.
The two go out for black coffee and Gary gives the memorable bit of
advice that all alcoholics need to learn to drink a lot of coffee. However,
Earl will have none of it; he declares that (much like the title of the ep
suggests) every good time he ever had in his life involved alcohol, and he’s
“Not ready for the good times to end yet.”
Therefore, he ditches Gary and vanishes into the connecting bar, leading
to probably my favorite scene of the episode.
The director of
this particular ep (James Sheldon, pictured below, who actually just recently died at age 95 in March of 2016) really does some great work towards making
this bar look extremely frightening.
It’s lit all dark, with just that sorta red filter coming from all the
light up signs, and it’s sorta shot in slow motion from Gary’s point of view as
he enters, turning all the laughing, smiling bar-goers into something rather
grotesque and upsetting. He also keeps
cutting to extreme close-ups of Gary’s anguished face as he tries to push
through into the bar and rescue Earl. In
truth, the whole sequence probably lasts less than sixty seconds, but it’s one
of those scenes that has seared itself into my brain ever since I first watched
it. It’s effective and it really makes
me feel afraid to go near a bar.
But wait, what’s
going on with some of our other beloved characters on the cul-de-sac? Well, not to say that Kenny and Ginger are
beloved by anyone, but they do get some material in this episode, so I suppose
we have to discuss it. Basically, the
two are still split up, as you’ll recall that Kenny was carrying on having an
affair in the closing hours of season one.
Well, now he and Ginger are split up and he’s just fucking his whore,
Sylvie, but you can tell he wants to get back with Ginger. When we first see Ginger, she is returning
from a date with some forgettable guy who also won’t take no for an
answer. Seriously, this dude wants to
come into her house and he wants to come in right
now. It doesn’t matter that Ginger
is not interested, and she practically has to slam the door in his face to make this potential rapist go away.
Then the phone
rings and it’s Kenny, asking her how she’s doing, blah blah blah. Their basic storyline this week is that Kenny
convinces Ginger to go out with him to one of their favorite restaurants, some
corny Italian place where they, I guess, first fell in love. For whatever reason, Ginger agrees, the two
go out and enjoy a romantic dinner, and then they go back to her place and
screw. After the bop in the sack, Kenny
is starting to get cocky (no pun intended), seeming to think that he’s in the clear, officially
back in her life. Well, that’s not quite
so, as Ginger explains that their little physical displays from the night
before do not mean he is now welcome back into her home as her husband.
You guys already
know this without me saying it, but I hate these characters and just can never
possibly care about what’s going on with them.
We’ve gotta suffer through three more seasons of them, so I guess I can
deal with it, but God damn if they’re not uninteresting. Just to show that I’m not crazy, My Beloved
Grammy has also confirmed that Kenny and Ginger are her least favorite
characters on the cul-de-sac (and, for those readers who are curious, at this
juncture she declares that Sid and Karen are her favorite characters on the
show). A lot of the material Kenny and
Ginger are given to work with this season is classic nighttime soap stuff that
could work and should work if it was
handled by better actors. Sadly, James Houghton and Kim Lankford are just so fundamentally bland and uninteresting to
watch; no matter what material the writers throw at them, I’m always going to
wind up bored and annoyed with it.
On the other hand,
in the department of characters I could never
possibly grow bored or annoyed with, we have Richard and Abs. There is some deliciously risqué and
flirtatious dialogue in this particular ep, starting with Abs asking Richard if
he would like to come over and swim in her pool. His response?
“Will I need my trunks?” Oooh,
baby, no sir, you won’t be needing your trunks!
However, throwing some of Abby’s decisions into question, she also
expresses an interest in Kenny when he shows up, being rather flirtatious with
him, as well. My conclusion is that Abs
is a new arrival on the block and she isn’t quite sure what she wants just
yet. I’m sure if she knew that Kenny was
a boring block of wood, she would not pursue him, but how could she know that
if she’s only been on the block a short time?
Abs has a date, so
she hires Eric Fairgate to be her babysitter while she’s out painting the town
red. However, midnight comes and goes
and there’s still no sign of Abs, prompting Karen to show up at 16969 Seaview
Circle around 1:00AM to make sure everything is alright. When Eric tells her Abs is still not home,
Karen tells him to go home and says she will wait for their beloved aunt to
materialize. Now, the DVD box said that
this episode features, “Karen’s first showdown with Abby.” Yes, this is true, but it’s not really a big
thing; mostly it’s setting up lots of future showdowns to come. Abs does eventually come home in the early
morning and Karen reminds her that she has two small children spending their
first night in a new house. A good
mother would stay home and make sure they feel safe and protected. Abs asks if the kids woke up even once in a
fright and Karen tells her they did not.
There’s no screaming or yelling or cool lines about “You are such a
bitch” or any of that stuff we’re gonna get a little later on, but it’s still a
good little scene and Donna Mills and Michele Lee both play their parts just
right. You gotta pace yourself with this
stuff, and we’ve got nine seasons of Abs to enjoy, so why rush things? For the purposes of this sequence, we are
planting seeds that tell us Abs is a bit of a village bicycle and that Karen
does not approve of her general lifestyle.
Okay, back to our
main arc. Eventually we wind up in a
super sleazy, super dirty little motel room in the red light district (and the
reason I know it’s the red light district is because there’s a constantly
flashing red light going on forever and ever and nobody thinks to maybe draw the shades and block that horrifying
red light out). Earl is detoxing in bed,
and he doesn’t look happy. Once again, I
reiterate that I’m not sure where this fits on the realistic category. Detoxing can be extremely dangerous,
particularly if someone is a really heavy alcoholic as Earl obviously is. Generally, detoxing should be done under the
care and supervision of a professional doctor, not in some gross red-lit motel
room with only Gary and Judy around to supervise. However, since this is still 1980, I’ll give
the characters the benefit of the doubt and assume that they don’t know the
dangers inherent in the dry detox. Also,
it works out fairly well for them, as Earl survives his detox and lives to face
another day, as well as two more eps of KL
(he will be returning later this season in the eps Breach of Faith and More Than Friends).
The actual final
scene of the ep is a little bit blah, but I’ll forgive it since I have the
retroactive knowledge that this story will pay off later in the season. If this was it for the saga of Gary and Earl and Judy, I would be very
disappointed in the ep and would not feel satisfied with it. However, since I know Gary and Judy are going
to start having an affair very shortly, I’m more patient with the rather dull
ending of this particular ep. Basically,
Gary and Val go walking off into the sunset and Gary is feeling really special
because he helped out a fellow alcoholic.
He says something like, “I did it all by myself!” and we freeze frame on
that. Like I said, not particularly
memorable, but have some patience, because this is all building towards
something.
Speaking of
building towards something, there was one event in this episode that I did not
remember at all and which I can only assume is building up to a storyline later
in the season. It’s a quick little scene
taking place in the Fairgate kitchen, but it essentially involves Michael
acting like a weirdo and making a big mess.
First, he pours his milk all over the table, pretty much missing the
cereal bowl he was aiming for. Now
there’s spilled milk all over the table, right?
Karen tells him to clean it up, so what does he do? He starts to just sorta…..rub it with his
hand? I don’t think this has ever been
proven as an effective method of cleaning up any sort of spill, but whatever,
Michael just rubs and rubs at the milk with his hand, only succeeding in
expanding the spill exponentially.
Finally, he starts to mop it up with his shirt rather than, you know, a
napkin or some paper towels. At this point,
Karen says she’ll clean it up for him and he goes running off and that’s pretty
much the scene.
I note this scene
because a little later in the season (can’t remember the exact title of the ep,
but we can’t be that far away from it), it is revealed that Michael has ADD and
we have an entire episode devoted to his attention deficit problems. Rather hilariously (as well as rather
sloppily, which is unlike the usual quality of writing on KL), Michael’s ADD problems are mentioned I think one more time in the season and then
completely forgotten about and never mentioned again in the next twelve
years. However, I can only assume that
this bizarre little sequence exists to set up that later plotpoint, and I do
give the writers kudos for setting it up so early. Other writers would just say, “Okay, time for
that ADD episode; let’s get cracking,” but here, they are setting it up well in
advance, and I appreciate that.
As an overall
episode, this one is only okay. I liked
it fine and it went down easy and I was never bored (aside from when Kenny and
Ginger were onscreen). At the same time,
the ep was only okay. It was fine.
Despite many aspects I liked (such as Abs and Karen having their first
little talk with each other and the wonderfully creepy scene of Gary entering
the bar, not to mention the generally hilarious performance of The Other Paul Rudd as Earl), it was also just sorta there,
if that makes sense. The episode came
and went and it was fine, but I don’t think it’s one that’s going to stick out
in my brain for terribly long. Make no
mistake, this ep is heads and shoulders above say, Land of the Free or The Constant Companion (and I’d even place it above an episode we have coming
up, the one entitled Kristin), but
it’s not as good as either Hitchhike: Part One or Hitchhike: Part Two. I like the fact that the episode is setting
things up to pay off later in the season, but if someone watched just this
episode all by itself, totally standalone, I doubt they would be all that
impressed.
However, on the
opposite end of the spectrum, for episodes that blast through the conventions
of television and achieve some special form of high art, we need look no
further than our very next story, a wonderful episode written by The Plesh
himself and featuring a fabulous guest star in Brian Dennehy. That’s right, folks, next up is season two,
episode four, the episode entitled Chance of a Lifetime. Talk to you then!
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