#patti mayonnaise

Doug and Skeeter are having a good time skateboarding in the park when they are struck with awe for the preparations for Bluffington Civic Pride Day.

It’s really not that impressive. It’s just a bunch of construction workers erecting a stage under the supervision of the mayor. Skeeter is impressed with the size of the stage. Mayor Dink takes questions from reporters.

Mayor Dink gives a general rundown of the standard activities they’ll have at the event, and surprises everyone with a new event. There will be a contest to write an official town song. Everyone is encouraged to write a song and perform it at the event. The winner, obviously, will be the official town song. Everyone seems thrilled by the idea, especially…

Of course they’re going to write a song. And of course Doug has a fantasy about this…

I don’t know that either of them actually plays piano. In the fantasy, they’re playing a waltz and singing and you have to wonder how Doug imagined this full song in his head immediately. Later, you’ll wonder if he pitched the song to Skeeter and Skeeter shot it down, because they don’t even try to play it. After the fantasy, Doug tells Skeeter they’re going to write the winning song. He narrates that he didn’t know at the time that the contest would come between him and one of his very best friends. Spoiler alert: it’s not Skeeter.

So, news of the song contest spread and everyone in town is writing a song. Every student in school has an instrument and they’re working out something. Teachers are working on their own songs. Cleopatra is apparently working on a song.

Her song is going to suck but everyone will call it the greatest thing ever because she is a baby. It doesn’t matter how much a baby sucks at something she shouldn’t be able to do at all.

Mr. Dink bought a mini portable fold-a-matic fuel injected digital recording studio that writes songs for him.

This seems unfair for two reasons: the machine writes the song and Mr. Dink is married to the mayor. Anyway, the first song it writes sucks, with the lyrics, “my love lives under a rock in Bluffington.” So he won’t win anyway.

Meanwhile, Doug and Skeeter are working on their song.

Skeeter sings, “the best town in the world is Bluffington. It’s not just a nothing-ton.” Doug stops playing and criticizes the lyrics, so Skeeter challenges him to think of something that rhymes with Bluffington. Before they can return to song practice, Patti shows up with a basketball and a tempting offer to shoot some hoops at the park.

They tell her they’re working on their song, but they’re stuck on lyrics. She tells them she’s having similar problems with her song. They ask to hear her song, but she says it’s not really finished and it’s probably no good. She removes a sheet of paper from her backpack and lets them read it over. Doug says the lyrics are fantastic. Skeeter agrees. Doug asks her to sing while they play backup. She agrees…

…and Doug reacts.

Because Patti is a terrible singer. The lyrics are great, in the way that they sound like they’d be lyrics for an official town song. They’re cheesy and sentimental, but they’re supposed to be. Anyway, the song abruptly ends when Doug breaks a string.  When Patti asks how her singing was, Doug grins and has a fantasy. It’s weirdly based on the George Washington myth about cutting down a cherry tree.

Since Doug Washington cannot tell a lie, he admits that he cut down the tree and her singing is horrible. She retaliates by dumping a bucket of cherries on his head.

After the fantasy, Patti is still waiting for an answer as Doug hallucinates this old trope.

Patti Angel wants Doug to tell the truth because Patti wants him to be honest. Roger Devil says she’ll never speak to him again if he tells her the truth. Doug quickly caves to Roger Devil and finally tells Patti she did great. Skeeter and Porkchop are confused.

Patti believes him. She asks for confirmation that she was great, not just good. Then she looks at her watch and says she has to go meet Chalky. After she’s gone, Skeeter speculates that his ears must be broken because he thought she sounded terrible. Miserably, Doug admits that Skeeter’s ears are not broken. “Her singing stinks like yesterday’s magic mystery meat.”

Skeeter asks why he lied and he says he didn’t want to hurt her feelings. Skeeter points out that she asked him to be honest. Doug asks, “what could it hurt?”

At school the next day, Connie is practicing her song at lunch.

Roger tells them to stop wasting their time. His group, Roger and the Klotztones “has this contest in the bag.”

They sing a song and it could be from Grease. Also, it’s insulting like Beauty School Dropout, so it’s got that going for it too.

Doug admits Roger is pretty good. Connie says they have to be, considering the competition. Patti runs up, excited to tell Doug she signed them up for the contest. Doug is drinking milk at the time, so he does a spit take.

Patti credits him with giving her the nerve to sing in front of all those people. Doug has fucked himself.

Doug is lost in thought when Patti makes him reaffirm his opinion that she’s a great singer. Now would be a good moment to come clean, but he doesn’t. He just agrees and goes into a fantasy as Patti says, “we’ll be the monster hit of the show!”

Yes, literally. They’re running from the villagers as Patti finally gets Doug to admit he lied to her. But it’s just a fantasy, so…

Before practice, Doug tells Skeeter they have to stop her before she humiliates herself on stage. Skeeter asks, “why don’t you just tell her the truth?” Finally putting that genius brain to good use.

Doug says he can’t hurt Patti’s feelings like that before wondering if there’s some way to keep her out of the contest. Here’s a question no one asks: why doesn’t Skeeter tell her the truth? He’s part of this too. He’s her friend too. Doug lied, and he’s a piece of shit for it and yes he should tell her the truth, but continuing the lie because shitty Doug is a coward only hurts Patti more, right? I would love this episode more if Skeeter just threw Doug under the bus here.

Anyway, Doug thinks of something. He asks Patti to go to the Funkytown Fritter Fry.

It’s on the same day as the Bluffington Civic Pride Day. Why are these events on the same day? Bold move, Funkytown. For the record, I would go to neither of these events. I have no pride in where I live, no interest in fried carnival food, and I hate crowds. Patti just thinks Doug is kidding, so that’s that plan shot down.

Later, Doug explains the situation to his dad.

Phil tells him the best solution is to just tell her the truth. Phil uses an Uncle Harold as an example of how no one in his family has the courage to tell someone something embarrassing. Apparently Uncle Harold wore a toupee inside out for years and no one ever told him. So to be clear, Phil is telling Doug he should do a thing his family has a clear history of being unable to do. Unfortunately, he says something that gives Doug an idea. He says, “I’m sure she never heard herself sing.”

Doug gets everyone over to Mr. Dink’s recording studio so they can record a demo tape. His plan, obviously, is to let Patti hear how bad she is on the recording. Unfortunately, her singing is so terrible, the equipment, even the popcorn machine, starts to malfunction and spark and smoke and shake.

Despite the malfunctions, they still get a demo. Upon listening to it, Patti says it sounds terrible. Doug is tentatively excited, thinking his plan worked, but Patti speculates that there must be something wrong with Mr. Dink’s equipment.

With that plan in the toilet, Doug has to try something drastic. He has asked Mayor Dink to disqualify his group from the contest. Why should she disqualify his group? Because he is not a native Bluffingtonian. He was born elsewhere.

Mayor Dink laughs off this suggestion. She says the only qualifications you need are that you love Bluffington and you have heart. Another shitty plan in the toilet.

Mayor Dink says she’s not worried about technicalities. She’s worried about the weather. It’s currently raining, and if it doesn’t stop, Pride Day might be cancelled.

Doug tries to hide his excitement by saying, “I guess everyone will just have to spend another boring Saturday hanging out at the mall.” Unfortunately, this gives Mayor Dink the idea to move the event to the mall. It’ll be indoors so haha, fuck you, weather. Mayor Dink adds one last thing that makes Doug feel worse.

“Maybe we can even get the mall radio station to broadcast the song contest!”

Do malls have radio stations? Is that a thing? I don’t think that’s a thing. If it’s a thing, I’m going to need a job at one of these mall radio stations. Oh, so this is a fantasy Doug is having. The mall broadcasts their song and aliens hear it.

“MAKE THE EARTH CREATURES STOP!”

Is anyone keeping track of the number of Doug’s fantasies that have resulted in the total destruction of the planet?

After the fantasy, Doug moans loudly, “now look what I did!”

Finally, he decides to tell Patti the truth. Lucky for him, she’s actually sick.

She’s lost her voice and she won’t be able to sing in the contest.

Doug immediately has a fantasy where he’s on a green hill in the mountains while “Hallelujah Chorus” plays.

After the fantasy, Doug tries to play it cool. Patti is too sick to notice, and suggests they just get Connie to sing the song. Doug likes this idea.

Finally, Bluffington Civic Pride Day is here. To kick off the song contest, we have this barbershop quartet featuring Mr. Swirly, Mr. Valentine, and two other guys who probably have names.

Please note that Mr. Swirly is wearing a fake black mustache over his real white mustache.

There are bizarre happenings, like a pilgrim giving away turnips on sticks, and turnip sack races, and snail races

Backstage, Mayor Dink tells everyone to be ready when their name is called. We get a brief glimpse of everyone practicing their songs. It’s pretty great. It’s like everyone staked out their genre of music so a lot is represented and it’s not all just trying to be The Beets. Most importantly, Connie sounds great singing Patti’s song.

Connie says it was easy since Patti wrote such a good song. Mayor Dink calls for Fentruck. It’s his turn.

“Bluffington, you do not disgust me.
let me count so(?) how many ways.
Number one: the people smell almost always
better than a herd of goats do.”

It goes on from there, of course, but we have to go backstage again to where Mayor Dink is telling Doug his group is up next. They do a collective high five right before Patti walks up to break the great news to them. Her voice is back.

Connie gladly tells Patti she can sing her own song. Connie is glad just to play backup guitar. Doug says Patti sounds kind of hoarse, so maybe she should rest her voice. Patti reassures him that her voice is great. Doug has a fantasy.

She’s not even halfway through the first line when the vegetables start flying. They’re piling up around her while she happily sings along, oblivious to all the hate she’s receiving. I especially like this fantasy because Doug believes that maybe everyone in town brought vegetables to the Bluffington Civic Pride Day event just in case someone sucks so bad they need to be traumatically insulted.

After the fantasy, Doug tries to say they made some changes Patti doesn’t know about. Connie quickly shuts this down, saying, “we haven’t changed that much.”

Finally, and after much sweating and stalling, Doug says, “maybe singing isn’t what you do best. Sometimes what you’re singing…doesn’t exactly match the notes.”

Doug says he didn’t want to hurt her feelings and she tells him he did anyway. So now they both feel terrible. Good job, Doug!

Mayor Dink introduces their group and they apparently went with the name The Funnie Farm, so that’s appropriate for the situation. Before they go onstage, Patti says, “I trusted you to be honest with me and you lied. I don’t know if I’ll ever be able to trust you again.”

Onstage, they start playing and Doug quits almost immediately.

He sees Patti on the side of the stage looking sad and stops the song completely.

Doug apologizes for the lack of singing. He wants to introduce a special guest. He calls out Patti, and says she’ll recite a poem.

While everyone in the audience waits to hear another shitty song about how great their town is, Doug apologizes to Patti.

Doug says she wrote some really great words and everyone should hear them from her. So she joins them and recites the lyrics she wrote while they play the song they wrote and it works perfectly.

It’s exactly the kind of sentimental crap that would win a contest like this.

“My home town is ice cream
And soccer games at school.
Walks with my dad on weekends
when the air is turning cool.
My home town is neighbors
children, cats, and dogs.
And watching folks at sun up
on early morning jogs.
Some people think that happiness
can only be found far away.
But my home town is full of friends
and that’s where my heart will stay.”

“So, Journal. Everything turned out fine. Even though we didn’t get the prize. Oh, by the way, the winner was Fentruck.”

Doug writes, “Patti got a special citation for her poem.” Doug concludes his journal entry saying he’s learned his lesson about being honest when someone asks for his honesty. Then his parents enter his room to show off the hats they bought at Pride Day. They want to know his honest opinion about them. They’re pretty cool right?

Right?

Who do I have to fuck to get a full recording of the entire song Fentruck wrote? He ends the song on number 22, which is “for liking me I’m thanking you with all my face.” I need to know all the reasons why Bluffington does not disgust Fentruck. If Doug had just told Patti the truth from the beginning this episode would feature a lot less conflict, and a lot more of Fentruck’s song. Doug’s attempts to get disqualified or to trick Patti into going somewhere else during the contest wouldn’t have eaten up so much of this episode’s run-time and we could have had that time to hear Fentruck’s song. If Doug hadn’t needed to talk to Patti while Fentruck was singing, we could have watched Fentruck sing.

Doug, Patti, Skeeter, Porkchop, and Dirtbike are rocking out to The Beets.

They’re enjoying a broadcast of a Beets concert. Doug narrates that they’ve always been his favorite group, when they are still a group. The concert is interrupted in the middle of a song by breaking news that The Beets have once again broken up. Doug, Patti, Skeeter, Porkchop and Dirtbike don’t stop dancing while discussing this news. Doug is a little disappointed. Patti says they’ll get back together. Judy intrudes on their fun, and asks Doug why he insists on destroying his brain with that commercial pap. She turns off the tv.

She wants to play her latest artistic composition that “proves there is more to music than rhythm and melody.” Her tape is a series of loud, disharmonic sounds that causes everyone else in the room to cover their ears and wail for it to be turned off, while Judy is doing some sort of interpretive dance.

She stops the tape only because their wailing is the perfect sound to add to it, and she must record it.

Lunch talk at school the next day is all about The Beets. There’s rumors that Flounder is starting a new band in Bluffington, looking for a new direction in music.

Doug says he hopes he doesn’t change too much. He likes the sound of The Beets. He gets up to put his tray away, but his sock snags on the table and he trips.

Roger promptly mocks Doug for wearing big, loose socks.

Today is Phil and Theda’s anniversary. Theda loves the present Doug got them.

It’s just a photo of Doug and Porkchop in an apparently handmade frame. Phil is also pleased, though the screenshot I took makes it look like he thinks it sucks.

Judy stands up to dedicate her new performance piece to her parents. The piece is called “Savage Cheese.” Before she begins, the doorbell rings. Theda jumps up to answer it, presumably eager to delay “Savage Cheese” as much as possible.

At the door is a Skin Deep Beauty representative.

She’s trying to sell makeup by the bucket, which is a good indication that it is crap. There are a number of things that are totally reasonable to sell this way. Certain fruits or nuts, perhaps. An overflowing bucket of makeup is an overflowing bucket of crap.

The woman is offering a make-over and Theda doesn’t much care for the idea. The woman gives her a card, in case she wants to try beauty, Skin Deep. It’s really a terrible business model to take an idiom that means conventional beauty is a poor indicator of personal character, name your company after that idiom, and then go around telling everyone they need to look beautiful. I can see that you are a person with no or poor character; won’t you buy a bucket of makeup so you can at least look pretty? Furthermore, you know what women need? Strangers ringing their doorbell to tell them they should try to be beautiful, for a change. Aren’t you tired of how you look? I’ve got a bucket of makeup here and surely something in this bucket can do something to make your face look better. I mean, I hope. You’re not giving me a lot to work with here, Theda!

Anyway…

Theda returns to her family, already thinking about getting that make-over. Phil asks who was at the door and she explains. Phil thinks the idea is kind of ridiculous. Doug likes that she always looks the same. Judy is happy her mother isn’t a slave to fashion. With each of their responses, they have made the idea of a make-over that much more intriguing.

Finally, Theda opens the gift Phil got her for their anniversary. She is excited until she sees what it is. Then she’s confused. Phil explains that it’s a waffle iron that makes waffles in the shape of Marlaine LeFlame.

Phil is too enthusiastic about this dumb shit gift to see that Theda is annoyed.

Meanwhile, Flounder is rehearsing with his new band.

Yeah, those guys. Flounder stops rehearsal because he needs a new sound. Right now they sound too much like The Beets. While he’s thinking, an explosion of incomprehensible sounds excites him. The engineer in the booth apologizes and explains that the sounds are just some “nutty tape I recorded for a girl as a favor to my cousin Cassius.” Flounder likes the shit.

At the Funnie house, Theda is doing nothing in the kitchen. She’s just standing there, hearing echoes of her family’s comments about her looks. She uses the waffle iron as a mirror before pulling the Skin Deep card out of her pocket.

Porkchop starts freaking out about something happening outside. Doug jumps up to see what’s going on.

Seeing Flounder walking up to his front door immediately triggers a fantasy.

Flounder knows Doug is really busy with middle school, but he needs a new sound.

Doug is the only one who can help him.

Granted Flounder’s fashion isn’t far off from Doug’s to begin with (it’s really pretty close to Philip J. Fry’s…) but I like the detail in Doug’s fantasy. When you ask Doug for a new sound, you get a banjo, a sweater vest, and a baseball shirt.

How else could this interaction go?

After the fantasy, Doug answers the door and Flounder asks for Judy.

Doug confirms that she lives here but asks why he’d want to talk to her. Before Flounder can explain, Judy comes to the door.

Flounder says he wanted to meet the person who made that tape of shitty noises. She starts to be a condescending, pretentious asshole to him, but he interrupts her to tell her how much he liked the tape. She says she was just working on her latest piece that “expresses the indifference of society to artistic otherness of the other.” So she plays that for him. Doug is perplexed.

They sat on the front porch listening to Judy’s crap for hours. Doug is thoroughly annoyed by this, so Porkchop (who has been listening to his own music on a walkman) struts in and shuts Doug’s fucking window. Why didn’t Doug think of this extremely simple solution? Because he’s fucking stupid. His dog is smarter than he is.

Toward the end of the night, Flounder is just agreeing with every stupid pretentious thing Judy says. She’s skeptical of his commitment to being a pretentious asshole, but none of that matters once he finally asks her if she wants to get coffee sometime. She tries to hide her excitement and comes up with a pretty good cover for how getting coffee somehow plays into her above-it-all persona.

I don’t know how old Flounder is supposed to be, but I’m not sure it matters because Judy is still in high school and it is fucking creepy that they have started dating.

And he started dressing like her! It sort of weirdly implies that Doug’s fantasy involved Flounder dating him.

Doug says it wasn’t long before everyone started talking about Flounder and Judy. Beebe and Connie flag him down at lunch and insist he sit with them even though he hasn’t even grabbed his lunch yet.

Neither has Connie for that matter…

They want to know if the rumors are true. Doug is hesitant, but confirms that Judy and Flounder are dating. Beebe offers him some imported chocolates. Connie compliments his hair.

Now that he has a rock star in the family, they are interested. Connie is particularly interested in his newfound ability to get front row tickets to certain concerts. Doug doesn’t know about any concert, so Beebe says Flounder has a concert next Friday with his new band. Before Doug can think about being indignant about their disingenuous affection for him, Roger interrupts.

“Hey, Funnie! About those socks…”
“Cut it out, Roger.”
“They’re very cool.”

Scroll back up and look at how angry Boomer, Willie, and Ned are. They may be wearing loose socks, but they are fucking pissed at Doug. Anyway, this is a fucking ridiculous ploy. Roger is rich. When faced with two options, flaunting his wealth or sucking up to Doug, he chose to suck up to Doug in such a stupid way.

Walking through the halls at school, everyone says hello to him. Doug doesn’t understand his popularity, somehow. I mean, it’s not hard to imagine Doug doing the same kind of sucking up to someone else in a similar situation, is it?

After school, Doug asks Patti and Skeeter, “if I can get front row tickets to the concert, do you guys want to come?” Of course they do. If he can get tickets. Connie intrudes and wants Doug to promise he’ll get her a ticket too.

Then Beebe intrudes to make sure Doug wouldn’t get Connie a better ticket than he got her. Then Roger wants to make sure Doug wouldn’t leave him and his goons out. Then an entire crowd of people who don’t even have names because Doug hasn’t interacted with them enough that it needed mention in his journal want tickets.

Look at these parasites. They chase Doug home.

I can only hope this is an exaggeration by Doug when he wrote this down in his journal.

Doug has to slam the door on the crowd. Before Doug can catch his breath, Theda calls him from the kitchen. He enters the kitchen, ready to ask his mom about his problem, but he is confronted by a stranger.

He apologizes and says he’s looking for his mom, Theda Funnie. It’s weird. Doug doesn’t realize this is his mom, so he apologizes to, essentially, a total stranger for apparently intruding on her privacy in his home. He tries to clarify who he’s looking for like he mistook her for someone else at the mall. After he finally catches up, he says she looks like a movie star, then corrects himself to “two movie stars.” I don’t know what the fuck that’s supposed to mean, but Theda takes it as flattery.

Phil enters the kitchen and has much the same reaction as Doug. He catches on quicker though. He is dumbstruck, then decides to get his camera. Thrilled, Theda consults her new mirror that also can make waffles if you’re into that sort of thing.

Theda apparently does not like waffles.

At the recording studio, Judy has taken over the band rehearsals. First, she’s annoyed the drummer, whose name is apparently Eric (I honestly don’t know if his name was established before this), keeps using drum sticks. She insists that he needs to use ferns instead.

She says it’s an homage to the rainforest.

Next, she’s upset with Norman.

She doesn’t want him tuning his guitar anymore.

Eric asks Flounder why she’s always bossing them around. Flounder explains that she’s creating an artistic vision for the band. Norman says she’s creating a giant pain in his neck. She says all this descension is draining her creativity.

Doug intrudes on this shitty situation to ask Flounder for tickets. Their gratuitous male bonding interrupts Judy’s meditation. 

Judy says her friends will occupy the front row. Flounder says there’s enough seats for her family and friends, and he’ll still have some left over.

This excites Doug and he has a fantasy. 

“And now presenting, the longest front row in rock and roll history!”

Like it’s the main attraction.

After the fantasy, Flounder does the math and tells Doug he can have three tickets. Doug has a fantasy about this too and it somehow makes even less sense.

He has three seats, so naturally everyone still came with him and then they attempted to pile into those three seats.

Somewhere near the top, Beebe points out this is all Doug’s fault and then commands the pile of people to get him.

At home, Phil has set up all his photography equipment and retrieved all his cameras so he can document his wife’s transformation. At some point, I hope she resents him for this.

Judy is indignant for her, right now. Phil is insisting they go out to eat again. He can’t have his “new wife slaving over a hot stove.”

Fuck you, you stupid fucking asshole. This is such a terrible attitude to have about your partner.

Theda tries to tell her shithead husband that she likes to cook but he ignores her. She sits back down at the table, sad. Doug narrates, “it’s weird. I was popular and mom was glamorous. So why weren’t we smiling?”

The next day at school, Doug is growing tired of his popularity. People have stuffed his locker with balloons and gifts and he’s annoyed by this.

Everyone else figured out the combination to Doug’s locker except Roger. Roger presents his gift in person.

How much did that jacket cost, Roger? Was it more or less expensive than a front row ticket? How much more or less? Did they ask for your dignity and self respect when they were selling the tickets or did you think you’d just give that up anyway. It’s not like there was much of that to begin with, right?

Doug wants to explain to Roger that he’s only got three tickets, but Beebe interrupts to tell him she’s stocked her dad’s limo with Peanutty Buddies. What time should she pick him up?

Before Doug can explain to Beebe, Connie interrupts with a song she wrote for him.

It’s not a good song and no one in the hall likes it.

At home, Flounder asks Doug what’s upsetting him.

Doug explains and Flounder apologizes for the fact that he only has three tickets left. Doug understand this. He knows getting even 3 free tickets is more than he has any right to expect. He just wants to know how to decide who to invite.

Flounder actually has some good advice for this. He says, “when you’re famous, or even know somebody famous, everybody wants to be your friend. it gets hard to tell if people really like you for yourself.” Basically, Doug should invite people who like him whether he gets them tickets or not.

Everyone gathers at Doug’s house for their free front row tickets. Doug nervously admits that he kept trying to tell everyone he couldn’t get tickets.

He apologizes and no one gives a shit.

They immediately disperse. They might be searching for pitchforks and torches.

Doug is a jerk. Not because he didn’t get them tickets. He’s a jerk because he waited until the day of the concert to tell them he didn’t get the tickets. If he had told them up front, they would have had the opportunity to buy their own tickets. Presumably the show is sold out and now their only option is to buy tickets from scalpers. You could argue that he tried to tell them but he kept getting interrupted and talked over, but it would be less rude for him to interrupt back and shout, “FUCK YOU I CAN’T GET YOU TICKETS, YOU FREELOADING SCUM,” than to sheepishly agree to get everyone tickets, then leave them hanging on the day of the concert. Anyway, after the crowd disperses, two people remain.

Doug asks if they were mad. They understand. Skeeter is just happy Doug will get to tell him about the concert. Doug is not surprised and neither is Porkchop.

Walking into the concert, brazenly wearing the jacket Roger gave him, Doug is confronted by Beebe. She says she had to dip into her trust fund to buy the only remaining seats, and those seats are in the nosebleed section.

She also gives him a bill for the imported chocolate. Connie says she rewrote her song. Roger wants the jacket back.

Willie, Ned, and Boomer look as angry as ever.

Backstage, Judy is telling the band that everything about their costumes and props is wrong.

Eric is upset that he’s holding carrots, asking if they are an homage to bunnies, before he throws them down and quits the band.

Norman also quits. Judy is glad they finally quit. She’s glad only the true artists remain.

The arena is packed when Doug, Skeeter, and Patti finally take their seats.

Please note that Porkchop is already there. When Flounder was calculating how many tickets he could give Doug, he had already committed one ticket to a fucking dog. He had three tickets leftover because he did not count Doug among his group of people needing tickets, but Doug’s dog definitely needs a ticket.

Doug immediately notes his mom’s appearance. She’s back to classic Theda. She says, “well, my new look was fun for a while, but I decided I like being myself, beautiful or not. Besides, the kind of beauty you get from a make-over is only skin deep.” I don’t know what I could type here to indicate an annoyed groan, but maybe just imagine that was my response to Theda. Doug says she was always beautiful all the way through and Phil backs him up.

Finally the concert begins. For high pretentious art, naming the band “Flounder and the Plastic Judy Band” seems a bit uninspired. I couldn’t bother to take screenshots of all the shit Judy does during the first song. She’s banging on sheet metal, dropping anvils, honking horns, and banging on cans and bottles. The crowd exits en masse.

Flounder is somewhat perplexed. Judy says she expected it. The music was beyond their comprehension.

Flounder tells the remaining group of Funnies, Skeeter and Patti that they might as well leave too. Phil tells him they’re not going anywhere.

What an ideal situation! You have six occupied seats. They didn’t pay for those seats, so hopefully everyone that left during the first song doesn’t want a refund, or at least won’t get one. Now you get to play the full concert to six people and a dog, none of which can even pretend to like the music. They’re just there to support you and your massive failure. Porkchop is the only one that planned for total bullshit.

Flounder dedicates the next song to the Funnies, for always being there for him. Patti and Skeeter should maybe take offense since they stayed as well, but whatever. For this song, Judy is playing the sawing-a-log-in-half. It’s not an easy instrument.

And it sounds like this…

After this disaster, are you surprised The Beets are back together? Before they start playing on the tv, Flounder thanks Judy for making him see music in a whole new way.

Judy is disappointed that Flounder has returned to The Beets when he was so close to being a real artist. Doug says, “I thought you liked Flounder.”

She replies, “as an artist, no. As a friend, I suppose he’s…tres cool.”

So, Doug, Patti, Skeeter and Porkchop return their dancing.

If I had to argue that Doug Funnie was not crazy, I’d use this episode. He’s maybe a dumb-ish kid, but being a little dumb is kind of what kids do. He’s at least not the dumbest kid in his school by far.

Doug’s school sure has a lot of special assemblies. Doug is barely interested in this episode’s special assembly because he’s working with Skeeter on a project for their civics class. They haven’t decided what the project should be yet. Skeeter has an idea; build a model of the capital building out of sugar cubes.

Doug doesn’t care for the idea. Skeeter says, “nothing impresses teachers like little buildings made out of food.”

Doug says he wants to do something special, so Skeeter suggests they build the courthouse out of mashed potatoes. This is what you get when a genius phones it in. Or maybe he skipped breakfast. I don’t know.

Finally, the assembly begins with Mr. Bone shouting unreasonably loud for everyone to shut up.

He threatens to move the entire assembly to detention if everyone doesn’t shut up. He then proves his value to the school and really earns that vice principal paycheck by introducing Principal Ex-Mayor White.

Principal White gets to the point relatively quick. This assembly is to let the students know they are introducing mandatory school uniforms.

All of the students gasp. Doug says, “aww, man,” like he’s disappointed by this new development.

Later, Doug narrates that the announcement hit the students like a wet blanket. Roger calls the idea lame. He adds, “if we all dress alike, how you gonna tell us rich kids from the losers?”

This is especially amusing coming from Roger. Roger was poor and he wore blue pants, a plain white shirt, and a black jacket. After his mom got rich, he cut the sleeves off of his jacket. I guess the reasoning is you can tell he’s rich now because wearing a vest is like saying, “I cut off the sleeves of this garment and donated them to a poor family so I could write off the expense of the whole jacket on my taxes. If you can’t donate your sleeves to my new charity, Sleeve the Poor, any little amount of money you can donate will go a long way to buying other jackets to remove the sleeves so they can be donated to poor families that can’t afford sleeves.” Anyway…

Beebe hates the idea too.

“Who would want to live in a world where we’re all seen as equals? It’s undemocratic!”

Fentruck is also opposed to the uniforms because of a dark period in Yakostonian history where everyone was forced to dress as cheerleaders.

Patti speculates that uniforms might not be so bad.

Skeeter says his cousin wears uniforms every day and likes it. He saves time in the morning because he doesn’t have to decide what to wear. Kids save money because they don’t have to keep up with the latest fashion trends. Patti is impressed and thinks that makes sense, ignoring the fact that they all wear the same thing every day anyway and kids would still have to buy other clothes unless they intended to wear the school uniform everywhere they go. What do you wear on a date? School uniform. Going camping? School uniform. Going to the movies? The arcade? Funky Town? Family getting together for Christmas? School uniform. So liberating to finally have clothes for every occasion, says the kids who already wear the same thing for every occasion anyway.

Beebe is still not convinced. She says nothing is going to tell her how to dress except peer pressure and trendy advertising. This is a little too self aware for Beebe, and luckily for her, Sally doesn’t let anyone call her out on it.

Sally is pissed. She says uniforms are a violation of their most basic right. Roger thinks she means “the right to flaunt it if you got it.” She’s too into it to call him a moron, so she continues about their right to freedom of expression. Patti agrees. Doug isn’t sure what he thinks.

Sally continues her rant, rallying the kids around the idea to write petitions to present to Principal White. Patti’s all in.

Doug and Skeeter don’t seem to care much. They still have to figure out what to do for the civics project. Patti says, “standing up for your rights is what civics is all about! I’m gonna help!”

Doug says, “too bad we can’t pass around petitions for our assignment.”

Skeeter again pitches the idea of making something out of food. Doug ignores Skeeter’s shitty suggestion because he has an idea. They’ll get a camera and follow Sally and the other students as they petition and protest the new school uniforms. They’ll make a sort of news report about the whole thing.

Skeeter is immediately on board, but still full of shitty ideas. He says, “we can shake the camera a lot like they do in the news. Zoom in and out! And we can shoot it in black and white…just ‘cause it’s cool. And if that doesn’t work, we can always build city hall out of cocktail weenies and aerosol cheese!”

So the petitioning is well under way. They’ve come up with this name for their protest organization.

Doug and Skeeter have a decent camera and lights and a microphone and they’re filming the overstated action. It doesn’t take long before they have plenty of signatures (an undefined amount) and they take a rather large stack of petitions to Principal White.

He immediately starts hamming it up for Doug and Skeeter’s camera. After Sally drops the stack of petitions on his desk, he says, “well now, this is exactly what I like to see. Nothing is as inspiring as students getting involved with school policy. I tell you, it’s young people like you that give us all hope for a brighter tomorrow! That and the knowledge that I will someday soon be mayor again.

As he continues, he picks up the stack of petitions and shoves them back into Sally’s hands. He says, "now I want to encourage you all to keep striving for your goals. Reach for the stars. Never give up! And remember, my door is always open.”

Mr. Bone is more direct in his approach to telling them to fuck off.

He says they have a special way of dealing with such important papers.

Oh, I don’t think they’ll all fit in that suggestion box, Mr. Bone. It just doesn’t look big enough…

Oh. Asshole. Mr. Bone is an asshole. He tells them there’s no room in the school for radicals and trouble makers and then promises to keep an eye on them.

At lunch, Sally is madder than ever. She’s demanding they organize a protest.

Doug and Skeeter are trying new camera tricks.

 The students start chanting “protest” and Patti really gets into it.

I think this is supposed to be Patti’s fantasy, but since Doug is always narrating the episode as he’s writing it in his journal, isn’t this really his idea of what Patti must be fantasizing about?

There’s not much to this fantasy. Sally is on horseback and leads Patti and her fellow horseless fighters to storm a castle that has smoke pouring out of it and apparently no defenders.

Basically, it seems like Sally is charging them into a defeated castle so they can suffocate. It’s a weird fantasy.

After the fantasy, all the students are cheering the idea of a protest and Sally says they’ll meet tomorrow morning on the front steps of the school for their official protest. Apparently, standing on a table in the cafeteria and encouraging the students to chant doesn’t count as a protest.

Meanwhile, in the Lunch Barn, Mr. Bone is spying on them. Why?

He’s the vice principal. Is he not allowed in the cafeteria during lunch? Have they broken none of his school rules? He threatened to give the whole school detention earlier when they didn’t shut up fast enough at the assembly, but standing on a table in the cafeteria and disrupting everyone’s lunch requires spying and unheard threats.

Patti is now passing out flyers advertising the next day’s protest in the hallway. It’s hard for me to understand how this makes any sense. When I was in middle school (when this episode originally aired…), I was in class pretty much all day. There was very little time between classes, and barely enough time to actually finish your lunch. So, sometime after lunch, Patti found the time to print up a bunch of flyers for a protest the next day, and now she’s just standing around handing them out. Did she use a school copier for that? Where was Mr. Bone and why was he not stopping that massive waste of school resources?

Sally approaches Patti with some bad news. Her voice is gone. She can barely whisper.

She asks Patti to give a speech at the protest tomorrow. Patti is reluctant.

The protest begins with a Connie song which is presumably called “Don’t Want Uniforms.”

Patti tells Sally she’s not sure she can do this. Sally reassures her that everyone is behind her. Mr. Bone is spying from the roof and has his own plan to stop the protest.

I don’t understand why Mr. Bone is handling this so poorly. He turns on the hose and nothing happens. Like an idiot, he points the hose at his face and says, “what’s blocking my flow?”

Of all the fucking places they could have put the ladder…

The hose bubble gets so big it pushes the ladder over and Doug and Skeeter are thrown into some bushes.

This is presumably a reference to any number of old cartoons and the oldest known comedy film and also the horrible treatment of civil rights protesters.

Mr. Bone just can’t do anything right.

Beebe gets splashed with a little water from the hose.

She says, “feel that? I think it’s gonna rain.” There are compounding layers of stupid to this. The sky is clear. Mr. Bone is yelling while being thrown about by a hose right above her head. If you are getting wet, it’s not going to rain; it is raining. Unless of course it’s obviously just a splash from a hose. Can none of these kids see the hose? What is happening to the students at this school? Anyway, she wants to introduce Patti now. At least they’ll get the big speech out of the way in case it rains. Fentruck introduces Patti in the traditional Yakistonian manner, which includes armpit farts and stomping while shouting “zvoopa” several times.

Patti is shoved onto the stage (Where did the stage come from? Did these kids who can’t see hoses or tell the difference between a man being tossed around by a hose and actual rain actually build a stage for this somewhat impromptu protest?) and she almost locks up. She’s very nervous.

Doug shouts words of encouragement and she starts speaking.

Slowly she starts to really get into it. She really gains confidence as the crowd gets more into her speech that she is totally just making up as she goes. As she starts droning on about the constitution, Doug has another fantasy for her. She’s the first female president.

After her speech, Mr. Bone emerges from behind part of the school and says, “alright you beatniks. The hootenanny is over! Get to class!”

Everyone disperses immediately. He didn’t even have to threaten them with detention.

The core group leading the protest remain to talk to Patti and discuss their next step.

Sally says they loved her. Fentruck says, “that was most inspiring. In my country, you would have been already in chains! And I am not just saying that.” Dark.

Roger says their next step should be throwing stink bombs into Mr. Bone’s office. Patti suggests they keep protesting in hopes that they can pressure Principal White to a debate. Roger doesn’t like the idea, but everyone else does so they pressure him to support it too.

Doug says, “we’ll call this shot 'The Bluffington 5.’” I doubt that Doug realizes he’s making a reference to something.

At the next protest, Patti buries the idea of school uniforms by actually digging a grave and throwing a couple uniforms into it.

They dug this hole on the football field, so I’m again left wondering why Mr. Bone hasn’t stopped the whole thing yet. The next protest is a candlelight vigil.

Unsurprisingly, the school paper has articles about S.P.U.D.

According to Guy, Patti is personally more popular than S.P.U.D.

Patti says the campaign isn’t about personalities but issues. She says they are all equal in S.P.U.D. but then uses her megaphone to tell the four other members that they’re slowing down. They’re walking a picket circle and beginning to resent Patti. They’re tired of doing all the work while she gets all the recognition. Still using her megaphone, she reassures them that no one is more important than anyone else, and also hold your signs higher.

Their next great idea is a hunger strike. They’ve chained themselves to a tree.

Mr. Bone is still spying on their various protests too. He’s got a brilliant idea to break up this little hunger strike.

He’s got the most amazing solution to this one. No, it’s not bolt cutters and detention slips. It’s cheese burger in a can. He’ll make them hungry!

Unfortunately, he loses his balance while he’s spraying the cheese burger scent, falls into a trash can, then rolls into the back of a passing garbage truck.

None of the hunger striking kids saw this happen or heard him screaming.

Sally tries to lead the group in a song. Roger proposes dirty tricks. Beebe suggests they get an army of lawyers and sue. Patti tells them to shut up. She says they only have to look hungry. Finally, over all these stupid little disagreements, the group starts breaking up. Roger says he’s going to start his own protest group. Beebe says she’ll start her own too. Fentruck too. Patti tells them they can’t leave because she gave the keys to Doug and he went to lunch.

With only Patti and Sally remaining in S.P.U.D., their next move is a sit down strike.

Two students walk past them and shrug. Sally asks how this is supposed to work, but before Patti can respond an actual news reporter from a local station approaches them for an interview. Principal White immediately interrupts to talk about himself and how he’s going to be Mayor again.

The reporter doesn’t give a shit about Principal White. He asks Patti and Sally if they have the support of the entire student body. They don’t really explain that they don’t have the support before the reporter loses interest in them and asks Doug and Skeeter if they support it. Doug says, “yeah,” but seems unsure and Skeeter says he’s not sure how he feels about it. Principal White jumps back in front of the camera

“Now as I always say: nothing’s as inspiring as young persons getting involved with school policy. And I want to say how much I admire their gumption! The same quality, I must say, that will once again make me an effective mayor come the next election.”

Patti takes this opportunity to corner Principal White into agreeing to a debate. At first he seems unsure, like he’s trying to find a way out of it, but then asks the reporter if it will be on tv. When the reporter confirms, Principal White commits to the debate. He says he is in favor of televised democracy and will personally choose the person that will be arguing his side.

Patti and Sally celebrate this small victory right up until Sally says she’ll clobber whoever Principal White picks. Even though Sally is the captain of the debate team, Patti doesn’t think she should be the one debating.

Patti wants to debate. She’s the one that challenged the principal. She’s the one they’ll listen to and believe. Sally quits.

At the debate, Doug mentions that, along with Skeeter of course, he got permission to tape the event. Disrupt lunch. Disrupt the hallways. Dig huge holes in the football field. Chain yourself to a tree. Do whatever you fucking want, but if you tape this debate without permission, I don’t know what Mr. Bone is going to do to you but you’ll fucking deserve it.

Doug points out the new splinter groups from S.P.U.D.

Roger’s group is Students Oppose Uniform Rules.

Sally’s group is Serious Students Organized Uniform Protest.

Fentruck’s one man group is named B.A.B.U.S.H.K.A. and I’m not going to attempt to type what he says he stands for. It doesn’t matter.

And Beebe’s group is BEEBE and it doesn’t stand for anything. They are all wearing the same clothes, so it’s safe to assume she’s no longer protesting uniforms. She is presumably protesting the fact that she is not the center of attention.

The mayor walks on stage, blusters about how great he’d be as mayor and how fair he is, then introduces the person who’ll be debate his side.

Everybody gasps. Skeeter says, “well, somebody had to do it.”

Skeeter begins by saying, “I know how everybody feels, but I think there’s some good things to say about uniforms.” The entire crowd erupts in boos and Roger’s group has noisemakers and horns.

Fentruck has a horn. Beebe’s group chants something through megaphones.

Skeeter tries to actually make his points but everyone is shouting him down. Patti gets frustrated with the crowd. She has a realization.

Patti gets everyone’s attention and says, “I know you don’t want to hear anything good about uniforms. I feel the same way. But if we don’t let Skeeter talk, we’ll be doing the same thing we accused the school of doing: not listening. It’s easy to get so caught up in what you want that you stop listening to the other side. I know. I guess I got so carried away being the leader of S.P.U.D. I stopped paying attention to everybody else. But we have to listen to all sides. It’s the only way to have a fair debate. The only way to have a democracy!”

She invites Skeeter back to his podium and he starts talking. Doug narrates over it, saying Skeeter had some good points, but he’s still not sure how he feels about uniforms.

Doug says the whole debate didn’t matter anyway. Everybody on the school board had a different idea about what the uniform should look like.

Mr. Bluff thinks everybody should dress like Beebe.

Mr. Valentine think the uniforms should look like Skeeter.

Mr. Bone wants to turn the students into prisoners.

Mr. Bone should not work in education. This is not a healthy view of students. He should not be in a position of authority anywhere.

The only thing the school board agreed on was putting off the school uniform idea until next year. And this is how Doug and Skeeter end their civics report.

Their report earns them A’s and a standing ovation.

Doug and Skeeter celebrate by buying the Bluffington 5 chocolate milk shakes.

Patti wants strawberry. Sally wants vanilla. Beebe wants low fat. Fentruck is allergic to chocolate. Roger wants burgers. Let no good deed go unpunished, but why didn’t they fucking ask what everyone wanted in the first place?

So, that’s it. Doug is maybe the least crazy person in this episode, but he’s still the narrator, imagining Patti having fantasies and just being a generally unreliable and inconsistent narrator. He started out unsure what to think about school uniforms and and a long, arduous journey, he steadfastly remained unsure what to think about school uniforms.

Nothing came out of Mr. Bone’s ridiculous spying. There was a missed opportunity to write him back out of the show. When he fell in the trash can that rolled into the back of the garbage truck? If he never showed up again, it would be the greatest end to the character, forcing the assumption that he died in the incident. Oh well.

“Dear Journal,
Middle school can be so unpredictable. I thought today was going to be another ho hum day, but you never know what’s waiting just around the corner.”

Doug and Skeeter enter the school and find a small crowd around a poster. Naturally, they are curious.

Someone unspecified is throwing a beach party at Lucky Duck Lake. Skeeter is very excited.

Doug thinks this means that Saturday could maybe be the most important day of his life. Skeeter asks him how it could be the most important day of his life. Doug replies, “‘cause it could be my one chance to do something I’ve wanted to do for years.”

“Down a gallon of root beer and burp until the windows rattle?”

Doug whispers, “no. Ask Patti to go out with me on a…date…”

Skeeter starts to loudly express shock at this but Doug shuts him up because Patti is nearby.

Skeeter quietly asks for clarification, because Doug has been out with Patti several times. Doug says none of those incidents were real, official, dates. At least he recognizes that. Skeeter fails to ask the more pertinent question regarding why this beach party is important. What stopped Doug from asking Patti out in the past and how does this beach party make it any easier?

Doug has a fantasy. The beach party is at night. Skeeter blows a conch shell and yells, “SURF’S UP!” Everyone grabs their boards and starts running into the lake. Patti doesn’t have her own board for some reason, so Doug offers to teach her how to tandem surf.

“Oh, Moon Dougie. You’re my big kahuna!”

Patti then asks, “aren’t these waves awfully big for a lake?” The fantasy fades out there, before she can ask more questions about this nonsense daydream. Skeeter has been trying to get Doug’s attention, and once he finally has it, he points out that the most popular girl in school is checking Doug out.

Meet Cassandra Bleem. Apparently she is the most popular girl in school.

While Doug is scoffing at the idea that Cassandra would be checking him out, she’s walking over to him.

She says she saw the cartoon he drew for the school paper and she loves a guy with a sense of humor. Doug is too flabbergasted to say much to Cassandra, and when she asks him to go to the beach party with her, he laughs it off. He tells Skeeter he just imagined that Cassandra Bleem asked him on a date and that it seemed so real. Skeeter pats him on the shoulder and points at Cassandra to make him realize it was real.

“Ahh!”
“Oh Doug, you are so funny, hehehe. So, you wanna go?”

Doug asks if he can get back to her. She flirtingly calls him a tease and tells him, “don’t keep me waiting too long.”

The encounter leaves Doug disoriented. He collapses to the floor. Skeeter sprays water in his face to bring him back.

“Did what I think happened really just happen?”
“It sure did! You, a lowly seventh grade toad, got asked to the beach party by the prettiest, most popular girl in the eight grade! Possibly the whole universe!”

Doug approaches the trophy case and examines his reflection in the glass. He think it maybe had something to do with his new toothpaste. Then he gets mad at Skeeter because he just realized he was called a toad.

Doug says he doesn’t want to go with Cassandra. He can’t remember the name of the girl he wants to go with though. Skeeter has to remind him her name is Patti, and it’s all very insulting and Doug should not get to go with either of them.

Before Doug can come to any sort of conclusion about how he now feels about Patti, Chalky barges in and congratulates him for the whole Cassandra Bleem thing.

Before Doug can explain anything, Guy chimes in.

By lunchtime, everyone is talking about Doug and Cassandra.

Roger figures Cassandra only asked Doug because she was too shy to ask him. This episode perpetuates some pretty negative views of gender relations all around. You could use it as an example of several unhealthy attitudes and behaviors. It doesn’t get better from here.

Doug escapes Roger, determined to get to Patti (to ask her out or explain or what? I don’t know) but he immediately bumps into Al and Moo. Impressed by his apparent ability to conquer older popularity, they salute him.

They say Doug inspires them and demand that he signs their limited edition copy of “How to Get Girls.” Doug signs the book (with pencil…) and they say that anyone can get a date to the party if he can. They walk away, leaving him staring blankly. Before he can realize how terribly they’ve insulted him, Skeeter reminds him of his goal to find Patti. On the way to Patti, he bumps into Fentruck.

This isn’t some misunderstood foreign gesture. Fentruck is shaking Doug’s hand to congratulate him. After Fentruck leaves, Doug again stands staring blankly. Skeeter again reminds him of Patti, even pointing at her across the hall and saying Doug better hurry or class will resume. Doug decides to let the Patti situation wait until after school.

Here’s our crappy B-story for this episode. Al and Moo are up to something. On the football field, they’ve got a decently sized rocket.

They plan to use this rocket to drop pamphlets all over town.

I really wish we could see the details inside. If I was doing this, the inside would read, “I built a rocket to distribute this pamphlet across town. Here’s my number.” Theoretically, I wouldn’t want to date someone that wouldn’t appreciate my desperate efforts or my rocket science delivery ability. Anyway, their rocket fucks up. The hatch won’t open and they can’t release the pamphlets.

Al and Moo start fighting over the control for the rocket and eventually it ends up in space

Finally, the hatch opens and the pamphlets spill out. Aliens crash into the pamphlets and start talking about Doug getting a date with an eighth grader.

What the fuck is this? I don’t know what to do with this.

At Mr. Swirly, Doug tells Skeeter he can’t make up his mind. He still wants to ask Patti, but everyone is making such a big deal of Cassandra that he feels like he can’t say no. Here to reinforce that idea is Beebe.

Doug explains to Beebe that he hasn’t decided to go with Cassandra yet. Beebe then accuses him of always making it about himself. Hasn’t he considered what dating Cassandra would mean for Beebe Bluff? If he doesn’t go to the party with Cassandra, how will he introduce Beebe to all of Cassandra’s important eighth grade friends? Here they are, across the restaurant.

You can tell they’re important because they look slightly older than the seventh grade kids.

Beebe calls them the “Crème de la cool,” and this triggers another fantasy. This time, Doug is in Baywatch, of all godawful things.

There’s dialog here, and they go for a slow motion run, but I’m too disgusted by the fact that Baywatch started before Nickelodeon Doug and ended after Disney Doug. Fuck television.

Beebe ruins Doug’s slow motion fantasy by saying the eighth graders make the seventh graders look like kindergartners. The fantasy changes to reflect that.

Doug is included in that change.

Does Beebe not realize she’s discouraging Doug from doing what she wants here?

After the fantasy, Beebe makes Doug get up and tell Cassandra he’ll go with her.

Doug still doesn’t quite know how to speak to Cassandra. She asks him if they are going together and he says, “well, uh, y'see…of course, I’d like to….” Before he can finish his thought, she is excited and tells him she’s really looking forward to the date. On his way back to Skeeter and Beebe, Patti says hello.

He says hello back and has a fantasy.

It’s sort of Casablanca but sort of the opposite. Fantasy Patti is upset because she expected the beach party to be their first official date. She says she expected it to be the highlight of her pre-adolescence. She says she’s going to Antarctica to leave behind “the us that never was.”

It’s a pretty ridiculous fantasy. Aside from assuming Patti feels this way, or misinterpreting which of the two is leaving the us that never was, it also assumes that dating Cassandra makes it impossible for Doug to ever date Patti. It’s one date. It’s not a lifetime commitment to monogamous marriage. Stop being such a dumb seventh grader.

After the fantasy, Doug is apparently locked into conversation with Patti. She says she heard Doug is going to the party with Cassandra. Doug sheepishly admits this is true.

Patti says, “well, that’s great! It should be a fun party. See you there!” If she’s torn up about Doug’s date with Cassandra, or even slightly bothered by it, she is hiding it well. It’s almost like she doesn’t want to date him and is happy at the prospect of him dating someone else so he can stop being so goddamn hung up on her.

Beebe grabs Doug and insists they plan every detail of the date. She doesn’t want Doug screwing up her introduction to eighth grade society. Roger is skeptical. He says eighth graders know stuff and have been places. Doug tries to defend himself.

Then he is also skeptical. He has a fantasy. On a yacht, Cassandra and her friends are all having boring, pretentious conversation about sophisticated fancy things.

Doug joins the party, yucking it up, ready for a swim.

Roger says Doug will be humiliated, and before Doug can even defend himself, Al and Moo get the attention of everyone in the restaurant. They have a large device called Al and Moo’s Date-o-rama. It plays music and has a full light show, but it’s not clear how it’s supposed to land them a date. They’re dancing around, wearing jackets with rhinestones spelling out “DATE ME” on the back.

Al and Moo explain that they’re having a contest where the winners win dates with them, among other fabulous prizes. Before their initial presentation ends, the Date-o-rama starts to malfunction. First, a light goes out. Then the top rolls off and smoke starts pouring out of the machine.

Everyone flees the restaurant as the sprinkler system kicks on. Al and Moo owe Mr. Swirly a lot of money, but he’ll probably just make his insurance company pay for it.

At home, Doug is determined to be cool for his date. He’s reading a book called Cool for Dummies.

He’s also consulting with the coolest guy he knows: Porkchop.

Porkchop shows him this really cool move where you twirl your sunglasses around your index finger before smoothly placing them on your face. Doug tries it and jabs himself in the forehead.

Al and Moo’s next tactic is an auto-dialer. Connie picks up first and hears, “congratulations! You have been chosen for a date to the upcoming beach party with one of the devastatingly popular Sleech Brothers. Press 1 for Al. Press 2 for Moo. Press 3 for both.”

As the message plays, we see more female characters responding to it. The three age appropriate females hang up the phone, but that old woman…

She wants them both.

Finally, the big day has arrived. Doug has his best Hawaiian shirt on and he’s about to ring Cassandra’s doorbell. He’s nervous and sweaty. Cassandra’s mom answers the door and tells Doug she’ll see if Cassandra is ready. The sight of Cassandra makes Doug slip into a time-filler fantasy.

I’m not about to transcribe what Cassandra says in this. Fuck it.

It is irrelevant.

After the fantasy, Cassandra puts on her sunglasses, asking, “shall we?”

Doug takes this cue to show off the trick her learned from his dog. He spins his sunglasses on his index finger. They fly off and bounce off several cool surfaces before falling into a cool umbrella stand. Doug struggles to retrieve his glasses while Cassandra giggles and says, “didn’t I tell you he was funny?”

Cassandra is excited. She can’t wait for Doug to meet her friends Summer, Hunter, and Devin. Doug says she’ll like his friends too, trying to list them but getting stuck on Patti. Cassandra laughs at him, saying, “oh, Doug. You are so hilarious. Imagine me hanging out with seventh graders. Hahahahaha!” Doug is confused and saddened.

Doug and Cassandra thank Theda for the ride and she drives away without a word because fuck a damn beach party at the lake, right?

Skeeter approaches Doug and Cassandra and tells them they’re just in time for beach croquet. He says he’ll make sure they’re both on his team.

Cassandra doesn’t want to play beach croquet, which I assume is like regular croquet but played near some sand and water. Anyway, she says Summer, Hunter and Devin are waiting and walk away. Doug apologizes to Skeeter and explains that Cassandra wants him to hang out with her friends. The beginning of a truly healthy relationship. Yep.

Skeeter immediately finds replacements.

They don’t have dates, so they are totally free to do whatever the hell they want.

Doug approaches the eighth graders and makes a great first impression.

So cool.

Hunter or Devin says Cassandra says Doug’s a laugh riot, then demands that he say something funny.

As Doug gets older, he’ll learn to deal with this sort of request in a variety of ways. Hannibal Buress has a good bit about it. Doug says, “something funny.” When no one laughs, he explains that they told him to say something funny so he said something funny.

To be fair, fuck them. Summer says, “if he’s so funny, how come we’re not laughing?” That’s on you, girl. Cassandra is upset with Doug because he’s making her look stupid. He says Skeeter told him a joke the other day. Excitedly, she tells her friends to listen up.

Doug begins, “what do you get when you cross and elephant with a…”
“Oh, give me a break. Not an elephant joke. What are you, five?”
“Typical seventh grader. They’re so immature.”
“Dougie, you’re mommy’s calling!”

I hope these shitty characters don’t show up again.

The whole situation finally pushes Doug over the edge.

They mock Doug for feeling sick, but when he actually throws up, they start to like him because throwing up is just fucking hilarious.

They truly are terrible characters. Doug should snap and drown them in the lake.

They invite Doug to go on the eighth grade ski trip. Summer invites him as her date, but Cassandra claims him for her own. While Cassandra explains that he’s so funny and that’s why she asked him out, Doug finally realizes she doesn’t really like him at all. He just had an anxiety attack and she and her friends thought it was hilarious.

Hunter, Summer, and Devin start talking about how they all thought the seventh graders were losers. Summer starts by trashing Beebe.

“Too bad all that money can’t buy her some class.”

Summer doesn’t even say anything negative about Skeeter’s personality. She just calls him “Skeeter Blue Boy.”

…is she being racist? I think she’s being racist. I don’t know.

Cassandra says, “and then there’s perpetually perfect Patti Mayonnaise.”

Mocking Patti finally pushes Doug over the edge.

“You all think you’re so smart, but you know what you are? You’re…you’re…you’re not my friends.”

Doug walks away and Cassandra comes after him.

Doug explains that he doesn’t have to perform like a trained seal with his friends. They like him whether he’s funny or not.

So Doug joins his friends and sucks at beach croquet.

No word on how he would fare at regular croquet.

Meanwhile, Cassandra finds someone else to make her laugh.

She’ll have to fight off the old woman, but I think she can manage it.

I still want Doug to explain why this beach party was the chance to ask Patti out he has been waiting for. I thought we covered this in the Dark Quail Saga. Did that not count? Is it ever going to count? Did he lie to his journal, himself, to make it seem like Patti wanted to go out with him?

I can’t believe this episode did not include the Lucky Duck monster. Skeeter shouldn’t have been excited about the party. He should have been campaigning to keep his friends away. Or throwing seasonings on the asshole eighth grade kids so the monster would eat them first, maybe overdose on some hormones.

Was that old woman arrested? Maybe she hooked up with the aliens.

Christmas is over. Doug and Skeeter are making the best of their vacation time. Skeeter’s tossing a football to himself and Doug is writing in his journal.

Doug must have said, “hey Skeeter, wanna come over so you can be bored while I write in my journal?”

Doug’s agenda for this journal entry is to review his New Year’s resolutions from the beginning of the year to see how they went. I don’t know what the first three resolutions were, but number four was “walk a mile in everybody’s shoes.” Doug checks it off. I hope he took that idea literally and just borrowed everyone’s shoes for one mile hikes. Resolution number five is “grow chest hair.” Another resolution Doug feels he accomplished. Generally, these are pretty bad resolutions though. What did he do to make himself feel like he walked a mile in everybody’s shoes and what actions did he take to grow chest hair that aren’t automatic results of him staying alive and entering puberty?

Resolution number six was “tell Patti how I feel about her.”

“Oh well. Maybe next year.” So much for the easiest resolution he had.

At Mr. Swirly, Patti asks Doug if he’s going to Beebe’s New Year’s party.

He says, “I guess so.” She says she is going too, then she says a goodbye and walks away with Connie. They sit down with Beebe at the next booth. Why aren’t they all sitting together?

Patti shouts, “hey, Guy,” as she’s sitting down. Doug is watching.

Guy is standing by the counter. He makes a noise with his mouth then says to no one in particular, “hold the mayo.” Get it? Since Doug witnessed the whole thing, he’s suddenly apprehensive about New Year’s Eve and tries to downplay the event. Skeeter agrees with him that New Year’s is no big deal, but then Beebe starts talking about what a huge deal it is.

“New Year’s is a huge deal! There’s lots of eating and dancing and kissing. Everybody kisses at New Year’s!”

Connie asks, “everybody?”

Beebe goes on to make the point that you have to kiss whoever you’re with at midnight because it’s a tradition. She starts looking at Skeeter to make her point, because the girl who attends a school shaped like her own head isn’t exactly equipped with an ability for subtlety. Her little speech makes Skeeter have a small freakout where he chokes on his drink, but then he just orders another, so he’s maybe not too worried about kissing Beebe.

Doug now sees the party as an opportunity to complete his resolutions.

“If Patti’s going to kiss someone at midnight, I’m going to make sure it’s me.”

Skeeter takes a moment to connect the awful dots Doug just laid out. “Oh, I get it, man. Since kissing is a New Year’s tradition, Patti will have to kiss you. She’ll have no choice.”

“Yeah! I mean, no. I mean…if I could just give her one kiss, maybe she’d finally know how I really feel about her.” Skeeter bad. Doug not so bad, but still very questionable. Words would be a better way to tell someone how you feel about them.

So here’s a fantasy about how the party is going to go. Doug and Patti will be the only ones there. They will be dressed up. Doug will be playing the piano. Patti will be amazed by his talent and romance.

Not content to this level of admiration, Doug will take off his shoes, climb on top of the piano, and continue playing the piano with his toes.

He is just as good with his feet as he is with his hands. After he hands Patti a rose without disrupting the music he’s playing with his feet, Patti says, “I want you to kiss me like you’ve never kissed anyone before.”

After the fantasy, Doug exclaims, “SKEETER! I’ve never kissed anyone before! I don’t think I even know how!”

Roger overhears this (I mean, he wouldn’t have to be snooping either. Doug shouted it. Are Patti, Connie, and Beebe still sitting at the booth next to them because they’re probably hearing everything Skeeter and Doug are saying and awkward?) and begins his usual taunting.

After Roger calls him a loser, Doug asks how many girls he’s kissed. Roger pulls out a notepad.

After consulting his notes, Roger confirms that he kissed 97 girls at New Year’s last year. Skeeter asks how many of the girls actually wanted him to kiss. His reply is just awful.

“Who cares? The point is even a scammed kiss counts!” Roger says he’s going for a new record this year. If you were ever wondering what Roger might go to jail for, here’s a clue. Unfortunately, he now has money, so maybe don’t get your hopes up that he’ll receive a decent punishment when/if it happens.

Skeeter makes a joke about New Year’s being the only way Roger can get a kiss. Doug says, “yeah, but he sounded so…experienced, and I don’t know the first thing about kissing, unless you count my grandmother! I gotta learn fast, ‘cause when the clock strikes midnight, I’m gonna be right there with the perfect kiss.”

Oh, they are totally still sitting in the booth next to Doug and Skeeter, but judging by the smile on Patti’s face, they were too busy in conversation to hear the guys.

Here’s Doug getting ready to practice kissing.

Lucky for Porkchop, Doug has the balloon. Porkchop pops a tape into the VCR and it’s a Smash Adams movie. Doug intends to study the kissing techniques of Smash Adams.

Smash Adams is holding a woman in his arms as they snowboard off a cliff. Smash opens a parachute and they begin kissing shortly thereafter.

Their parachute snags on the roof of a building and they end up hanging upside down. Their kissing continues uninterrupted.

Doug practices.

Porkchop is embarrassed.

Judy catches him. Embarrassed, Doug can’t think of an excuse for his behavior. Judy says, “don’t tell me. You’re practicing for some loud, mindless, bourgeoisie New Year’s Eve bash where mob mentality forces you to kiss someone at midnight. Patti, perhaps?”

She takes the balloon from Doug, promising to show him the proper technique. She does a weird sort of French act before doing a bad impersonation of Patti, then she throws the balloon away and chases Doug around the room trying to kiss him.

After Smash Adams and Judy failed Doug, he turned to his next great source of information.

Fuck.

Really, this could go a lot worse than it does. It’s still a wholly useless learning experience for Doug though.

He hides this in an issue of The Amazing Man O Steel Man so no one can see what he’s reading.

Skeeter walks up behind him and sees what he’s reading. He blushes. Everyone in the store stares at him.

Skeeter says it’s a cool issue of Teen Mush Magazine and he’s already on step 32. Doug is too embarrassed to say anything but “oh” while he sheepishly puts the magazine back on the rack and walks away because he has that standard social anxiety disorder.

Doug stops by Lack Luster Video to pick up more movies for research. He’s literally back where he started. It gets sort of weird when he walks past the Pet Pagoda and sees a kissing fish in the window. He thinks maybe he should just imitate nature.

Roger sees him imitating the fish and mocks him. Doug tries to play it off like he’s been thinking about becoming a marine biologist. Roger says, “cut the chin wag, Funnie. Tomorrow night’s New Year’s Eve, and I don’t want to risk chapping my lips with idle conversation.” Shouldn’t have fucking started it then, Roger. Asshole.

That night, Doug is practicing his duckface in the mirror.

Phil and Theda are settling in for a night of shitty New Year’s TV and popcorn. Theda asks Judy if she’s going to a party, and Judy dismisses the idea with a short rant about how stupid it all is. She says she’s going to sit in her room and clean out the attic of her mind.

Doug catches his parents kissing and narrates, “it was kinda embarrassing. They are my parents after all, and really old. But they did look like they really liked each other.”

Theda asks if Doug is ready for Beebe’s party, and Phil asks if he has a ride over there. Doug says Mr. Dink is taking him. Mr. Dink is chaperoning. I guess being married to the mayor isn’t all ribbon cuttings and shopping sprees and cocaine addiction. Sometimes you just have to do a shitty job.

Meanwhile, Judy’s celebration is off to a great start. Unfortunately, she left her door open.

Theda and Phil start blowing some horns and disturb her peace. Rude.

At the party, Skeeter offers Doug some goat cheese and garlic hors d'doeuvres and he declines because of the breath issue..

So far, Doug’s piano fantasy is all wrong.

Doug starts eating carrots while Beebe drags Skeeter off to dance.

Guy approaches Doug and gives him a warm greeting because really, they are friends and Guy doesn’t know he’s an annoying shitbag. Doug says, “I thought you never went to seventh grade parties.”

“I don’t. I’m in the next room. With Bill Bluff! And the future captains of industry! Having a grown up party!”

In the Bluffington world, there are conspiracy theories on the internet about what happens at Bill Bluff’s Grown Up New Year’s Party for Eighth Grade Boys. Maybe there’s blurry pictures. Maybe it’s not so much a conspiracy as a series of court settlements for undisclosed amounts and charges.

After Guy leaves, Doug returns to his carrots. Patti enters and shouts from across the room, “hey, Doug! Great party, huh?”

“Yeah…great.”

Meanwhile, Judy is fucking bored with her meditation.

She calls her friend Cassius and gets an answering machine, I guess. I think that’s what it’s supposed to be. It starts, “hello, this is Cassius.”

Judy says hello and starts to say something but is cut off by Cassius saying, “we all know New Year’s Eve is a mindless ritual for the hoi polloi. HAPPY HOI POLLOI! HAHA!” A woman on the phone tells Cassius happy new year before making kissing noises. Maybe it’s not the answering machine. I don’t know. Either way, Judy hangs up in anger.

Back at the party, Doug is still standing alone, eating carrots. The clock goes from 9pm to 11pm. Doug has been standing there eating carrots the whole time. Chalky walks up and says, “eeeh, what’s up, Doug?”

Suddenly, I fucking love Chalky. Anyway, Chalky asks if Doug has made any New Year’s resolutions. Doug says he has just one. Chalky says, “yeah? Me too! I’ve decided to develop some character flaws. You know, people don’t like you when you’re too perfect?” Doug points out that he’s off to a good start since people don’t like it when other people talk with their mouth full of food.

Meanwhile, bored Judy wants to join her parents but still insists on making a thing of protesting it. They don’t care and she joins them.

What was the point of making the popcorn if you weren’t going to fucking eat it?

At the party, Doug is all out of carrots and terribly tired. He normally doesn’t stay up this late. Roger helps him out with a blast from his horn.

He just wants Doug to watch him set a new kissing record.

Doug looks at the clock and sees it is 11:30, then spots Patti across the room, chatting with Guy.

Instead of joining the conversation and maybe talking to Patti before his planned kiss, Doug dances his way over to Skeeter.

“Skeeter, it’s almost New Year’s! What if I blow it? What if I don’t kiss her right? What if I poke her in the eye with my nose? What if our teeth hit and cause a spark that hits the curtains and starts a fire!?”

“Wow…could happen, man.” Thanks, Skeeter.

Doug returns to the earlier fantasy for some reason. Patti is horrified by Doug’s kiss and pushes him away. As she stands up, he falls to the floor.

“Eww, where did you learn to kiss? On a balloon?”

“Well…yeah. But don’t leave! I’ll try harder next time!”

“There’ll never be a next time, loser!”

The fantasy ends with Doug screaming, “nooooo,” and in real life he starts backing up, as if recoiling from the horror of his imaginary failure. He backs into Patti.

She asks if he’s okay and he says he’s perfect. He then excuses himself and walks away. His plan to kiss her conflicts entirely with his plan to avoid her all night. After he leaves her alone and confused, Guy dances over.

Doug really starts to lose it here. He walks over to the snack table again, saying, “steady, Doug. Steady.” He mindlessly stuffs his face with food and mutters, “she was close. Very close.”

Beebe tells him she’s glad he’s enjoying the onion dip. He realizes he’s been eating onions and excuses himself. Beebe is briefly confused.

Doug finds a corner where he can brush his teeth.

You realize how easy this is for me, right?

It’s not midnight yet, but Roger’s already chasing girls for kisses.

…what?

Suddenly, Doug can’t find Patti. He’s looking everywhere but can’t find her. He asks Skeeter if he’s seen her.

Beebe says she left with Guy to go to another party. Doug asks Mr. Dink if he can give them a ride to some other parties for an emergency.

Being a responsible chaperone, Mr. Dink immediately agrees and they leave.

Doug barges into Al and Moo’s New Year’s party to ask the nerds if Guy and Patti are there.

Before Doug can actually ask about Patti, Al and Moo decide to show off their dancing shoes. They are programmed to perform any dance.

Mr. Dink says he must have the dancing shoes and Al and Moo say they are very expensive. Makes you wonder if they are actually his sons.

Doug finally gets to ask Moo if Patti and Guy have been around. Moo tells him they left just before he got here.

At the next party, the foreign exchange student party apparently, Doug, Skeeter, and Mr. Dink are forced into some sort of foreign conga hopping line.

Fentruck tells Doug Patti and Guy left just before he got here.

And here’s another party where Doug apparently just missed them.

Why are Guy and Patti going around to all these other parties? Who is driving them? You know what will really impress Patti? If you take her to Doug’s dog’s New Year’s party. Porkchop and his dog friends are really cool! Good thinking, Guy.

Doug, Skeeter, and Mr. Dink return to Beebe’s party just in time for the countdown . Doug is dejected. Skeeter reassures him that there’s always next year. For the countdown, Mr. Dink turns on his new, very expensive, dancing shoes. They immediately malfunction.

Roger starts going for the record with Connie. Here’s how that went.

Next, he tells Beebe she has something in her eye. She says, “really?” as if it’s possible she didn’t notice something in her eye but Roger did. He tells her he’ll get it.

At the time, she was enjoying a piece of pie, and after Roger steals a kiss, she slams the pie in his face.

What you can’t see in this picture…

…is the sound of Roger kissing other girls and getting slapped. Or getting food or drink thrown in his face. Doug narrates, “watching Roger, I was suddenly glad I didn’t try to steal a kiss from Patti.”

Doug has a fantasy about his first kiss.

“I wanted my first kiss to really mean something. To be something special. Not because it was New Year’s, but because Patti wanted me to kiss her.”

Why the fuck is everything on fire? Oh how romantic. All the poor people’s meager possessions are aflame, just like our hearts are for each other.

Doug says he wants his first kiss to be like his parents’ kiss, where it means something because they both really care about each other.

Meanwhile, Beebe is chasing down Skeeter to demand a kiss. He relents, and look how happy he is…

That’s not enough for her though.

I guess she’s better than Roger because she’s only forcing one person, but still…inappropriate.

Judy gets her midnight kisses from her sleeping parents.

WHAT IS THE FUCKING DEAL WITH THIS BOTTOMLESS BOWL OF POPCORN? WHO DO I HAVE TO SLEEP WITH TO GET THAT?

Doug is sitting outside the party with a tray of hors d'oeuvres when Patti approaches him, saying she’s been looking for him everywhere.

He says he’s been looking for her too, but then asks, “where’s Guy?”

“Guy? Ugh. Do you believe this whole New Year’s Eve was about Guy trying to steal a kiss from me?”
“Steal a kiss? That’s bad, isn’t it? So, what’d you do?”
“Well, I told him I was just at the party to have fun, and if this whole party was about kissing, then I was leaving!”

“Well, I’m glad you did.”
“Me too. At least with you, I can relax about all that kissing stuff. I’m just not ready for that yet.”
“Yeah, me neither.”

Roger runs up to them to brag about breaking his record. He’s covered in food.

He’s also committed several counts of sexual battery, and he’s openly bragging about it, so the mob of girls that chase him off is understandable. Doug asks Patti if she’s hungry and says “there might still be a little pie left that Roger’s not wearing," 

Doug says Skeeter turned to the one source for accurate monster news, in his ongoing search for the Lucky Duck Monster.

Doug and Porkchop are just playing cards while Skeeter laments the lack of monster news in the latest Weekly Weird World.

Al and Moo are teaching their dog the periodic table, but pause long enough to tell Skeeter the Weekly Weird World is crap.

Skeeter says he was going to read about Brian Langolier, and Al and Moo quickly change their tune. One of them calls Briar the “true model of female beauty.” They try to take the paper from Skeeter and drop their element flash cards.

Patti catches the plutonium card and asks if she can hang out with them. She says Beebe won’t do anything while Teen Heart Street is on. “It’s like she thinks everything stops at four o'clock!”

Al and Moo express shock that it is four o'clock and chuckle as if embarrassed when Patti says, “don’t tell me you guys watch that junk.” They run inside the house with Skeeter after saying they do.

Doug tries to play like he’s on Patti’s side. He calls the stories totally bizarre. “Like, I hear there’s this school election coming up, right? And Franklin Most, he’s like this campaign manager. He threatened to keep eating lima beans until Briar gets elected, and uh…maybe we could stand over near the window?”

“Doug, do you wanna watch the show?”
*embarrassed chuckle*
“Oh, go ahead. I don’t mind.”

Now we get to see some of this awful show, Teen Heart Street. A man is asking Briar, “is it true that if elected you’d put the ‘body’ back into 'student body president?”

She’s posing awkwardly and says she just wants to make people happy. This is part of a terrible tv show Doug, Skeeter, Al and Moo are watching.

Al and Moo are totally sold on her promise to make people happy. The man turns to another girl, a girl who doesn’t look like a model, and asks, “so what makes you think you can possibly win?” Al and Moo boo the screen.

She says, “well, I have all four years experience in the student council. And I’m a member of the national junior merit scholarship fund for the gifted.”

The reporter asshole says, “sure, sure, and I can see you’re handy with a knife and fork too.” The girl has no chance to respond before some other asshole interrupts the whole thing to excitedly announce that the votes are in and the first girl won.

Patti, Connie, and Beebe are also watching this awful show. Beebe declares it to be the best episode yet.

At this point, I wish Patti or Connie or both or all three of them started laughing about the episode, as if it was somehow supposed to be making fun of sexist bullshit instead of just being sexist bullshit. Instead a voice on the tv says, “stay tuned for a commercial that looks like a documentary.”

The commercial defines fat as cushion from injury, or insulation to keep you warm, but then says, “for most of us, it’s just ugly, old fat.” Fat blobs glide on screen. Patti, Connie and Beebe all gasp. Another blob of fat drops down and stands up to introduce himself as Lardy. He’s a fat cell that’s been inside you for years.

Lardy says there are two periods of your life where you grow a lot of fat cells. The first is in infancy, and the second is at puberty. This freaks the girls out because they’re at one of those ages.

The model actor from the show is in this commercial and says, “it’s a sad fact of life that none of you will ever have a 9 inch waist, but now you can try, using my waist away diet kit!”

The voice-over man says, “remember: your friends will never tell you when you’re fat.” This is evil shit. Patti steps in front of the screen because finally someone has to criticize this nonsense.

She says they’re just trying to make you think you’re fat because they’re selling that dumb product. Beebe disagrees. She warns Patti that if she’s not careful, she’ll look in the mirror and see Fatty instead of Patti. This sort of already contradicts the last thing the commercial said. Patti isn’t even fat and her friend is already telling her to worry about it. Anyway, fuck that commercial for all the ways it is wrong.

At lunch the next day, Doug, Skeeter, Connie and Roger are discussing the episode of that awful tv show. Roger says his favorite part was when Briar dumped the school constitution, and declared herself head cheerleader and beneficent dictator. He says, “now that’s a woman!”

Skeeter has a bullshit newspaper called “Weekly Weird World” and they’ve got an article about how bigfoot sends Briar fan mail every week. Doug says something about how it makes sense that a monster would fall for a girl like Briar, if indeed the monster was going to fall for a girl at all. This gives Skeeter an idea for finally catching the Lucky Duck Monster. He wants to get a female monster to draw him out. Doug is immediately enthusiastic about this idea, and quickly asks where they are going to get a female monster. Neither of them considers the idea that the Lucky Duck Monster might be female. What if it’s an asexual monster? Let’s say that there really is a Lucky Duck Monster, and it is definitely male, and Doug and Skeeter somehow get a female monster to draw it out of the lake…then what? Are they going to try to interfere with the horrifying monster sex? Seems like a bad plan.

Meanwhile, Patti is picking out her lunch when Guy makes her feel bad about her choice. She grabs a salad and he calls it rabbit food. “Puttin’ on a few LBs, huh?”

He immediately assumes she’s on a diet and again proves that awful fucking commercial wrong by ignoring everything she says so he can say, “I’m with you all the way, Patti. Trim down, firm up, BREAK IT!” Then he admires himself in the reflection on the sneeze guard. Patti has the opposite experience.

Meanwhile, Doug and Skeeter are planning for their female monster. Initially, they have a nonsense sort of Weird Science plan to use the Lucky Duck Monster’s DNA, but Doug suggests they might be meddling in things they shouldn’t. So they settle on making a female monster out of junk.

Patti walks by and Doug says hello. She asks him if he thinks she needs to lose some weight.

Sarcastically, he says, “oh yeah. You’re huge.” He chuckles and Skeeter chuckles and Patti misses the sarcasm entirely because sometimes the human brain is just a fucking dick and it always does this type of shit to us. Doug, with as much experience as he has with his own brain taking innocent comments and turning them into obsessions, should really know better.

Now Patti is trying out for the school’s track team. Coach Spitz says he wants a team that is lean and mean.

Patti dwells on the lean and mean remark until she hears an echo of what Beebe said earlier about seeing Fatty in the mirror. She misses the beginning of the race and starts off way behind.

Then she transforms into a much heavier version of herself.

In the audience, Doug says something to Connie about Patti getting chunky. Connie says something to Roger about how huge she is and shouts, “YOU CAN DO IT, FATTY! I MEAN PATTI!” Doug tells Skeeter that, as her friends, they can never tell her she’s a huge blubbery sack of fat. Briar asks Doug if he’s seen anything so fat in his life. He says it’s both sad and horrifying.

Briar shouts, “YOU CAN RUN BUT YOU’LL NEVER LOOK LIKE ME!”

So Patti just ran through her own fantasy. After it is over, she finishes the real race and the coach tells her she just barely qualified for the next round.

She approaches Connie and Beebe and says she’s going on a diet. Connie wants to lose weight too, so she’s also going on a diet. Also, Beebe too.

“I’m not gonna let this fat lick me. As ya’ll are my witness, I’ll never be heavy again!”

Apparently, they’re getting together for lunch now to show off their fat free lunches. Patti bought the Waist Away diet kit.

Beebe is surprised she bought the kit. Patti says the actor is lame, but she is in good shape. Using the scale, she says, “this sandwich is a tad weighty, and she tosses half of the ingredients.

Mr. Bluff bought Beebe a calorie analyzing computer.

She puts her lunch in the machine, it vibrates and beeps while a robotic voice tells her that her lunch accounts for 10% of her daily calorie allotment. It finishes by complimenting her.

In the library, Doug and Skeeter are having trouble finding examples of female monsters.

Doug suggests they take any monster and just make it look female. He imagines this.

Skeeter imagines this.

And I wonder why they are doing this research at all. They’ve already agreed to just build a female monster out of junk. I don’t know if you’ve ever made something out of junk before, but generally, what you can make out of junk depends largely on the type of junk available to you

Meanwhile, Patti is tracking her running with her watch. She’s happy to have run for 30 minutes because it means she burned 250 calories.

Beebe is still trusting the bizarre machine, which claims her hair is gorgeous.

Patti is using this Waist Away calorie tracker that is unnecessarily large. The company selling Waist Away probably made it this large so they could charge more for it.

Patti continues exercising more and eating less. At lunch, she’s carrying a tray with an egg and a carrot right past Guy.

He gives her a thumbs up, completely oblivious to his part in her increasingly dangerous behavior. Now she’s convinced the diet is the best thing she’s ever done.

She has a fantasy where she’s at a huge track event sponsored by Waist Away. She is easily winning the 400 calorie dash.

I will remind you that this is her fantasy about how Waist Away is the best thing she’s ever done. I feel that is important to remember, because Lardy lets two huge blobs of fat out of a cage and they start chasing the runners.

The fat blobs catch two people stretching on the sidelines and make them fat. Patti wins the race. Briar presents her with a gold plated sandwich, "a happy reminder of when you used to eat.”

You’d think this sort of nightmare would help Patti realize the bullshit trap she’s fallen into, but that’s just not how bullshit psychological traps work.

Doug, Skeeter and Porkchop are working on the monster when Patti jogs by.

She jogs in place to chat with them and they ask her what she thinks of their monster.

“Wow, that’s one scary pile of junk!”
“It’s our monster.”
“Oh, well, I gotta go! Today’s our weigh-in. I think I lost three pounds.”

At this point, Doug says, “that’s great,” but he’s completely disinterested. She started talking about her stuff and he just tuned her out.

As she’s running away, Doug says, “she is way too wide, man.” He’s talking about the monster, but Patti hears the comment and thinks it is about her.

At the weigh-in, Connie goes first. According to the scale, she lost one pound. Unfortunately, the scale is a piece of shit and shows her weight fluctuating between losing and gaining one pound. Beebe shoves her off the scale, saying one pound hardly seems worth the effort.

Beebe steps onto the scale and is shocked by her seven pound difference. Connie and Patti are impressed until Beebe says she didn’t lose seven pounds; she gained seven pounds.

Turns out she wasn’t using the analyzer correctly. The settings identify her as a 6'2" male with a target weight of 250lbs. Beebe rings a bell to call her butler and demands that he make the analyzer work.

Patti finally steps on the scales and finds that she met her goal to lose three pounds. Satisfied she’s meeting her goal, she gets back to running.

She wakes up early the next day to go for a run while the sun comes up.

After school, Patti is part of a Big Buddy program and they’re playing beetball.

Before they get started, Patti chastises Chalky for forgetting his buddy badge. He apologizes, but she still says, “it’s a little thing, but our buddies appreciate it.”

Chalky asks, “where’s your buddy?”

She looks around, sputtering out noises and he asks, “you forgot your buddy!?”

She makes excuses for her newfound shitty behavior and Connie points out that this isn’t like her. She snaps back, “oh come on, Connie. Don’t tell me you’re jealous 'cuz I lost more weight than you!”

Without her little buddy, I guess Patti just fucks off to get back to running because in the next scene she’s checking up on Doug and Skeeter. They’ve finished their monster and Doug wants her to tell him, if she was a male monster, wouldn’t she want to date this?

She’s running in place and can’t really think of an answer past “um.” Doug suggests she’s overdoing the running thing and she says she still has 300 calories to burn. As she’s running away, he tries to tell her that she looks kind of tired.

Skeeter can’t let Doug get sidetracked into worrying about Patti though. She’s only the girl he’s been in love with since the day he first saw her. They have more important shit to do. Their monster is complete and it’s time to take it down to the lake. Unfortunately, they didn’t really secure it in any real way, so when they pick it up it falls apart immediately.

Roger rides his bike up to them and asks if they’re entering a stupid pile of junk contest.

Doug explains their plan and Roger criticizes their creation because it looks like they made it out of stuff from the garage. They say they made it out of stuff from the garage. This whole stupid interaction gives Roger another shitty idea.

Roger’s ideas for making money don’t make sense. His idea this time is that he’ll spend the money to make a better monster for them, and then what? Apparently he’ll dress the monster in a light blue suit for their front page photo. The newspaper will spell his name wrong. Quite a visionary, that Roger.

At lunch the next day, Doug asks to sit with Patti. She’s making notes about her exercise and takes a short spray from a can labeled “Spraywich.”

That was apparently her entire lunch and it was 5 calories. She says she’s stuffed. I wish this episode was funny. It tries to be. They try to lighten things up with the female monster, but every scene with Patti makes every other scene irritating. One of their friends clearly needs help and Skeeter just can’t lose focus on something that is obviously bullshit. Fucking grow up, Skeeter. You’re supposed to be a genius. After you give up on the Lucky Duck Monster, are you going to try to catch Santa Claus? What other fictional being would you like to see Skeeter waste time trying to capture while his friends deal with real problems? Doug’s finally come around but, like most of us, he’s ill equipped to help her. He asks her if eating a spray for lunch is such a good idea. She takes this the wrong way entirely, and thanks him for the suggestion to skip lunch entirely. Fuck.

Back in the Fuck Skeeter plotline, Skeeter gives a construction worker the design for the monster.

Doug asks him if he can skip monster work today. Doug wants to go to the track to find Patti. Skeeter is okay with that, but still unconcerned for Patti. It’s all female monster for Fucking Skeeter.

Roger is disappointed with the design for the monster. He imagines a few designs, the first of which is actually a classic female monster that Doug and Skeeter overlooked because they are apparently dumber than Roger.



None of these are right though. Roger sees a copy of the Weekly Weird World and gets an idea.

It is literally the same idea Doug and Skeeter had. He wants to make an attractive female monster. How was this lost when he hired himself for their project?

At the track, Doug tries to relay his concerns for Patti’s diet to the coach.

The lazy, overweight man cuts him off, saying all athletes diet. Doug just doesn’t understand because he’s not an athlete. Doug suggests that she is getting carried away. Coach says they’d win more trophies if more athletes got carried away. He’s so struck with what he just said, he decides “get carried away” should be their new team motto.

Patti immediately confronts Doug for the way he just went behind her back to the coach. He tries to defend his actions, but she shouts over him.

Also, she’s having difficulty focusing.

She says Doug made her so mad she got dizzy.

Back in the Fuck This Storyline, Roger has Willie taking promotional photos before they take the monster out to the lake for the unveiling. It doesn’t make any sense and I hate this and I want it to stop.

Skeeter takes offense to the sign advertising it as “Monsters by Roger.” Who cares though? Fuck you, Skeeter.

Back at the track, Coach Spitz says the team will be the top five students from each grade. He’s already made a shirt with the new motto.

There’s a table with bottles of water set up for the athletes. Beebe is there, I guess replacing the water. Patti almost picks one up, but then says, “no, thanks. I’d only retain it.” Beebe admires her discipline. Fuck Beebe. Patti walks into Doug. She apologizes and tells him she has to warm up. She can’t focus.

Coach Spitz announces Patti as the next contestant for the long jump. She readies herself and looks at her goal, which turns into a swirling mess that disappears underground.

She shakes her head and does her long jump. She lands on her feet and immediately collapses backwards.

Again, in the WHO FUCKING CARES STOP GOING BACK TO THIS PLOT IT DOESN’T FUCKING MATTER part of this episode, Roger is trying to assert his claim to the monster. He accidentally releases the trailer carrying the monster and it starts rolling down the hill.

Patti reenters consciousness to find Coach Spitz is more inept than you thought. He tells her she’s in the next race. She says she doesn’t feel so good. He tells her to get carried away. Fuck Coach Spitz. He should be fucking fired.

Ms. Kristal angrily says, “CARRY YOURSELF AWAY, COACH!” She adds, “this girl isn’t running anymore today.”

Ms. Kristal asks Patti if she’s eaten anything at all today. Patti says she hasn’t because she thought she’d be able to run faster that way. Ms. Kristal explains that your body needs protein, so when you don’t eat, your body starts eating itself and you lose strength rather than gaining it. Doug says that’s scary. Coach Spitz says he feels terrible. Avoiding the subject altogether, Patti asks Doug, “aren’t you supposed to go to the park with Skeeter?” Doug says it’s okay and he won’t miss anything if he’s a little late.

Actually, what he’s missing is a runaway monster.

Mr. Dink sees it and says, “I’m strangely repulsed, and yet I’m attracted.”

Some foreign scientists somewhere say,…

Doug apologizes for all the times he ignored Patti when she wanted to talk. He was too focused on making the monster with Skeeter. She says it’s okay because she knows what it’s like to get carried away. He asks if she wants to help them take the monster to the lake.

She says, “sure, Doug. I’ve never seen a real, live, fake…”
“MONSTER!”

The monster rolls past the track field. Skeeter and Roger run up and ask which way it went.

The monster rolls onto a major highway, has its head removed by a sign, rolls into the median and falls off the trailer. It lands in the road and smashes to pieces. A crowd of photographers run up and take pictures.

Doug, Skeeter, Patti and Roger step in front of the photographers. Skeeter says they’ll never catch the Lucky Duck Monster now. Roger laments the loss of his monster franchise career. Why can’t they just build another one? Fuck you, the episode is almost over. That’s why.

At Mr. Swirly, Doug suggests they split a small pizza.

Patti declines the offer, saying she’s going to order one for herself. 

Wrapping up his journal entry, Doug says Skeeter may not have caught the monster, but he won the scary junk contest.

Apparently Roger wasn’t making a stupid joke earlier. Bluffington has a Stupid Scary Pile of Junk Contest and Skeeter won. Roger and Skeeter start arguing over the trophy.

Patti has a final voice-over for this episode, offering real help.


In Doug’s “well, Journal” wrap-up, he says, “I guess sometimes you can’t believe everything you see, even when it’s yourself.” This is woefully inadequate given the whole experience. He should be pissed at the media for their sexist attitude. He should curse the name of the show that belittles women that do not fit a narrow definition of physical beauty, especially when they follow that show with a commercial where they say you will probably never fit that narrow definition, but you should damn well try anyway because your friends are all talking about you behind your back. Surely they put all of that shit in this episode to criticize media for doing this all the time, but then Doug doesn’t really explicitly learn from it. “You can’t believe everything you see, even when it’s yourself” is something Doug has so far failed to learn in every episode of this show. There’s no reason to believe the lesson stuck this time either.

This episode begins with Doug asking, “okay, so who’s driving me to Funky Town?” His parents look at each other briefly and return to their newspaper.

Neither wants to deal with him. They’re both being very adult here, buying multiple copies of the newspaper so they don’t have to share, coming up with lame excuses for why they can’t take him, completely ignoring their newborn baby as it wanders about the room. Fortunately, Judy offers to drive him.

I really hope this newspaper is free. I appreciate the headline joke, though.

Everyone is shocked. Theda tells Judy there’s no need to be sarcastic. She replies, “who’s sarcastic? You guys are busy. I’m not. I’ll drive him. Keys?”

Judy leaves the house. Doug shrugs at his useless parents, and follows her. Phil and Theda drop their papers, stand up, and hug.

“After 16 years of parenting!”
“It’s like a dream!”

Notice how they are still ignoring the newborn?

When Doug and Judy sit in the car, Doug asks her, “what’s the catch?”

She says she’s just doing him a favor. He accepts this and she immediately reveals that the catch is that she wants to make one quick stop first.

“It all started on a Friday afternoon…”

So now we’re going back two days to get the story about why Doug needs a ride to Funky Town. He really should just leave this part out.

Patti asks if anyone has any plans for the weekend. Skeeter says he’ll be doing the usual, which is comic books and dirt biking. Beebe is also doing the usual. For her, this means a little polo and a little hiking in the Bahamas. She yawns as she says this. Doug says, “hey, I know. What do you say we go to Funky Town?” Patti dismisses this idea because they went there last weekend. Enter Guy Graham.

“Listen. How would you guys like to have a blast this weekend? Kick out the jams!? Blow out the stops!? Really soup things up!? KNOW WHAT I MEAN!?”

His suggestion is that they go to Funky Town. Of course. Everyone is excited about this idea now, except Doug. Doug points out that he just suggested that and they shot him down. Patti says, “somehow the way Guy said it, it sounded like fun.” Doug has a fantasy.

He’s flying a plane past his friends and asks, “wanna come surfboard-skydiving through the eye of a hurricane?”

They are not enthused. Guy approaches them and asks, “how’s about staring into a corner and slobbering like a baboon?” This is an idea they can get behind.

Because Doug has a low opinion of Guy and also his friends apparently. He just doesn’t get it.

Walking home, Doug continues moaning about the situation. He has taken this one instance as the new rule. He thinks his friends think all of his suggestions sound boring. If Guy excitedly told them all to jump off a building, they’d do it.

Tired of trying to get Doug to understand, Patti walks away. Doug says he’s not even going to go to Funky Town.

On Saturday, Doug and Skeeter are at an arcade playing a game called Death Golfer.

Skeeter asks him what he plans to do tomorrow. Doug says he was thinking about getting some people together to play basketball. He reasons that not everyone will be at Funky Town. “I mean, I know Al and Moo will be around.”

Actually, they won’t. They climb out of the Death Golfer cabinet talking about the type of processor the game uses. One is sure the games at Funky Town use the same processor and the other is sure they don’t. They’re planning to find out tomorrow.

Realizing the futility of putting together a basketball game, Doug has a fantasy about all the fun things he could do alone on a Sunday afternoon. Sitting on the couch, he turns on the television.

A news pundit says some things that are political and vaguely boring until his speech turns into “blah blah blah” and Doug falls asleep.

Doug has a dream about all the fun his friends are having. Guy and Patti run off a ride laughing. Guy suggests they stuff cotton candy down their shorts, pour ketchup in their hair, and run around squawking like chickens.

The dream within the fantasy ends, and then I guess, so does the fantasy. Doug is making this harder to write than it has to be….

On Sunday morning, Doug finally stumbled on the solution to his problem. He jumps out of bed shouting, “YES!”

He says he decided to change his mind. He gets dressed and runs downstairs and, well, we’ve already seen what happens there.

Finally, we get to see where Judy needed to stop. Why did she need to drive Doug to Funky Town? What was it she needed that apparently couldn’t be explained to the parents? Was it drugs? No. It was Snord Gruppen.

Basically what we have here is Ikea. Judy needs a new bookshelf. Doug knows what’s up though. He points out the incomparable size of Snord Gruppen and she dismisses his concerns.

Why didn’t she just drop him off first? Doug doesn’t ask this. He asks why can’t she do her shopping some other time. She says, “you know mom and dad never give me the car to go shopping.” A reasonable answer to a reasonable question that completely ignores the fact that “after you drop Doug off” is included in the phrase “some other time.”

Judy approaches something that doesn’t look like a bookshelf and says that it looks like a good bookshelf. She says, “what I love about this stuff is it’s all interlocking and stackable.” She spins a piece of the not-a-bookshelf and water pours on her from something that looks like a shower head.

A salesman approaches them and asks if they need help. Judy says, “this bookshelf spat on me!”

“This is sink, madam. You’re in kitchens. Living room is that way.”

That is a pretty shitty sink. They find something that looks a little more like a bookshelf. Doug points out that this extra stop is taking longer than she said it would. She pulls a knob on the presumed bookshelf and it turns into a car.

Another Snord Gruppen employee tells them bookshelves are on the second floor. Doug continues complaining, and after failing to find something else to mistake for a bookshelf, Judy asks a group of Snord Gruppen employees about bookshelves. They don’t know what she’s talking about. She says, “a bunch of flat, interlockable, stackable surfaces on which to place BOOKS!” They are still confused, so she pulls a book from her bag to show them. They laugh.

They says there’s nothing like that here. All of their books are interlocking and stackable, so they have no need for bookshelves.

Big fucking waste of time. In the car, Doug says he has 20 minutes to get to Funky Town. She says they’ll make it, but first they have to go back home. Incredulous, Doug asks why. She says she doesn’t know the way to Funky Town from Snord Gruppen. She only knows how to get there if she leaves from the house. Judy is the worst.

Doug checks a map and gives her very simple directions for the fastest route. She follows his directions until they get to the exit they need to take. She makes no effort to slow down and just zips right past it.

Next, she drives through a roundabout, pointlessly driving around it a couple times.

They drive through an industrial area and Judy starts yelling about how they’re lost. When they find a tollbooth onto the interstate, Doug insists they aren’t lost. They’re almost there.

He says Funky Town is just on the other side of the tollbooth. Unfortunately, it’s actually the border crossing into another country. This guy wants to see their passports.

Meanwhile, Patti and Skeeter are having a blast and wondering why Doug isn’t there yet.

Back in the car, Judy is berating Doug for his navigational incompetence. Because apparently it’s his fault she didn’t listen to him when he told her to take that exit. And it’s his fault she doesn’t know how to get to a place unless she leaves from their house. Anyway, now she has to make another stop. Doug begins to protest but it’s a rest stop and she says she has to stop. For some bizarre reason that I’m just going to blame on their parents, neither of them wants to say “bathroom.” She doesn’t say, “I have to use the bathroom.” He doesn’t say, “oh, you have to poop? Okay, yeah. Better you drop poops in a toilet than in your pants.” They’re both embarrassed.

While waiting for Judy, Doug turns on the radio and pulls out the map. A news story on the radio freaks Doug out a little.

“The couple was found stranded on a deserted island in the middle of Lake Aukamaga. They said they had gotten lost on the interstate and had been kidnapped by a gang of bikers. The bikers are still at large and dangerous.”

At the mention of bikers, Doug looks up from the map to see a group of cyclists stopping to sit at a picnic table.

A stereotypical biker pulls up next to Doug and asks if he needs directions. Doug turns blue and declines the help.

Then he has a fantasy about all the fun his friends are having. Al and Moo get on a ride while Skeeter makes two comments about how much fun they’re having or how much fun Doug is missing. Beebe is riding bumper cars and telling her chauffeur who to hit. Patti wonders out loud where Doug is and Guy tells her to forget about him.

“Hey, let’s take a boat through Suck Face Tunnel!”
“Suck Face Tunnel? What’s that?”
“I don’t know. Doug made it up.”

His fantasies are having dreams and becoming more self-aware.

After the fantasy, Doug is fuming about Suck Face Tunnel and asks Judy if she can go faster. She says no and she needs another rest stop.

If you were wondering if Doug was the only Funnie kid with apparent bouts of crippling social anxiety, well, apparently Judy couldn’t find the fucking bathroom and didn’t want to ask somebody where it was because then they’d all stare at her. Doug points out that everyone is at the rest stop for the same reason. Growing more impatient, he tells her to just stop at a gas station. She says it looks disgusting, but pulls over just the same. She says, “I don’t see one. Do you see one?”
“One what, Judy? SAY THE WORD!”
“Forget! Let’s go!”

Doug asks these two assholes if they have a bathroom because his sister needs to go. They laugh and Judy blushes.

When they’re back on the road, Judy is so furious, she threatens to tell Patti that Doug is in love with her. They get to their exit only to find it is closed due to construction.

The workers, especially the asshole working one of the bigger machines, are terrible.

Judy asks if there’s a detour to Funky Town and the guy goes on and on about how much he loves the place until the tractor operating asshole drops a huge slab of concrete right next to the car. Doug and Judy are scared for their safety, and should probably call OSHA. Instead, they reiterate their need for directions to Funky Town.

Unfortunately, another worker starts using a jackhammer right next to their car at the same moment they are getting directions.

Immediately after finishing the directions, the guy tries to ask Judy out. They hastily drive away without proper directions, because old man construction worker couldn’t just be helpful to the 16 year old. Naturally, they become more lost.

Doug is trying to navigate with the map, and I’m starting to wonder if he can actually read a map.

Lots of nonsense occurs.

Some cows get involved.

Finally, they’re just arguing. Doug takes the whole trip as good reason why their parents never let her drive. She says, “well maybe YOU’D like to drive then!?”

He says he would and reaches for the keys. She grabs them and hangs them out the window, threatening to throw them into the woods.

After she throws the keys, they both realize how fucking stupid that was and scream. Doug says that all they have to do is walk straight into the woods until they find the keys, then walk straight back.

After about 10 steps, Doug trips and despair takes over. He clutches at grass and dirt and says, “it’s no use! They’re gone! We’re gonna miss Funky Town! We’re gonna starve to death! We’re gonna be stuck here together for the rest of our lives!”

If you were wondering if it was worth your child’s time to join the Bluffscouts, it is not. They will be prepared for nothing. Anyway, Judy finds the keys. They were on the ground at her feet, a few feet in front of where Doug gave up.

They somehow become lost on their way back to the car. Some wildlife freaks them out and they start running. They run until they find a mysterious village. The citizens are dressed mostly like Pilgrims and they have weird accents.

Doug asks this guy if there’s a phone they can use. He doesn’t know what a phone is, so Doug describes it as a box you use to talk to people. The guy tells him, “leave off your foolery, ye young rapscallion.” This is apparently Pilgrim for “fuck off, shithead.”

Doug asks if it’s possible they drove through a hole in the time space continuum. Judy tells him to not be ridiculous. She grabs another person and asks for the date. The Pilgrim girl says it is June 14, 1683.

Doug and Judy gasp, but then Judy realizes she knows the girl. The girl panics and runs away. They chase. They’re too busy chasing her to notice the other people dressed in modern clothes and taking pictures.

When Judy finally catches the girl, Doug realizes they accidentally wandered into an area next to or part of Funky Town. Judy’s friend warns her that they have to pretend it’s the 17th century. Judy catches on and takes up the accent and speech patterns while Doug asks for instructions to the entrance of Funky Town.

The asshole Doug asked about the phone points them out to the parson as witches. So they have to be punished.

It makes no sense. They aren’t employees of this shitty place. If they’re putting all their apparent customers in the stocks for blasphemy or witchcraft or whatever, how are they still a business? They received this punishment because Doug asked for a phone during a minor emergency. How many emergencies have these employees ignored for the sake of their fake authenticity? You’ve had a stroke? What is this phone thing you speak of? Uh huh, and ambulance? What sort of spell is that? Are you the devil?

Doug takes this moment to reflect on all the times Judy has embarrassed him. The first example he thinks about is when she redesigned his soccer team’s uniforms.

She cast him as Ear Wax in her hygiene play.

After the recollections, a woman tells her son to stand by the witches in the stocks so they can get a picture. This doesn’t make sense. I hate how much this doesn’t make sense.

I don’t want to transcribe their whole fight, but basically Doug blames Judy and vice versa. Obviously. When Judy says Doug was too eager to meet up with “that little chicken leg blonde,” he blushes and pretends he doesn’t know what she’s talking about. She points at Patti who has just arrived with Doug’s friends, and Doug says, “Chicken! I mean, Patti! Am I glad to see you!”

Doug’s friends let them out of the stocks. Patti asks where they’ve been and he tells her to forget it. Right after he suggests they go on some rides, a man announces that Funky Town is now closed.

So Doug tells them the story of their ridiculous day and realizes it’s actually pretty funny. They all think it’s very funny that Doug thought he actually traveled back in time. Al and Moo are laughing so hard they’re crying.

Doug asks about all the fun they had with a somewhat accusatory tone.

Skeeter points out that all the rides are the same so, y'know…

Guy creeps up on Patti, putting his hands on her shoulders, and says, “I don’t know, guys. Patti and I had a fantabulous time! It was kickin’! It was slammin’! It wa…”
“Hey, Guy, cut the hype.”


After shoving him away, she says, “can’t you admit it was just a little dull? You always make such a production out of everything.”

In the parking lot, Judy is the first to realize they left the car out in the middle of nowhere. Doug’s friends and Guy help them look.

Doug asks Patti what Guy meant when he said they had a fantabulous time. She says, “nothing.”
He asks, “never heard of Suck Face Tunnel?”
“Doug, what are you talking about?”
“Nothing.”

I don’t know why Doug made up a ride called Suck Face Tunnel. It doesn’t make sense. He’s been to Funky Town before. According to the beginning of the episode, he was there last week. If it’s a place where middle school kids hang out, there’s almost certainly a part of it where they are sucking each others’ faces. Doug apparently doesn’t know about this area, and so made up his own idea of what it would be. It’s a shitty Tunnel of Love with a shittier name.

I currently have no theories on the apparent widespread shame the citizens of Bluffington apparently feel when they have to use the bathroom.