My Name Is Earl

Will you guys make fun of me if I admit that I had tears in my eyes during the last few minutes of tonight's episode? And I watched it twice! (Sorry, got a screener a while ago, and I've been holding back.) Those scenes with Joy, Darnell and the boys praying for "Old Daddy," Randy alone in bed, and Earl turning in his list just melted me. "The House of the Rising Sun" playing in the background didn't help matters.... But then there was good old Ralph as if he'd been expecting his former cohort and already roping Earl into trouble.

Rewind. All of the steps Earl has been taking to make himself an adult were already making me excited for another season of the show. Sure, I'll miss the motel setting, along with its vending machine that takes buttons and Paul the sleepwalking guy from downstairs. But there are so many comic possibilities with Earl working and living in a new place. Beginning with Randy's Mr. T answering machine. And then there was Earl's sudden decision to try to find a girlfriend, paralleling Randy's search earlier this season. I love how he now has a taste for highly educated women (guess he's looking for the exact opposite of Joy) — first Alex the professor, then Ruby the deaf lawyer. First lesson in dating, though, buddy: Tell them all you want to about the list, but don't ever let them see it. I really hope Marlee Matlin comes back to get him out of this jam in the fall.

But of course Earl isn't as bad off in jail as Darnell would have been in the trailer with Dodge and Earl Jr. His hair and Mr. Turtle's butt wouldn't have lasted another week without Joy. What an adorable masochist Darnell is, longing for the woman who made him eat the other half of his heart necklace when they were in a fight. But Earl certainly had a point about Joy: For all her faults and violent acts against strangers, she is a good mother. Still, his sudden confession to get her out of jail shocked the hell out of me. He has a point about making up for all the times he should have gone to jail before, though. And this could make for a really interesting Season 3.

On to the funnies:

— Joy turning herself into Dog the Bounty Hunter accidentally.
— Among Joy's other past misdeeds: having a threesome with her best friend's parents, going to church in a denim bikini, hitting a Girl Scout with a rock, stabbing Earl in the neck with a ballpoint pen, throwing a puppy at him.
— Among her attributes: She can yodel and she mounted a dead pony on roller skates so the kids wouldn't miss their rides at a party.
— Among Earl's faults, according to Joy: She had to put a towel on his chest during sex to avoid rug burn, and he once had a semigay dream about a guy from 90210.
— Earl asks if Ruby thinks he'll make a good witness "because I'm tall and have a handsome mustache?" Doug the interpreter's response: "She didn't mention that. Probably because she's not into the Village People."
— Depressed Darnell killing a crab with a mallet on Catalina's plate.
— Randy's advice to Earl about how to ask Ruby out: It doesn't matter what you say as long as you act cool. "See? [Turns collar up] 'Ediebottendoozy. Ediebottenwoh.'"

Finally, this wasn't Catalina's best message to the audience disguised as angry talk in Spanish, but here's your translation: "Thanks for watching our show. We're going to miss you this summer. Don't you think it's funny that Earl thinks I'm talking about how much I hate Joy, when really I'm saying how much I love you guys?"

Catalina, we'll miss you, too!

Find Earl videos in our new Online Video Guide.

First, off let me admit that I've never seen the movie Rudy. If I hadn't read Greg Garcia's explanation on this very site, I really never would have known that tonight's episode was an homage to the movie. I mean the randomness of having Sean Astin, Charles Dutton and Chelcie Ross guest-star seemed perfectly normal. But I guess I would have wondered why there was all the soaring music and odd inspirational speeches. So last week, Earl tackled (heh) the "teacher making a difference" movie cliché and this week it's the sports-movie message that you can do anything you put your mind to, but sometimes you need a little help from your teammates.

I'm sure you guys were all following along with your TV Guide-provided "Laugh 'N Sniff" cards, but in case you're online-only people, here are the smells we got to experience: clean uniforms, Oreos, new-car smell, popcorn, bad cologne and something else I can't remember because the bad cologne overpowered the rest. Also, I kept looking down to take notes and missed the number cues a couple of times. But the smells were just part of what made this episode quite the poetic experience. There were some amazing lines, and I'm not talking about the ones mimicking Rudy. The two that struck me as quite literary were from Earl: "The air-conditioning felt like Frosty the Snowman was blowing kisses up my coveralls," and "It was like the time I drank chocolate milk and realized I wanted to live my life with a mustache."

Here are some others I loved:
"Everybody rubs my mother's bust." — Mr. Waadt
"That's a lot of punch. Someone at the trailer park getting baptized?" — Joy's deaf lawyer's "word talker"
"Anything you put in your 401K, the company will match." "I'm gonna put a puppy in mine." — Reggie and Randy
"Dickies who think you're dumber than they are just because they're a little smarter than you." — That other Docker (can someone please ID him?)
"I also like the smell of bacon, but I'm not going to fornicate it." — Darnell
"When the moon hits your eye like a big pizza pie, that's amortized." — Earl
"Oh, chasquido." — Joy

That little Mexican adventure of Joy's can't end well for her, but you know it's going to be damn funny for us to watch!

In the meantime, read my interviews with Jaime Pressly and Ethan Suplee. Because Joy said so.

"Earl, relax. The teacher always gets through to the troubled kids. I've seen that movie 12 times, and it always ends up fine — although sometimes you do get shot in a drive-by or catch breast cancer." Thank you, Randy. And wouldn't it be nice if after this episode we no longer had to see versions of that movie come out? All we needed was To Sir, With Love and Stand and Deliver. But that's precisely why, for the sake of my teacher friends, I did love this twist on the genre: a tongue-in-cheek endorsement of eye-for-an-eye discipline when "inspiration" fails miserably.

I'm guessing that tonight's episode marks a new phase of Earl's life (or as Darnell might put it: "Subsets! You're growing up before our very eyes"). Now that the bank representative made him realize he's an unemployed homeless man with no education, I think time's not going to stand still in Earl's life anymore, and soon enough he's going to have to cross people off his list while getting on with his own life. I love how, even though this show could have easily just stuck to the formula of the first season and settled into mediocrity, it keeps switching things up and evolving.

In the meantime, however, Earl's life looked even more pitiful to the high-school kids than it did to the bank lady. Getting attacked by nonflushing speed freaks in his own motel room, pronouncing YMCA "yemca," getting beat by a monkey at rock-paper-scissors, wearing a disheveled porn-star mustache — all are surefire ways not to impress the young'uns, but also not really scaring them straight, either. Poor Darnell wasn't helping matters with his highly educated freakout. Nope, it took an act of accidental terrorism to make the kids change their ways. (And I hate to mention it, but I really hope there's no one out there criticizing the show for being insensitive to Virginia Tech or suicide bombers.) I think the "small penis" recording would have worked nicely, too.

A few more funny things to point out:

— When Earl mentioned he was going to show the kids their future, Randy's response was, "Just don't tell me what day I die. Is it a Thursday?"
— The closest Earl ever got to being a stuntman was falling through the roof while he was trying to rob a liquor store. I believe he's referring to this unfortunate character whose real-life video is in our new Online Video Guide. Shameless plug for the project I've been slaving away at, but I promise there are more funny videos where that came from.

For you, dear readers, I almost watched this entire episode a second time just to record all the different gonadal euphemisms used, but since this is a forum for sharing, I thought I'd just list a few and let you guys fill in the blanks. Can't you just imagine what the whiteboard in the writers' room looked like the week they created this? My favorites: McNuggets, little Chubbies, meat and potatoes. Now you add yours to the bottom and we'll have the most mature discussion these blogs have ever seen! (Though I don't know if our censors are as forgiving as NBC's.)

I really hope that the death of Big Chubby — due to a mix-up between his vodka-filled water pistol and his real gun — doesn't mean the door is closed on any possible future Burt Reynolds appearances. He and his mustache will be greatly missed, even though that means we did get to see the best fake mustache on the show since Ralph tried to impersonate Earl at the bank. I love that they never even made a joke about Little Chubby's rug or his mustache; it was funny just hanging there. And though I was never a huge fan of Norm MacDonald before, he certainly does play a good mean nutcase (sorry) and an appropriately unsettling nice guy with that signature deadpan delivery of his. I damn near got chills watching him force Joy to drink Randy's rat tail. I'd probably do the same thing Joy did in this case and demand that my husband "kill him slowly." Instead, Earl just killed his manliness, turning LC's jingle bells the color "rorange" and actually giving him an Earl-like epiphany about becoming a nicer person. How that involved the Aborigines I'm still unclear about. It also made him rent Memoirs of a Geisha, which I don't recommend to anyone not suffering from insomnia. Unfortunately, once "the doctor put Humpty Dumpty back together again," the testosterone-producing Little Chubby did horrible things like make truckers lap-dance for each other and strap Earl to the wrong end of a batting cage. So the real way Earl crossed LC off his list was by singing "Free Bird" twice and by finally making the mean guy get in touch with his feminine side and have the offending glands removed.

And all this prompted Earl to make a hilarious, unintentional reference to this week's Lost: "What would I sacrifice to be loved? Not my balls."

While tonight's wasn't the most high-concept of Earl episodes, it was the laugh-out-loudest of the season (hmmm, I'm not as good as Randy at making up terms, am I?). When I read the synopsis before watching, I feared it would be a recycling of Anchorman, and maybe even remind us of Lost's "Tricia Tanaka Is Dead." But no, this satire of local news reporters had a decidedly Earlish twist, beginning with the meth-lab explosion in the trailer park. Not just any show could take something we now immediately associate with trailer parks in a sad way and make it funny in an inoffensive way. That's not to detract from the all-out slapstick hilarity of the episode, but I just wanted to point out that there was some nuance thrown in with the broad comedy.

So we don't know if this was before or after their Cops was on, but Earl and Randy were big TV stars more than once in Camden County, thanks to their antics behind poor, tortured Nicole Moses. I can't decide if I liked the bear attack or the baby in the refrigerator better. Both were great because you know you've seen some similar report on the 11 o'clock news, in between all the murders. Seems to me Nicole probably had just a little bit of bad karma coming her way for taking part in the exploitation of human tragedy to advance her career. (Nope, I'm not a huge fan of local TV news: It's a sure-fire recipe for paranoia in New York City.) And after seeing how she manipulated the story about Earl to make Randy seem mentally "disabilitated" (not that she had to do much), I definitely don't think Earl needed to go out of his way to help her. There was an actual serious-ish topic tonight: The way Randy is stuck in Earl's shadow. Poor guy. But I think deep down he knows that if he wanted to be an independent individual, he'd have to give up most of his pleasures in life, like trimming Earl's nails, in order to concentrate on his own zagging, and that wouldn't be very much fun.

Enough of the philosophical musings, here are the funny bits:
— I laughed the loudest at Randy freaking out when the weather map made his torso disappear, so that one deserves to be listed out of order.

— "Crazy Arms" made Earl and Randy "the proudest brothers since Eddie Van Halen and his drummer brother." (The husband tells me that's Alex, by the way.)

— Randy's eight-hour dream about a ball of yarn bored him so much, he wanted to go to sleep, but he was already asleep.

— Earl: "Words go right through my head unless they're Polish jokes or Judas Priest lyrics." Judas Priest have some pretty silly lyrics, incidentally.

— Part of Nicole's reporter purgatory included doing the crop report with a sock puppet.

— Joy cracked herself up by asking Randy: "What's wrong? The world run out of macaroni and cheese?" Man, that would really bum me out.

— Randy's biggest objection to moving out of the motel: "I don't like paying money for soap."

— "Crazy head" was pretty cute, but not nearly as funny as when he freaked out over his torso disappearing. I almost had mac and cheese coming out of my nose.

— Darnell knows for sure that the moon landing was all done with puppets in his uncle's garage. Second puppet reference of the episode!

— Randy believes he's proven his smarts by getting a Grover out of the claw machine, which costs around $600 to accomplish.

OK, time for me to go to bed and dream about my own ball of yarn — hopefully not attached to my teeth.

Could there be a nicer cuckold in the world than Earl? And tonight's story — which was one of the funnier ones in recent Hickey history — took place before Earl's karmic epiphany. Well, maybe it's just because he's telling it post-epiphany that it's the sweetest tale of trailer-park infidelity I've ever heard. Throughout the whole episode, he kept emphasizing the fact that Joy and Darnell were in love, never really blaming them for cheating.

It's nice how we're so far into Season 2, but we didn't know until now how Joy and Darnell got together, or how Earl came to terms with raising two other men's "iglilitimate" kids ("No offense, buddy"). See, Lost fans? You're not the only ones who have to wait for answers! In a nutshell, Earl and Joy were stressed out over childcare, so a margarita-infused Joy wound up in the Subaru Brat with Darnell. Earl was too happy-go-lucky and/or selfish to notice until his son came out "darker than blue." Even then, he wasn't exactly angry, just disappointed and ready to get out of the whole situation and move back home. But miraculously, pre-karma-epiphany Carl Hickey didn't try to solve the problem by yelling. He actually tried to talk some reason into his son and coerce him into doing the right thing... by throwing his gerbils out the window.

So, on to the funny parts:

— I love just about everything that came out of Joy's mouth this episode, but she said most of it too fast for me to write it down. There was something about sticking her baby in a gunnysack and whacking it upside a barn. I did get the best one, though: "Click your heels, Dorothy, and maybe a house full of midgets will fall on my husband."

— Oh, and she tried to convince Earl that Earl Jr. was black because he must have a "recessive black genie."

— I actually got a kick out of the baser gags of the evening, such as Earl's belief that Darnell's hair in their bed was actually his own from down under.

— Earl's attempt to convince his parents that the white kid in the nursery was his failed big time when a strange woman came to breastfeed it. And Carl's quick response: "I want my Indian-tooth rattle back."

— Randy thought the best way to avoid embarrassment about their multicolored family would be to dress like clowns. Sounds pretty progressive to me.

— Since that plan failed, he was pretty content to move back in with his parents and play Merlin.

— He'd also settle for getting to play that gerbil-catching game Earl and Carl came up with, but no one let him try it.

It probably wasn't the best idea for me to write this after watching Grey's Anatomy — crying my eyes out doesn't really put me in the mood to recall bad Earl's evil stunts. Wait, I got that wrong: recalling bad Earl's evil stunts is exactly what one should be doing after crying one's eyes out.

Interesting that the birthday boy didn't know from the start he'd be having a silly day, when it started with a breakfast in bed of button, beer and gum pancakes. But he might just be used to Randy's culinary creativity. What he can't be used to is Randy's newfound ability to organize a surprise party without spilling the beans. I didn't suspect a thing. Granted, none of Earl's friends/former victims had to stretch much to find new list items for him to cross off for them, so they didn't exactly seem suspicious. And of all the shows on my viewing schedule, this isn't exactly the one I expect to have a twist of any sort. Well, "twist" is a bit of an exaggeration. Let's call tonight's episode a lighthearted excuse to bring back the old Camden freaks again and revisit the fun that was bad Earl. It was also a good way to show all those list items without making us go through his efforts to cross them off. I don't know exactly how he'd work off switching out Darnell's pot brownies with regular ones, which resulted in Donny listening to a Phish album straight through.

Some other funny parts:

— Earl used to watch a show about jackasses called "Dumbass," which inspired him to torture Randy in creative ways.
— That scene about Earl peeing on his mom's rug started off making you think he was just a baby when he did it. But no, he was just a drunk.
— The best place Joy could think of to buy things to spice up her sex life was Spencer's Gifts. "We're gonna have to do it near an outlet!"
— Earl really amused himself by making fun of Joy's baby weight when she was pregnant the first or second time. But this was yet another great way to make use of Jaime Pressly's real bump.
— That scene with his childhood friend's pervy, pill-popping mom was kinda scary.
— Beau Bridges was great as Papa Hickey who, after accidentally taking a happy pill, goosed his guests and tried to turn his anniversary party into a key party. Gotta love those nods to the '70s.
— Joy managed to get a good insult in, even at Earl's surprise forgiving party: "They stopped making those flannel shirts in 1991. Come oooon."

Nope, wasn't the funniest episode of the bunch, but seeing Earl breakdancing more than made up for that.

By the way, here is my recent interview with Eddie Steeples, and here's one that the magazine did with Beau Bridges.

Apologies for getting this up late. I've had the kind of headache you'd get from drinking beer through a straw at Randy's speed — without any of the fun side effects. But I must blog about this episode, because after a couple of off weeks, a little Joy-centric action has brought Earl back to top form.

Has it struck anyone else that this show is the offspring of All in the Family? Just in the way it layers political incorrectness on top of progressive commentary on race relations, without any rhetoric (hmmm, maybe Aaron Sorkin should be watching). Of course, it takes Joy — who still makes herself laugh every time she refers to her "deaf lawyer" — to deliver messages about tolerance and forgiveness. Because of course, Joy's newly discovered half sister Liberty Jones (played so perfectly by Tamala Jones) is so much like her — right down to the interracial marriage to very chill, skinny husbands with an affinity for reptiles — that they've been rivals since elementary school. Loved the debate between Woodrow Wilson and Henry Cabot Lodge: "President Wilson smokes cigarettes down by the creek!" "Henry Cabot Lodge has a condom in her purse!" How could a little thing like skin color keep them from knowing they were sisters? Well, there is one big difference between them: While Joy's ambitions were wiped away once she had kids (if we're to believe her "My Name Is Joy" speech a few weeks ago), Liberty's still working hard to make her dream of professional wrestling come true. Maybe not having her father around gave her more drive or something. Fighting "The Man" and the "Klanimal" certainly seems like a constructive way for her to let out her frustrations. Anyway, enough of the life lessons, let's review the funny bits:

— Randy trying to grasp the concept of a half sister: "Top half or bottom half? I'm surprised they kept her alive." Joy: "I'm surprised they kept you alive."

— Earl and Joy's spending spree on Liberty's credit card included paying for a homeless man to have laser eye surgery and be their butler for a day, and getting Randy tap-dancing lessons.

— D.J. Qualls was such an excellent casting choice for the white version of Darnell, Ray-ray. And his biggest reason for wanting a kid was to name him "Ray-ray-ray." I hope Mr. Turtle and Mr. Bearded Dragon get to have that playdate soon.

— Staying out of jail is the best reason Joy's had for getting knocked up, since a broken condom and Darnell's leg cramp were the "reasons" for her other sons.

— Joy's best insult to Liberty:
"The moon take a night off so your butt could eclipse the sun?"

— And finally, I can't think of a show that's made its star's real-life pregnancy into a funnier plot. Can you?

I actually don't remember what the Napoleonic Code is anymore (though I'm sure I learned about it a few times), but since I love everything that comes out of Darnell's mouth, I thought it was appropriate. And now I'm wondering if there's something in that code that will demand that Earl return to the high level of comedy it had been serving us of late, before this OK episode. Sorry, I just don't find French jokes that funny. And I felt like the plot about Pierre, the tortured exchange student who fled the country just because young bully Earl strangled him a little in the boys' room, was weakly thrown together merely to justify a bunch of French jokes and a guy with an exaggerated accent.

Well, OK, there were a couple of French jokes that amused me: Earl's little simile, "Like my grandmother's French poodle, that bitch bit back," for one (and does that mean Earl once bit his grandmother's poodle?). The Zinedine Zidane head butt that Pierre gave Earl upon arriving at the Crab Shack. And the fact that they played "Thank Heaven for Little Girls" from Gigi while Pierre got his fill of American kisses. Also, you couldn't help but laugh at all the reasons everyone tried to give Pierre to prove America's superiority. First, Earl declared that we like to take in foreigners and help them. Then he showed the Parisian the town gravel pit, the largest freeway pile-up, cheesy art for sale on the street and "giggle belly." Joy tried everything from the Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade to women who shave their armpits. The best was Darnell, who started with "Baseball, roller coasters and a system of jurisprudence based on Jeffersonian democracy" and finished by rattling off a list of types of marijuana. But what got to Pierre was Catalina's charming rhapsody on the availability of toilet paper.

That was the catalyst (hehe) for the funnier part of tonight's episode: Catalina and Randy. Pierre's Pepe le Pew act finally made Randy get up the nerve to tell his wife he wanted to squash bugs for her and make their relationship more than a green-card marriage, all while holding a urinal cake in his hand. Poor Catalina was put on the spot, and, oddly enough, it was Joy who came up with her solution: Sleep with Randy, but make it the worst sex of his life. "This feels like the time you told me the public pool was topless," was Catalina's first response, and then the best exchange followed: "You slept with a guy for free cassettes?" "It was before CDs. Don't judge me!" (An echo of Joy's mom's catchphrase.) "How old were you? CDs were invented in...."

At first, I feared Catalina rubbing herself with cheese and fish and making herself sweat would actually make Randy like her more, given his food obsessions. And maybe they would have, if she hadn't also pretended to be Randy's mom. Unfortunately for Catalina, it was the best sex of her life. This is actually the best possible direction for the show to go in. I didn't really think Randy and Catalina's marital bliss would work for the show, and Randy pining over her was going to get old pretty soon, so turning the tables was a pretty smart move. I hope it inspires more zany comedy in the coming weeks!

The past few episodes of Earl were a lot to live up to, so maybe I should be happy about not having to take so many notes during tonight's. It's rather a relief to settle back into a steadier pace of life in Camden County — and granted, by steadier, I mean one that involves a guy killed by a Murphy bed and a funeral parlor run by John Waters.

It was interesting to see the show get a little depressing at times, especially since Earl normally shrugs off the worst parts about their poverty and trashiness as simple facts of life. But I actually shuddered when they showed Catalina sleeping in what I assume was the motel's laundry room with the other maids. And then there was the fact that Josh lived his life online and had no friends (that he knew of) in real life. Hey, is that all a joke at our expense? (Nah, just at the expense of people who frequent those other TV sites that shall not be named.) Thankfully, all of this was made lighter by the presence of John Waters and his "tableaux" of the deceased in their favorite habitats, which to me seem much less creepy than your traditional open-casket wake. I just wish we had much more of the kooky auteur. There's no such thing as too much John Waters. I'm not sure what to make of our first look at Catalina and Randy as a married couple, but I have no doubt we'll get a better look at their domestic life together soon enough.

The other funny bits:
— Earl's freaky coincidences of being "trapped" in the bathroom, in a conversation with the Tom Hanks-obsessed guy and in the back window of the El Camino.
— His attempt to make the massage gift "unanimous."
— Joy's joy at the death of her victim/witness, which she celebrated with Chablis and 7Up, since there were no buckets of champagne available.
— The crazy dream in which Josh visited Earl and trapped him in that toy-grabbing claw game (do those things have a name?). It was a new level of surreal for this show.
— John Waters describes the traditional funeral, accompanied by Pachelbel's Canon in D on an organ. Earl replies: "Not the cannon. That sounds dangerous." I guess that joke is funnier if you're a recovering orchestra geek like me, and like this guy.
— Darnell is strangely fixated on his purple wedding suit, made with poisonous purple dye.
— Earl's original eulogy for Josh: "Cactus, mayonnaise, eggs, gas bill."
— Earl discovering what Joy calls the "wide, wide world of web" and live chat.
— Darnell's subtle joke to himself: "Mrs. Prickly."

Does anyone remember the last straightforward, standard crossing-someone-off-the-list episode of Earl? I'm not complaining. I like these experiments just fine, and I'm pretty sure I'd get bored of that formula if they'd stuck with it throughout this season. But it is interesting to note that no two episodes have been alike for the past three or four months.

Tonight seemed to be starting off the old way: Some event triggers Earl's memory of a past wrongdoing (the Abernackys move out of the trailer park); cue flashback to said wrongdoing (Earl, Randy and Joy stealing from the library because they're too bad at spelling to stay home and play Scrabble, the way other families do); and then making up to the wronged person somehow ends up more complicated than it seemed at first. Of course, I love the details that make up the robbery: Randy stands watch because he's afraid of paper cuts; the peacock is the official bird of Camden County; the value of the Civil War-era silverware they've stolen is announced on TV; after Jasper tells the gang it's too hot to sell, Randy gets confused and thinks the hole they're digging is for Jasper. Oh yeah, and these guys are Earl's justification for why he deserves a motorcycle.

After Earl's story of the failed ransom note, we abruptly switch over to "My Name Is Randy" mode. Cute idea, full of funny quotes, but I don't know... maybe it's a lack of practice, or maybe I'm opposed to change. I just didn't enjoy Randy's, Joy's and Darnell's narration as fully as I'd hoped. So let's just skip to the funny bits:

— Randy helpfully suggests to Earl that the reason he can't find the buried treasure is that someone from China dug it up from the other side.
— When Earl and Joy used to fight, it gave Randy a tummy ache. (Actually, that's sad, not funny.)
— The conversation between Jasper's mail-order Russian bride and her cohort (who "sounded like Count Chocula and looked like Frankenberry"): "He is not brains of operation." "He's muscle?" "More like butt."
— Randy's reaction to accidentally winding up in the gazebo with a male prostitute: "The stuff he had was the same stuff I had."
— The intro to "My Name Is Joy" requires full playback: "You know the girl who could've been the next Faith Hill but somewhere along the way discovered peach daiquiris, put the diaphragm in the wrong way and found herself right dab in the middle of trailer hell...?"
— Faith Hill does actually bring Joy to her happy place, until the chorus of "Breathe," which sends her into a hacking smoker's cough.
— Instead of reading in the bathroom, Earl usually uses that time to make cockroaches race.
— Joy has always considered the hidden silverware her "safety net."
— Of course, we couldn't learn too much from "My Name Is Crabman," except that he graduated college at 14, is a virtuoso cellist and can identify 254 varieties of cheese in a blind taste test.
— So how could someone that smart mistake pepper for the fish food?
— "I'd never say it out loud, but that bitch is crazy!"
— The code phrase for buying pot from the librarian used to be "I'd like to make a donation."
— And thankfully, Earl recognized the charred silverware, now labeled as caveman artifacts, before making that donation. I can't imagine the lotto money would last much longer if he had to dole it out in chunks like that. Especially after that trip to Mexico. Speaking of which... whither that entire Catalina story line?

I basically watched this episode twice in a row because I was rewinding so much, just to make sure I was catching all the great lines and correctly identifying everyone. It was practically a yearbook of Camden County's crazies — in almost a subtle way, because if you haven't seen every single episode of Earl, you might not recognize, say, Donny Jones, but you'd still laugh at him wearing nothing but a python on his lawn while the one-legged girl called the cops on him and Gay Kenny looked on. And I've always said my favorite episodes are the ones that go back in time to bad-karma Earl, so this 2003 "rerun" was ideal.

Even though Reno 911! did it first, this is such a loving tribute to Cops. Especially the way Randy seemed to be such a connoisseur of the show, though he couldn't get the theme song right: "Bad boys, bad boys... Who you gonna call?" "Bad boys, bad boys... What's it gonna be?" Too bad his attempt to create a good chase scene for the show ended in him having to be tranquilized in a tree.

Here's a review of the other characters' "performances":
Earl's many attempts to escape on a kids' bike were classic, but nothing says romance like stealing a cop car (a cameraman hostage included) to take your wife on a date. He was pretty good at being sadistic to the poor camera guy, too. I wish I didn't have to imagine his skinned "pecker." (Interesting to know which terminology is acceptable at 8 pm on network TV, isn't it?)

Joy was in fine form, first with her massage-oil tantrum ("That's peppermint. I hope you find it refreshing!") and then with her rooftop tossing game. (Carrot Top did it better on Reno, but he didn't put out the mailman's eye with a shard of Def Leppard mirror.) Finally, on their cop-car date: "Since when do you like rap music?" "I am not cheating on you!"

At first I thought we'd finally found out what landed Darnell in witness protection, since he'd apparently been caught growing weed in his grandma's house. But my chronology's all off, 'cause we first saw him dumped out of the Feds' van on New Year's 2000. So that must be his fake grannie encouraging the fruits of his gardening hobby ("Different people page him all day long just to see them!")

As much as his initial appearance on the show caused me trouble, Mike O'Malley's Officer Stuart was well-suited for this episode. He turned down his CB radio to talk to the Cops people about his porcelain caps. Then he let Tim Stack "of TV's Son of the Beach" continue to drive home drunk because he'd been in Punky Brewster and "it's a straight shot home once he passes the school." (Tim Stack also apparently wrote this episode, so extra points for funny self-deprecation with that IMDb joke, too.) And he was so very understanding when explaining how poor, closeted Kenny somehow always has emergencies requiring the help of him, the fire department or the lifeguard.

The other guest cop (since Officer Bob Smiley's a real-deal regular) took me a scene to recognize as Kathy Kinney without her Mimi makeup from Drew Carey. She should definitely score a job on Reno.

And a final nod goes to Patty the Daytime Hooker, who apparently has a master's degree and who was having some afternoon delight in the photo booth with Willie the Mailman (who I just discovered is Ethan Suplee's dad, Bill) while "Afternoon Delight" played in the convenience store. Then there's Natalie, the ex whom Earl faked his death to break up with, who was convinced she'd be shot in the face for drunk driving. This is the first time I'd bothered to look her up, and it turns out she's Beth Riesgraf, Jason Lee's fiancee. Things work out well when they keep things in the family on this show.

One whole hour of Earl is a lot to cover, and I really don't know where to start. Especially, since this episode had so many different plots going on. We'll take it in baby steps.

First, during the recap of Catalina's arrest (this show is very careful not to alienate the casual viewer, who might not watch every episode), her proof that she was American made me just a little sad: "McDonalds! Disneyland! Jim Belushi!" But I was immediately cheered by the sight of "Mexican" Earl and Randy. I put "Mexican" in quotes because I'm pretty sure they've never mentioned which country Catalina's from, but it's a little long-winded to say "unspecified Central American country" every time, and the Mexican Earl and Randy were talking in cartoon Mexican accents when they were discussing stealing the donkey from the one-legged girl and making their friend's mom smoke until she dies (the parallel-universe version of making Donny's mom quit smoking).

Nothing is weirder than seeing Joy after she's taken a real-life working Chill Pill. No wonder Darnell was so freaked out. (And as if that weren't enough, he had to take care of Mr. Turtle, who snuck one of the pills for himself.) But for the rest of us, it was a chance to see the adorable side of Jaime Pressly, with all her great Southern nicknames for people (Sugar Butt!) and sweet, vacant eyes. Too bad being sweet doesn't really work in the trailer park. Give a man a Clorox wipe for his butt and he'll take a mile. The best was when they were being blasted by the too-close neighbor's dryer exhaust and she giggled, "It's like being kissed by bunnies!" I'm glad, though, that Darnell didn't snap and become the bad guy. You just don't go there.

It was Randy who snapped a little, in a good way. After everything he's done for his brother, he had a right to get angry and force "someone whose name rhymes with 'girl'" into action. If you ask me, it was about time these guys broadened their horizons. And while it seems odd to hear that some people have never been on a plane, I feel like every time I'm in line at security I'm behind one of them — and they have lace-up shoes, three pounds of coins in their pocket, a belt and a 32 oz. can of Aquanet. Guess they didn't know they could get all that at the mall in the sky. Did SkyMall pay for that product placement? Also, is someone in the Mexican food industry paying Earl to come up with catchy taglines like, "Tacos, the only food shaped like a smile, a beef smile" and for churros, "Shaped like a Slim Jim, tastes like a donut."

I found Earl and Randy's fight before getting on the bus disturbing. Randy's just not supposed to hurt people unless he's hungry... even if it was part of him becoming a man for his true love or whatever. Thankfully, John Leguizamo came to the rescue and prevented any more violence by kidnapping Earl, whom he believed to be an American drug dealer for Billy Idol. One of the many, many things I love about John Leguizamo is that wherever he shows up, he always gets the best quirks to his characters, like Diego's being stuck in 1988, the year his satellite TV stopped. ("Are those Bugle Boy jeans you're wearing?") So Diego, the quintessential '80s criminal, turned out to be Catalina's uncle, and naturally Earl wound up teaching the karma philosophy to him — and hey, he seemed to already understand a little about the concept, since he planned to give those people he accidentally shot a spiral-cut ham. Meanwhile, Randy learned a different meaning behind embracing his inner child: the soul of a couple's lost child, which Randy consumed in sandwich form. That meant he got to go home with the couple, eat flan and get tickled till he peed on their dirt floor. I don't know why he'd ever want to leave. Oh, yeah, Catalina. Too funny that she almost ended up being Earl's third unplanned wedding. (You didn't forget about Ralph's mom yet, did you?) Which meant we got to see Randy hire a mariachi to sing his heartbreak song, "Time After Time," in the absence of a boom box and tape. Randy should have known better: Earl would jump in a pool of leeches rather than see his brother suffer. That series of marriage trials perfectly matched the image of the village Catalina had been drawing all this time, especially the field of rakes representing the perils of talking about your wife's weight. I only wish we'd gotten to see the rest of her family and a few more adventures in her hometown. Maybe they'll bring back Diego for an episode or two. Por favor, Sr. Garcia? We promise to do good things all hiatus long!

Was it me, or did tonight's episode have a sad undertone to it? Not that I'm complaining. It was a welcome change of pace. And there were still plenty of laughs mixed in there, too, distracting us from the fact that this was essentially an episode about Randy's as-yet-unrequited love, Earl and Kenny's compulsive gambling problem, Catalina's kidnapped brother and Joy's impending, doomed trial. All it takes is a scene of Joy beating up her lawyer's interpreter, and I'm all smiles again.

I'm so happy that they keep finding ways to bring back Gay Kenny. Earl sure did love teaching him how to be manly ("Don't say 'oodles' unless it's followed by 'noodles'"). Unfortunately, the guy who initially set Earl on his path to helping his former victims inadvertently unleashed Earl's weakness for betting. And though this remnant of old Earl wasn't exactly hurting anyone with his crazy winning streak, he did neglect his duties. All that time he spent with Kadeem Hardison (aka, Dwayne Wayne) watching a chicken "drop" could have been spent advising Randy on the best way to arrange his tampon mobile, his bubble-wrap carpet and the Salma Hayek piñata so he'd win Catalina's heart. That's all going to be a little harder now that she's being deported, in her Club Chubby outfit, no less.

By the way, I've read that Greg Garcia plans on writing Jaime Pressly's pregnancy into the show, so that explains the throwaway line about not taking birth control. Now for the funny moments of note:

— Randy's love poem somehow contains the words "cartilage" (or Florida) and "heartilage."
— Earl has pointed out to Randy the similarities between "Cat Lady" and Catalina more than once.
— Kenny claims that Brokeback Mountain has ruined gay life.
— Joy's deaf lawyer flirts with men via her interpreter.
— During her drug-experimenting days, Joy once chewed on a horse's adrenal glands.
— While Tiny Dancer the dog was a lucky racer for Kenny, the horse called Candle in the Wind lost him all his furniture.
— Dwayne Wayne's business philosophy: "Chicken gotta poop; people gotta bet."
— And my absolute favorite quote of the night was from Earl, who said that calling his winning streak a gambling problem was "like saying Def Leppard has an awesomeness problem. Pour some sugar on that!"

In general, I think Morgan Spurlock's 30 Days series is a brilliant way to convince people of the valid points of various important issues they'd previously been either closed-minded or completely ignorant about. But tonight, Earl took a subject featured in Season 1 of 30 Days — in which a wasteful New York City couple had to live for 30 days on an off-the-grid, environmentally conscious commune that very closely resembles Woody's Sunshine Collective (right down to the human-waste composting) — and made an even more persuasive argument for environmental activism: While some dedicated souls can lead ecologically perfect lives, the rest of us don't need to freak out, just make a little effort every day.

I'm quite surprised that Earl and Randy's first and supposedly only encounter with pot was while robbing Christian Slater's Woody. They're truly unlike most white-trash men I've encountered in my life. Though I can definitely see why two such laid-back guys have no use for the soothing effects of marijuana — especially Randy, who spent four-and-a-half hours searching for his nose when he tried it. They'd have been pretty ineffective petty thieves if they were high all the time. (Hey, is that an argument for legalization?) Anyway, after my girlhood obsession with Christian Slater, and adulthood realization that the guy can't really act, it was great to see him in a role that made him look good. All he had to do was build a dung house, deliver a Global Warming for Dummies speech and then a modified message that every little bit counts. Mark Hunter would be proud.

After hearing that this episode would feature "foamation," I was a little disappointed that so little of it was actually animated. Then again, as Catalina explained, the long process wouldn't have been practical or easy. Here's what her foam-animated self said to us in Spanish: "This was going to be me taking off my head and dusting with it; but the animation was so expensive, it's better that you watch me dance."

Other funny moments:
— Joy unable to talk to Earl while attached to the lie detector.
— Randy's reaction to learning about Woody's dung house: "Crazy people put poo on their walls."
— When Woody said, "I see your pickle," Randy stared at Earl's pants.
— Randy's reaction to the person who doesn't believe in plastic: "That's just crazy. Plastic exists; I've seen it!"
— Woody's advice to Earl: "You're reading too many bumper stickers."
— The double dose of bedtime talk. After Randy and Earl discuss which Jim Henson creations could beat each other in a fight, Joy and Darnell discuss whom Darnell's aunt could beat up. Now wait a second, how does Darnell/Harry keep in touch with his aunt? Very interesting.