zwolanerd

SUMMARY

After reuniting Eric with Heidi, Jaye is on edge. She attempts to cause harm to and get rid of the muses in Wonderfalls, which culminates in her smashing several Wax Lions with the Brass Monkey. Jaye ends up back in Dr. Ron’s office, where she sort of tells him about the muses. Someone with a gloved hand is watching the security tapes from another room.

Jaye’s parents are trying to talk to her at the Barrel, when she spots Eric and Heidi and ducks into the back room, where she runs into Mahandra, who tries to comfort her as she cries. Heidi comes in to tell her that she won Eric. The Cocktail Bunny on a box behind Heidi tells Jaye to “save him from her”. The Wax Lion tells Jaye to ask the monkey about it, so she sneaks back into Dr. Ron’s office. After he catches her, the monkey admits that “she’s going to kill him”.

Jaye is distressed, and attempts to stop Heidi from poisoning Eric, after she sees her purchasing some pills. She is held by a police officer in the office at Wonderfalls, but manages to climb out the window and go to Eric and Heidi’s hotel room. Heidi admits that she slipped Eric a pill, but it was a male potency drug to trick him into being intimate with her.

Jaye returns to Dr. Ron’s office to have words with the monkey, and it promises to tell her why they talk to her if she licks the light switch. This causes a power surge and the power in the building is shut down, preventing Angie Olsen from following through on her plan to “torch” Dr. Ron and frame Jaye for it. Dr. Ron decides to give Jaye the monkey. When Jaye goes to the Barrel to apologize to Eric, he tells her that he is moving back to Jersey with Heidi.

There is a lot of stuff going on it this episode, and a lot of it is due to misdirection. Misdirection is really hard to pull off correctly. In order for it to be really effective, it needs to manipulate the viewer into thinking that situation A is happening, although it’s really situation B, but all the actions committed by the characters need to be completely in line with knowing that it’s situation B all along. In other words, misdirection can often fall apart on rewatch. Unfortunately, that’s the case here. The first time that I watched this episode, I was totally on for the ride. Heidi seemed incredibly guilty. Sure, the gloved hand thing was strange, but I’d completely forgotten the couple of throw-away lines earlier in the season where the characters mention Angie Olsen as “that Olsen girl” and how she stabbed herself in Dr. Ron’s office. Knowing that it’s not Heidi, everything feels really forced and weird. Heidi looks incredibly evil, even though she’s just jealous.

The second half of the episode, once the Angie Olsen reveal is made, is well-paced and brilliantly acted. The thunder and lightning really sets the mood, which is an homage to different films in the horror genre, including Panic Room. Karen’s role in this episode is also fantastic, as she basically talks down a murderer. Her vulnerability is very touching, as she is genuinely hurt that her daughter is going through something and doesn’t feel like she can talk to her about it.

During the commentary, the creators say that this was the second episode that was conceived, but eventually postponed to avoid alienating viewers. On the contrary, if the first half of the series had been this good, maybe it wouldn’t have been cancelled. I’ll admit, you care a bit more about Jaye and her problems after 10 episodes, but the pacing and editing and dialogue of this episode is much superior to that of, say, Karma Chameleon. The Client formula has also been somewhat phased out by now. It is still present, but the delivery is much more subtle and intertwined with the rest of the plot. It’s no longer a thinly veiled metaphor for character development.

It’s kind of a throw-away line near the end of this episode that Dr. Ron tells Jaye that she needs “more help than I can give you,” and then it cuts to Karen and Angie, implying that Dr. Ron said the same thing to Angie, which caused her violent outrage. I was really expecting Karen to fire Dr. Ron as her therapist after this because it is completely unprofessional to say that, especially to emotionally fragile people. Of course, Jaye has extenuating circumstances that cause her crazy, but Angie is obviously troubled. Bad, Dr. Ron! Bad!

There is lots of muse activity in this episode, starting with a pride of Wax Lions taunting Jaye that “you’ll never get rid of all of us”. We get several lines from the Brass Monkey, including “tell him nothing,” in reference to Dr. Ron. The namesake of the episode, the Cocktail Bunny, repeats “save him from her” several times. The Wax Lion tells Jaye to ask the monkey about this whole thing, who tells her about the murder plot. At Wonderfalls, the Wax Lion tells Jaye that “She’s going to kill him, don’t let her leave”, which proves to be a big mix up as she tackles Heidi instead of Angie Olsen.

In the climax of the episode, the Brass Monkey has a conversation with Jaye, which is somewhat different from prior episodes, where only directives are given. Usually, the muses choose not to respond to Jaye, but here several times the muses do. We also get the big answer of why the muses have chosen to talk to Jaye in the first place. “Because, you listen.” So simple.

TRIVIA & REFERENCES:

• The scene where Jaye melts the Wax Lion in the coffee pot was really tricky. They had to experiment with lions made of different materials, and used wires to prevent the lion from falling over.
• Dr. Ron’s name is an homage to Dr. Rons in other TV shows, including Star Trek. His office is also drastically different in every episode it appears in, since it needed to be reworked for the blocking requirements of each episode. It’s actually a room in the Tyler house.
• There was a scene after Eric confronts Jaye for stalking them at the Barrel where she swipes his wallet to get his hotel room key, but the scene was cut.
• The police officer, Mike Sloan, is the same officer that questioned Sharon in Crime Dog.
• During the confrontation between Jaye, Heidi, and Eric in the hotel room, the writers wanted to use the drug name Viagra, but they were not allowed to use it because they mentioned some of the undesirable side effects of the medication.
• Angie sings the theme song to The Facts of Life during the torching fantasy montage. The creators originally wanted the Laverne & Shirley theme but the rights wouldn’t clear. Coincidentally, The Facts of Life is the first television job that Scotch Ellis Loring (Dr. Ron) ever had.
• One of the prop guys cleaned the light switch with vinegar before Jaye had to lick it.
• This episode sets up major story arcs for forthcoming seasons. Dr. Ron was going to ingratiate himself to Karen by co-authoring a book about emotions in Niagara to get close to Jaye. She would be institutionalized in the aftermath of his publication of a book on her Christ complex. Aaron would also be looking at Jaye as a spiritual leader.

Written by: Meags