The Daria Annotation File:
Monster

Loose Threads:

What happened to Kevin's produce?

How did young Jake manage to tip over a bicycle that had training wheels on?

Daria was in dance recitals? In "The Road Worrier" she says "I knew I should have taken ballet," so what kind of dance?

Why did Quinn fall through the door?

Notables:

When Mr. O'Neill offers the girls a ride, Daria sits in back and explains that she's "afraid of an airbag injury." While the obvious interpretation is that she doesn't want the airbag to go off and decapitate her like in the horror stories (How does she know his car has one, however?), she may be implying that sitting in front would put her in easy reaching distance of Mr. O'Neill...

Lawndale must be pretty well off for a teacher to get away with assigning a film project and not worry about students not having video cameras available.

When Daria and Jane were filming the clay figures and the spray bottle, and saying that they had to be in the same room for all eternity, that's a reference to a Sartre play, "No Exit," in which a bourgeois lech, a "good woman" and a lesbian are damned to spend all eternity in the same room.

When Quinn asks Daria if she can borrow some clothes, Jane says to check her head for bumps. Aside from the obvious "see if she's hit her head on something", this may also be a reference to phrenology, which claims that a person's personality is reflected by the pattern of bumps on their heads.

Quinn gets ready for the taping really quickly.

Jane's comment about pore-refiner spelled backwards is probably a reference to Steven King's The Shining, where the phrase "Red Rum" comes up as murder spelled backwards.

Quinn smacking the camera with her hand ties back to the home videos at the beginning where a really young Daria does the same.

Jake never seems to get past the first minute or so of his videos.

At the end, Jane says "We're like artists. And this is how we screw ourselves." This may be a (somewhat obscure) reference to a comment made in "Stranger in a Strange Land." One of the characters, Jubal Harshaw, calls modern art (what I'd suspect at least some of Jane's work would be classified as) "pseudo-intellectual masturbation," and creative art as "intercourse."

In this episode the phrase "which is my best side?" is used 9 times.

Mistakes:

The clock in the kitchen is missing its hands again.

They aren't actually taping when Quinn asks "Which is my best side?" but it shows up in their film anyway.

It's pretty bright in Daria's room for 4 a.m.

Didn't they cut out all of the scenes with the "pores"? How did anyone know about it then. And not everyone in the crowd around her at the end were in Mr. O'Neill's class.


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