03-02-2001

Hail,

This will probably be a fairly short one. This week has been pretty busy for me, so I haven't spent much time on the episode.

I'll start with the easy bit, Jake's whole startup experience. It was quite funny, especially Jake's multitasking scene. The coworkers are pretty standard parodies (see User Friendly). No real new ground here, but it's some nice Jake scenes.

From that it's a bit of a jump to the other main plot, Daria and Tom's upcoming anniversary. This was my main problem with the episode, the two major plots don't mesh well. Although you could draw some interesting parallels between Daria's dating skills and Jake's work skills (if you were so inclined), they don't really have anything at all to do with each other. Most of the humor is in the Jake plot, and the jumping back and forth was just grating.

Backing up a bit, we see more Helen and Quinn in this episode, but not much. Quinn tries to give Daria some dating help (maybe she's hoping Daria will become popular enough that she doesn't have to pretend they're cousins any more), and her scene with Tom was pretty good. Quinn hasn't really learned subtlety yet, but with Joey, Jeffy and Jamie she doesn't need it. Has she regressed? Who knows. The next episode is a Fashion Club centric one, so we'll see then.
Helen's little talk with Daria makes me think it's more likely that there'll be a sex episode at some point this season. All things considered, I hope they don't, but if they do I really hope they don't let Sam and Chris touch it (no pun intended).
The little new Jake and Helen history is amusing, but not really unexpected.

Jane is still another token character this episode, although she was more central to the plot than last time. Her new art is, as usual, amusing. It's really hard to tell if (or how much) she's over the whole Tom thing. Her comments to Daria about the dates could be a bit of revenge on her part, but we lack several months of history here, so there's no way to judge.

Tom put the rest of the episode the best. "You're mad at me for something you forgot about yourself?" I don't think he handled things badly this episode. She's mad, she won't talk, not much he could do about it. Daria, after she sees at school that she's acting just like the people she's spent the last four season making fun of, finally comes to her senses. Unfortunately not before we're subjected to a rather irritating fantasy sequence.
In the end, these things are unimportant, but Daria wants to celebrate them anyway. There must be some sort of importance to her there. Sadly she doesn't seem anywhere near as self-aware as she used to, but that trend has been going on for a while.

On the whole, a decent episode. Definitely not Anne's best, but we've seen worse, and it is a step up from "Fizz Ed."
One thing I do want to bring up is this whole "You might be human after all" line that's popped up a few times. I'm starting to get quite offended by it. What ever happened to individuality? If these last two episodes were the first I had seen of the show, I wouldn't have continued watching.

Wraith