Lemon suddenly slithers her way into popularity when she wins a $1,000 TGS lottery and hands the money over to the crew to have a night out at the bar on her. When a crew member accuses her of leaving out the recovering alcoholics, she has to one-up herself. Lemon insists she's up to the challenge, but Jenna and Tracy argue that she's not meant to be the popular girl she's pretending to be (a.k.a. The Liz-ard, The BLiz-zard, The BLizbian, etc.) and is instead like the R.A. in college -- all rules, no fun. After her ice cream sundae bar goes doubly awry for a lactose-intolerant recovering alcoholic, Lemon gives him a watch that's been passed down in her family for generations. Due to the inscription on the back, the crew guys recognize Lemon's desperate stabs for acceptance and call her out. She finally resigns herself to her R.A. role and lays down some discipline on those fools.
Jack finds himself useful in ways he didn't anticipate and extraneous in ways he thought he'd be essential. In the case of the latter, he receives a copy of the quarterly report for GE's microwave division, and they've done better than usual, apparently without his help. Distressed, he travels up to Stamford to ensure that he is needed but is only met by derision from the new engineers, who deem his spearheading of the trivection oven totally 2009. He confiscates their prototype microwave and elicits Kenneth's help to prove he is useful. After shocking Kenneth, making him simulate using the microwave in a freezing rain storm, and inching our favorite Page one step closer to "the light," Jack marches back to the microwave engineers with a speech prepared. As he delivers it, the microwave's talking feature (using his voice, more on that below) keeps interrupting him in such a way to make him realize that his glory days are over. He concedes defeat, congratulates the engineers on their success, and passes the torch.
Meanwhile, the writers discover that Jack's voice is being used for an online pronunciation dictionary. Jack explains that he worked on a linguistic project during his undergraduate days at Princeton, pronouncing literally every word in the dictionary to preserve the standard American accent, and the recordings were later sold. But no amount of explanation can stall the shenanigans the writers inevitably get up to when they realize they can make Jack "say" anything they want. They proceed to prank-call Pete and, as Jack, promise to make his dreams come true -- as long he brings his guitar for a jam and wears a Mexican poncho for a private rendezvous. Happily for Pete, Jack's experience with GE's microwave engineers (read below) puts him in such a frame of mind to view Pete's prank-inspired foolishness as a reminder of the college he could have had if he weren't reading that damn dictionary all day to pay his way through school. They sit, drink brews, and jam... until Lemon disrupts them and forces them to watch her shotgun a pizza.
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Want more? The full recap starts right below!
30 Rock. Lemon makes a typically frazzled start to the day as she wonders where Tracy and Jenna are. They finally show up, Tracy in a paper doctor's robe and Jenna in a ripped, disheveled private school uniform. Tracy apologizes that they haven't been able to get into their costumes yet. Lemon looks at her watch and mentions how behind schedule they are. Jenna tells her that men's watches are out for women. This year it's all about the Adam's apple. Lemon explains that her grandfather received this watch after working for years at Union Station in D.C. -- as a pickpocket.
One of the crew guys (the delicious Daniel Sunjata) comes in and makes the last call for the TGS lottery. Everyone buys in to pick one card from the deck. If their card is selected from an independent deck, they win a thousand dollars. Lemon buys one just to get everyone back to work. Jenna and Tracy warn Lemon that the crew members hate it when people in creative win. Lemon is sure she won't win because she only has a one in 52 chance. Tracy is amazed at her ability to determine the odds of winning, and suggests she take her Rain Man-like probability skills to Vegas.
Writers' room. Lemon finds Toofer in the "Punishment Corner" for adopting a Madonna-esque faux Brit accent... or just being the persnickety intellectual we all knew him to be. Toofer insists they look up the pronunciation for "shed-you-al" on the Internet, and it comes back as the American pronunciation "sked-you-al." After Frank tells Toofer to stay in the corner, Lutz points out that the voice on the pronunciation voice sounds eerily similar to Jack's. They test out some more words (America, whiskey, liberal), but it's irrefutably proven once Frank types in the magic phrase: "Lemon, Lesbian Frankenstein wants her shoes back." Credits.
Upstairs, Lemon finds Jack reminiscing over old GE quarterly reports. He shows her one from 1985 with a photo not unlike this one on the cover. Lemon asks why he's looking back, and he explains that GE's Microwave Division is releasing its quarterly report today. He tells her it might be his last quarter with the company now that he's transitioning to Kabletown. He gazes out a window and waxes nostalgic, "I've been a GE man for 25 years... and a GE woman for one week of corporate espionage at Revlon."
Lemon awkwardly changes the subject to ask if Jack could possibly be the voice of Pronouncify.com. He types in a phrase to check. As luck would it, the phrase is "Those bastards." Indeed, his voice has been co-opted from back when he was in college at Princeton and had to make ends meet by reading every word out of the dictionary for a linguistics project: "They wanted to preserve the perfect American accent in case of the Cold War." Once the Iron Curtain fell, the researchers sold the recordings, and Jack rues the things his voice has been dragged into -- Thomas the Tank Engine, Wu-Tang Clan songs, etc.
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