Ex-cons start showing up and spitting on the sidewalks, so Lynette gets the girls together to organize a protest, including an infusion from a few streets over, Hydrangea Circle, who seem to be uniformly violent homosexuals looking for a fight and passing out matching baseball bats at every opportunity for mayhem. I'm still not sure I understand what Hydrangea Circle is all about, but I hope to God they are real.
There's a fakeout where Paul scuttles Mitzi away for the night and everybody thinks she sold her house to Paul, meaning that the actual swing property is Bob and Lee's house, which is two more untrustworthy homosexuals right there. Some redheaded child gives Lynette a big speech about kindness or something, and then Hydrangea Circle throws rotten vegetables at the Mayor and suddenly there is a half-hearted wuss of a riot. Which was apparently Paul's plan all along? Complicated real estate scheme leading to complicated renovations prior to opening a halfway house leading to [somehow we arrive at] a riot. A lame one! Between people we don't know, and some other people we don't know! I expected better from Paul.
You know who I don't expect better from? Susan Fucking Delfino, who spends the entire episode lecturing Tom and then Renee about how Tom's marriage is her business and she should decide what goes on in Tom's marriage, because the Scavos' marriage is apparently really more about Susan than you would think. Mike helps put this retarded idea in her head -- because, somehow, in Alaska sometimes you fuck snowmen, which I guess isn't really that different than the scarecrow he fucks in Fairview -- that Renee should move off Wisteria Lane, because that is also a thing that Susan is in charge of now. Anyway, Susan fully gets curbstomped on all her organs during the riot, and her lifeless body dries like paper on the hot pavement and flitters away into the disturbance and it turns out all she ever was, was bones. Bones and chicken skin.
Gabrielle goes to Lynette for help with her grieving process now that Grace is gone, because of how Lynette once had that fetus that ran away to Texas, too. She tells her to write Grace a letter and then leave it somewhere Juanita can easily find it and come to question her entire existence, which is already so plentifully contingent, and then go running headlong into a riot so she can be murdered. Upside is, Juanita first throws Gabby around like a ragdoll and it's awesome, and then she runs out into the riot and ends up in the car with the gay ones, for no real reason except Gabrielle needs to run around and prove she loves her fat dumb daughter.
Keith finally proposes to Bree in the stupidest way possible, but she doesn't want to marry a child and their relationship is a joke, so she invites him to move in with her. Richard sabotages that little idea with this show's usual subtlety and panache, and then moves in for the kill after Keith randomly breaks up with Bree in the middle of moving in, thanks to Dad's manipulations. Then an ex-con invites himself into Bree's house so he can rape Bree to death, and Richard shows up to kick him out of the house so that he can himself rape Bree to death. He is a bad man, as it turns out, and one who refuses to leave her premises.
Bree tells Keith that his dad tried to kiss her, so Keith beats him up, and they sort of start the riot, which is more like an anxious milling around for the most part, a Brownian sort of agitation, and then Bree fires a gun into the air for no goddamn reason at all, and suddenly everybody is in the riot and it's just like when the club burned down: People start mooing, and scattering like zombies, and forgetting what fences are like, and toppling things over, and throwing veggies, and it's real dumb. Lynette saves the other gay one's life, kind of, or they act like she did, but really she just went all Transamerica for a second and it startled the angry bears into releasing him.
But at least Paul is happy for a second. Until he gets shot in the chest, and then still manages to look sexy as hell while bleeding out. 2 January: Orson in a wheelchair looking ill, Susan sick and hopefully dying of something painful but quick, Keith still whining like a child about God knows what, Renee confessing all kinds of things and behaving cartoonishly, and we find out who shot Paul Young. And I hope they pay for what they've done. And I hope that it is Susan.
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Want more? The full recap starts right below!
Previously: Stranglers, drug addicts, stabbings, kidnappers, plane crashes, tornados, hostages, basements, killer moms, killer dads, eco-terrorists. Currently: Paul Young playing a game of spoooooky Monoooooopoly.
But before you say this show has lost its touch, let's remember what's important: Red Scare paranoia, hate, and scapegoating everyone around you so you don't ever have to look at how horrible you are all by yourself: "We know what they look like, we know how they dress, and we know how they behave. Yes, we can all recognize the Wrong Kind Of People."
What they look like: Well, at least they're white. I mean, they kind of have to be -- which in turn makes the question moot -- but what they look like is Sons Of Anarchy. How they dress: Same. Mary Alice does not approve of their clothing, but then it's hard to dress an ex-con from the sale rack at Chico's. How they behave: They spit on the sidewalk. As if McCluskey doesn't do that.
"And when we see them coming, we do what we have to [do] to protect ourselves."
It would be different if Mary Alice were wrong. One of Lynette's ginger spawn will make a half-assed attempt at pointing out the blatant hypocrisy here, but it'll be for show. What's important is that your dumber conservatives have realized racism is bad, but they still don't quite understand why. So they know they're supposed to get offended when you call them out on their racism, but feel like it's because being called a racist is what's offensive. ("Everybody's so tolerant until it comes to my hateful beliefs!")
And you can have a show like this, which has graduated from having a Mexican-American tell wetback jokes for the last three weeks to this story, which is kind of like what stupid people thought True Blood was going to be like: Instead of hating queers and Jews and blacks out loud, we'll just use a population nobody could ever take up for as a stand-in for all of them. We'll stack the deck in such a retarded, ridiculous way -- it's a takeover, they're ungentrifying, it's a revenge plot -- that the whole neighborhood rioting out of basic hatefulness actually makes sense. Especially once you add Hydrangea Circle into there, which is just another excuse out of nowhere.
If there were such a thing as "the Wrong Kind Of People" -- which there are -- and if you could tell just by looking at them -- which you can -- and they are going to get aggressive -- which, oh, they will -- then you have every right to take steps to preserve your area. What confuses me about this is: Why tell this story? What is at the bottom of this story? What are we being sold? Of course y'all don't understand that the hate itself is the problem. If only Jesus had thought to mention that, while raging against the estate tax and the existence of an independent Palestine and making sure that we understood extending tax cuts for the top 2% of the wealthy in America while denying basic health care to everybody else was really important to him. The Wrong Kind Of People live on Wisteria Lane, and that's where The Rest Of Us want them to stay.
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