Down at the Fairview Herald Mayoral Race debate, Maybe Mayor is scoring some serious points off the incumbent. And then Gabby arrives, with Closet Man on her arm. She stays only long enough to sit down in her reserved seats in the front row and start making out with the Closet Man, and then she leaves. It's a short visit, but it's enough to completely throw Maybe Mayor off his game. Wow, I don't know why I'm surprised to discover Gabby is so petty and awful that she'd destroy a man's potential chances at winning an election, simply because he failed to call within some arbitrary timeframe.

I actually really liked this episode, but Gabby's behavior just left a gross, frustrated taste in my mouth. I know, I know. I spent the past two recaps bitching on and on about how out of character Gabby was behaving, regarding her restraint with Maybe Mayor in recent episodes. And now that she's apparently returned to her old ridiculous ways (paying a strange man to make her new boyfriend jealous? Whatever! Not just whatever...whatever CUBED), apparently I miss that newer, wiser Gabby of the past two episodes? What a hypocrite am I! And yet, I still maintain that Gabby's initial reluctance to date, or sleep with, this rich powerful politico wasn't adequately explained by the events that preceded it. Yeah, maybe Gabby's Zana escapade led to some growth of her character (though if it did, its significance was too subtle for this small brain to comprehend), and maybe I was too quick to ignore that growth in my rush to scoff at her unexplained breach with her usual behavior patterns. But now that she's gone right back to her wicked ways, it seems I was right to question the sincerity of her character shift in the first place. I mean...right? All that said, though, I really, really want these characters to grow and change and improve. I'm tired of the yo-yoing plotlines, the two-steps-forward-two-steps-back character development. Oh! You know what it's like? It's like when I was a kid, and my friends and I would get together to "play Barbies." We'd make them go on dates and have sex with each other's boyfriends, and each other, too, sure, why not. But as we played, we never worried too much about the backstory. So what if Barbie Short Hair was shy last week? This week she's a sex machine. And so what if Tan Barbie displayed lesbianic tendencies last time around? Because today she's in love with the GI Joe with one arm missing. This show is exactly like that, inserting these characters into an endless train of funny situations simply because they're funny, and not because those situations will make any permanent impact on the characters themselves. They're all a bunch of dolls without possibility of any true long-term character growth. But outfits! They do have lots and lots of outfits.