As I've mentioned, the tapes I'm using to recap these episodes are from one of the many runs of the pre-New Orleans marathons. Interspersed throughout the commercial breaks, as you may remember, are the results of The Real World online poll, featuring pretty much the same three questions over and over and over again for the duration of this twelve-hour period. One of the poll questions asks who we, the voting audience, believe to be the "Life of the Party" during his/her Real World tenure, and the choices are thus: Teck, Ruthie, Nathan, and Lindsay. And so you may have wondered: Why are there no picks from the Boston season in this category? Why no options for someone who would qualify as having a "life" as seen in the context of a "party"? Were you wondering why? Well, this episode is a pretty accurate depiction of why. Pretend you're watching paint dry. Beige paint. On the freshly painted walls of a funeral home. Then pretend you're color-blind. Half the fun of that, and there you have this episode. Yawn. Yawn. A thousand times yawn.

Sometime several hours before the end of last week's episode (the continuity issues, er, continue), the Stagnant Seven sit in the kitchen of the firehouse, enjoying a hearty pasta dinner. We learn from Sean's and Jason's confessionals that "the whole house is working together at an after-school program for kids," and that they will be doing so "Monday through Thursday, 1:30 to 6:00." Children? They're having them work with CHILDREN? Could this be any more irresponsible? Seven self-obsessed brats so captivated by their own personalities that they believed the best mode of personal expression was to showcase their every move on television are going to subdue their angsty, pointless egos and work with kids? This can't end well. Hell, this can't even start well. If MTV saw fit to try and liven things up by sending them to work, maybe they should have picked a less volatile environment in which there was less of a chance of directly destroying the lives of vulnerable, impressionable people. Like putting them to work in the core room of a nuclear testing facility, for instance. Or maybe on an assembly line, welding commercial airliners. Kameelah hits the nail on the head, accurately recapping their entire experience in advance for our benefit: "It's like a stimulating five hours of everything." Well, except for the "five hours" part. And definitely except for the "stimulating" part.