Introductory montage of Boston on the cab ride. I spent quite a bit of time there in college visiting friends, and it's pretty accurate as far as how I remember it: Historic, snow-covered, and always rapidly approaching dusk.

Meanwhile, over at the Kendall T stop, newly introduced character Jason makes almost as bad a first impression on the audience as I have seen since, well, I'd have to go all the way back to Elka. Lost in the city, lost in grammatical clarity, lost in his ability to differentiate between his first few episodes on screen and Seth Green's character in Can't Hardly Wait, Jason asks for directions, divulges that he "journals [sic] everything," and wears a knit black hat in his first confessional that speaks quietly "Please can I be cool" but is drowned out by the bellowed truth, "Damn, scrawny white boy!" Conjugate the verb "to journal" for me, will you, writer man?

Genesis: The stock pretty girl. But I'll just bet she's got a past. Or a secret or two. We learn that she was a troubled, withdrawn youth. Gee, I sure hope that distraught history of hers doesn't come to bear when faced with the prospect of living with six total strangers. On television. Why do these people even apply? She never should have gone solo to begin with. Peter Gabriel was the heart and soul of that group.

Genesis, whose eventual sob story of a past makes it retrospectively amusing that she should be the only member of the house to pull up in a taxi while everyone else opted instead for relatively cost-effective methods of travel, arrives first. As she walks into a converted firehouse, I am forced to leap off my couch, sending several other Real World marathon's worth of potato chip crumbs and half-full glasses of cheap red wine all over the living room. Through already singed corneas, I grab hold of the contrast and tone knobs on my television set for fear that failure to do so in this primary colored environment would cause for a permanent inability to distinguish sharpness in any colors not as bright as these. Like the yellow that one might find on the surface of the sun, for instance. Jason enters next, introducing himself to Genesis and telling her that he's from Boulder. She's from Mississippi. He tells us that he thought that she was a sorority girl, and that "she's gonna be a goody-goody, and we're not gonna have a lot in common." They take off on a tour of the place, discover that there is a large triple, and Jason comments that he'd rather "roommate" with a female. Conjugate the verb infinitive "to roommate" for me, would you, writer man? Genesis exhibits her neediness in immediately asking if he wants to live with her, and he indicates his social climbing nature by telling her they should wait until the rest of the house shows up in a comment that barely masks the subtext, "You seem cool. But are you the 'me' kind of cool?" Cut to wacky montage of Genesis and Jason taking wacky Polaroids of themselves in an obvious directorial decision to endear us to these characters real early on. It works mad wonders, and suddenly I like them both quite a bit. They seem like they both sat at the cool table. I want to sit at the cool table, too. I also credit them both for consciously spending so little time with Sean. Yeah, I know they haven't met him, yet. That's Sean's cross to bear, now isn't it? Not theirs.