What follows is wonderful and takes a while, but like the constant orgies is hard to really describe. Sarah is grilling up a meal for her boys, who drink beers and make small talk. Except it's Steve who smally is talking, and Jason is just staring at Sarah as she turns from a person into a fantasy, and does an outrageously funny and sexy (and improvised) dance at the grill: first she twirls, and giggles, as Steve's voice recedes into the mental distance, and then smacks her Christian ass with a spotless metal spatula, and unsnaps her apron -- No Special Rights For Dead People -- to free her breasts, which then join her in a dance, which becomes bootylicious, and then the grand finale: licking the entire shaft of a beer bottle before tipping it back. Jason finally shakes his head and snaps to, where Steve is still talking, and barely keeps it together.

Later, Steve makes a comment about how Sarah used to be a vegetarian, which Jason unwisely admits he already knew, and Sarah enters the room with a tray of ribs -- "Hope you boys are ready for some true Southern decadence!" -- and Steve giggles. "You don't really eat Sarah's ribs. It's more like you take a bath in them." They all laugh like crazy people, and then -- like Lynda Barry's puppy -- Sarah helps him with his rib-eatin' bib.

I'm reminded, with the Newlins, of Farscape, of all things, where the gross stuff -- the particularly Australian glorying in bodily fluids, sex jokes, the like -- always occurred when the most important shit was going on. You wanted to look away at the precise moment you should be paying the most attention. And with the Newlins, you see that the show has sort of the same principle happening: whenever things are at their silliest, or the most cartoonish, or the seemingly most leftist or whatever, that's when the real shit is happening. Lafeyette doesn't turn capers to make you laugh, in a bit: he turns capers to make you stop thinking about the real price of his joy.

This isn't a sex farce and it's not some adolescent anti-Republican screed: it's the real shit, happening in front of you, so that later you can say you didn't know how the trick was done. It's not just a seduction of the body, or the mind, or the soul. It's all of them. They are doing the Lord's work, and they are doing it well. He lost his parents when he was ten.