Because if you ever thought that the show maybe hadn't earned the number of gay jokes it relies on (Isabelle, every word out of Doug's mouth, the entirety of every Sanjay scene) -- and it doesn't, and it never has -- I don't see how taking a disc sander to the face of some straw-man queer that, as far as I remember, hasn't even had more than a single line of dialogue since he was introduced, and not playing it for anything other than a cheap thrill is going to solve the issue. I've kind of trusted this season to explain it to me at some point, because a lot of the gay humor has seemed forced in addition to being weak, like Doug's obsession with his long-gone son and whether Silas sucks cock. I don't, given what happens in this episode, actually think it's going anywhere at all, which means it's been playing to the cheap seats all along, comedy-wise, and playing to a greater hypocrisy, writer-wise. This is a show about a drug dealer who blew up an entire town, but who drives a Prius and thinks she's a good person; it's a show in which any character at any time can become a mouthpiece for the self-satisfied superior liberal inside us all, railing awkwardly about Bush or the war or Starbucksization or whatever. But if you're really relying on weak humor at the expense of people whose only personality trait is being historically degraded, isn't that just like smuggling drugs and people in your Prius?

What I do know is that if Till and Schlatter were women, the idea of sticking some random practically nameless lesbian cop in there to get her face disc-sanded at the last second would stick in some fucking craws. I do know that, and the reason that I know it is that it happens all the fucking time. It's lazy there and it's lazy here, and it does nothing to further the plot except to say, "Even Sanjay, who is himself one hundred percent gay as his entire personality, knows that this man is untrustworthy because he's gay."

Shane's smoking with the skanks behind the gym; Isabelle stands by being disapproving and asking them not to blow smoke in her face. The slightly gothier one tells Iz to dye her hair black, and they start talking about how bad-ass it would be to break into the chemistry room. Isabelle points out that this is stupid, being that it's the middle of the day, and the girls scream about how they just wanna get high. (Man, I wish they would make some uninformed decisions about substance use in their high school's chemistry lab: "This says 'hydrochloric acid.' Is that like hydroponic?" "I don't know, let's drink a whole bunch of it and then take a nap.") Shane, of course, immediately offers them pot, which Isabelle finds unimpressive to say the least. She gets ready to bounce, and the skanks tell her Shane's not going anywhere. He meekly agrees. "Wow. You two are totally making me reconsider fucking boys. You do them once and they become your puppet." Less-gothy girl, having just caught on, finds this inherently funny: "She's a dyke!" More-gothy skank says that in this case, she'd be better off dyeing her hair purple. It's a totally random, totally dumb, totally awesome little scene.