There are terrible things in the world of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, and they can make you tear your eyes out. Cry, scream, beg, they’re coming for you. Demons, dark gods, mummies, werewolves, the Gentlemen, and, of course, vampires. Running background gags and cold opens both involve random massacres. The world that it takes place in is a nightmare, to the extent that a sequence during Buffy’s senior prom has her receiving the “class protector award,” because they had the lowest mortality rate of any high school class in Sunnydale history. That’s perhaps why this episode is so impacting and so horrifying: Because it has basically none of that.
Quick Recap: Buffy (Sarah Michelle Gellar) is a teenager/twenty-something who has been tasked by fate as “The Slayer.” It gives her some superpowers, but it also makes most of her life revolve around demons, vampires, and worse. She knows the plural of apocalypse, because she’s had to deal with enough. With her as the “Scooby Gang” are: 
Giles (Anthony Stewart Head), her watcher and mentor; Willow (Alyson Hannigan), her witch best friend; Xander (Nicholas Brendon), who is the normal guy; Tara (Amber Benson), a witch and Willow’s girlfriend; Anya (Emma Caulfield), a former demon-turned-human who has difficulty coping with humanity; and Spike (James Marsters), a vampire and Sir-Not-Appearing-In-This-Episode. Buffy lives with her mother, Joyce (Kristine Sutherland) and her younger sister, and mystical creation, Dawn (Michelle Trachtenberg).
SUMMARY
This episode starts exactly where the last episode ended. Buffy arrives home, sees flowers from the guy dating her mom, and calls out asking if Dawn needs to be picked up. All routine. Then, she sees her mother on the couch, eyes wide, not breathing.
The next 10 minutes are difficult to describe. They’re intercut with flashbacks, fantasy sequences of potential happy miracles, odd exaggerations of distance and size, and they’re all intentionally jumbled with reality.
When a tragedy strikes suddenly, the mind can be overwhelmed, and few episodes of television have ever played it as straightforwardly as this episode. This is a character who has punched world-eaters in the face, struck dumb at the thought that she’s lost her mom to a stroke. When the EMTs arrive, and determine that Joyce is dead, they do so with professional detachment, while Buffy is left in the corner to struggle to grasp reality. They leave, telling Buffy not to move her mother before someone collects her. When Giles arrives, Buffy herself calls her mother “the body,” which causes her to break down again at the realization that the thing in her house is no longer her mother.
At Dawn’s school, she’s pulled out of class to be told by Buffy. We don’t hear the conversation, only the reaction as she breaks down. We are shown Willow panicking over trying to find the right outfit for seeing Buffy and Dawn, before pointing out that she can’t stop thinking about clothing and how that’s stupid and childish, before she starts crying and is comforted by Tara.
Xander just keeps finding things to be angry at, from the doctors, to the walls, to the Dark God they’re supposed to be fighting this season. Giles mourns privately. Anya, meanwhile, is scared because she doesn’t know what she’s supposed to do. Demons don’t really care when other demons die, and she was previously immortal.
At the hospital, the Doctor tells Buffy that Joyce died painlessly. Tara then tells Buffy of losing her own mother, but it isn’t of great comfort. Dawn then visits the morgue, and is attacked by a vampire. Buffy arrives and quickly and unceremoniously kills the vampire, but in the process, the sheet falls off Joyce’s face. Dawn can only cry and touch her mother’s face, asking where she went as the episode ends.
END SUMMARY
Okay, the summary isn’t going to do much for why this episode is amazing, because it’s mostly the audio-visuals and the acting. Everything in the episode is disorienting. Sounds are exaggerated, camera angles are abnormal, silences are more pronounced, and there is absolutely no music within the episode. Perhaps most disorienting is that many parts of the episode just drift away from the main characters and feature normal sounds and activities. Children are heard playing outside as Buffy vomits when they take the body.
Wind chimes are gently ringing as the paramedics come. Xander is shown getting a parking ticket through the window. Life goes on, despite everything that is happening at that moment. When the doctor tells Buffy that her mother died painlessly, the line “I have to lie to you to make you feel better” is spoken at the same time. The camera was often hand-held during the episode to encourage the drifting feeling around the characters.
The characters, too, are shown at their most out-of-character. Buffy, who is typically the hero, repeatedly appears to be constructing her own narrative that this is all her own fault for not being there when it happened. Every time someone appears to say that there was nothing she could have done, she clearly doubts it. Again, she’s a superhero. She isn’t used to a problem she can’t out-punch. At points during the episode, she even starts to imagine alternate realities where this isn’t happening, but they are all destroyed by reality. It’s also noticeable that, contrary to how TV usually is forced to work, Buffy isn’t wearing her usual make-up and hair during the episode. She looks weary, tired, and like she’s been crying.
As for the other characters, they all have different reactions. Willow, who is literally capable of moving large vehicles with her mind, feels so powerless that she’s stuck trying to focus on the one thing that she can control at that moment: Her clothing. Xander wants to hurt everything and everyone, even punching a wall, which, contrary to most tv shows, both hurts him a lot, but also makes him feel better. It let him hurt something, 
even if it’s him. Anya, despite being the oldest character, responds much the way that a child does. She doesn’t really get “natural death.” Demons don’t have to deal with that. Children don’t have to deal with that (please, just let me have this one. I know it’s a lie, but I hate how much I’ve seen the truth). It’s so hard to explain to people why such a thing even happens, because it doesn’t have a real “reason” for something so devastating. Dawn just wants her mother back. It’s important to note that Joyce had been a parental figure not just for Buffy and Dawn, but also for Xander, whose homelife was shown to be alcoholic and abusive, Willow, whose parents are strict but often absent, and Anya, who hadn’t really had a mother figure before. To Giles, who is shown reacting more reasonably and calmly throughout the episode, but still shown to be deeply saddened by her passing, Joyce was a close friend and someone he’d once had sex with on the hood of a police car. Twice. Tara, however, is the outsider, as she didn’t really know Joyce. She just knows that she was very important to her friends and the woman she loves, and she tries to help however she can. Having all of these different levels of grief shown throughout the episode allows the audience to see all of the emotions, direct and indirect, that can come from dealing with the void.
Life is loss. You can’t have one without the other. But, no one deals with loss in the same way. This episode covers a huge range of those responses and, by filming it in an uncomfortable manner, makes sure the audience is as vulnerable to them as possible. Ultimately, this is less a viewing, and more an experience. Joss Whedon noted that a number of people wrote in telling him that this episode helped them cope with losing someone, and I fully believe this episode might help the grieving. It requires almost no knowledge of the show, so, even if you aren’t familiar with it, you should check it out.
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Okay, so, as I said in an earlier entry, I thought that 
hide it from his son Walt, Jr. (RJ Mitte). For the first half of Season Five, Walt manages to become a drug kingpin, amassing a fortune and piling up bodies everywhere. By the time of this episode, Walt has lost his empire. He has left his family, betrayed and been betrayed by Jesse, and tried to find a new life, but, ultimately, he fails. He’s even told that he should die by his own son. Dejected, he calls the DEA and tells them where he is. Then, he sees Gretchen and Elliott Schwartz on TV. These two, arguably, indirectly caused everything in the series.
against. 2) The characters are slowly becoming weirder and weirder, a process usually called “Flanderization” on a sitcom, after Ned Flanders of 
CharDee MacDennis is exactly the kind of game that these crazy *ssholes would create. First, you have to drink the whole time, going from beer to wine to liquor. Second, the levels are “mind” which involves answering questions, creating art, solving puzzles, or just getting random cards that break the game (such as “take the money from everyone’s pockets” or “Dennis and Dee go straight to level two.”). The questions are not actual trivia questions, they’re just opinions they wrote in the 90s (such as: What’s the greatest band in the world? Chumbawumba). The second level is “Body,” which involves physical challenges that are actually dangerous or painful. The third is “Spirit,” which allows the Gang to emotionally abuse each other that it has driven them to be suicidal in the past.
American boy and girl. Unfortunately, that includes being All-American educated, which they reveal when they sing “Romeo and Juliet,” whose lyrics demonstrate that they both have not read the play, nor ever heard of it before, aside from being a love story. Oddly, the William Shakespeare that appears during the song apparently has, as he keeps trying to correct the inaccuracies. They ignore him, possibly because he has a pedo-stache.
Jimmy breaks into the church to rob it, because pot, and has a vision of heaven where a pretty well-built Jesus sings a song to him, which, similar to the pot fantasy, is filled with mostly naked women. I guess that balances it out? At the end of the song, Jesus asks Jimmy to come back to God and Jimmy says he’s got a new god now… REEFER. Even the devil spit-takes at that line, which is hilarious.
Jimmy’s now hooked again, and having sex with Sally in the next room, when Mary finds the Reefer Den, and accepts a smoke from Ralph. In the original, Ralph tries to rape her, but this movie flips that by having the pot turn Mary into a sex-crazed Dominatrix who starts to make Ralph her bitch in song.
Ralph starts to feel guilty and hallucinate Mary in Hell, and more zombies. Then, he starts to get the munchies while with Jack, Mae, and Sally. Jack and Mae go to get Chinese, but when they return, they find that Ralph has become so hungry that he has eaten Sally. Jack kills him. Mae then realizes what pot is doing to her life and murders Jack. She then goes to see President Roosevelt, who is visiting the town, and gets Jimmy a pardon. Jimmy, Mae, President Roosevelt, George Washington, the Statue of Liberty, and Uncle Sam all sing about the importance of telling the truth, while simultaneously telling a long series of blatant lies and stating that the next step is to ban immigrants, jazz, evolution, pornography, and homosexuals.
This movie is hilarious. It takes all the insanity of the first one and not only amplifies it, but puts some really amazing songs in there. My personal favorite is probably the title song “Reefer Madness,” because it’s insanely catchy, but “Listen to Jesus, Jimmy” is pretty great too. Alan Cumming is perfect for this film, because his smile always looks equally like he’s going to hug you and remove one of your organs. Given that his mysterious character appears to just be traveling around to sew discord, that’s probably exactly the way it should be.
Reefer Madness is an anti-cannabis (or, as they spell it in the movie, marihuana) film which was originally designed to be shown to parents to warn them about the dangers of pot. And yes, it was absolutely serious. However, while the original movie was just an educational film with an embedded morality play, it was bought by another filmmaker who specialized in exploitation films, who apparently inserted a bunch of the other, racier (by 1930s standards) shots into the movie and gave it wider distribution. Since nobody involved actually cared that much about the movie’s longevity, it wasn’t copyrighted properly, and lapsed into the public domain.
It apparently became popular in the 1970s when people used it as a way to drum-up funding and support for the California Marijuana Initiative (which failed). But, because it’s so gloriously awful, it started to gain a cult following, and eventually got a musical adaptation and a ton of humorous commentaries. In 2004, someone colorized it, and since that version was the first one to come up on my Amazon search, that’s the one I watched.
It describes the effects of pot: Uncontrollable laughter, then dangerous hallucinations where time slows down, then “conjuring up massive extravagances,” emotional disturbances, the inability to think, leading to acts of violence, and, finally, INCURABLE INSANITY. The movie then explains that it’s totally based on scientific research into pot addiction, and begs you to do something, because “the dread marihuana may be reaching forth next for your son or daughter… or yours… or YOURS!” Yes, they typed that out, as if you read as multiple people.
So, the movie’s frame tale is a lecture given at a PTA meeting by a high school principal (Josef Forte). This guy is glorious. He says everything like he’s preaching a sermon while a pit to hell opens around him. It’s so serious, so urgent, and so blindly, obviously, wrong. He tells the audience that morphine and heroin are less dangerous than marijuana. Also, he tells them that he’s going to inform all of them of the places where you can find/buy drugs, which was definitely not the normal path to take at an anti-drug meeting. That’s like telling MADD where all the good bars are.
It then cuts back to another pot party where Bill sleeps with Blanche. At the same time, Mary comes over to the pot house looking for Bill (but not her brother). She sits with Ralph, who then proceeds to get stoned and TRY TO RAPE HER. And yes, this is portrayed as being a result of cannabis. The rape scene has a lot of weird cuts in it, which might be from not being able to film it in one take, or from inserting extra frames of the violent attempt to force Mary into sex, or holy shit, this movie stopped being funny. Also, I found out later that Mary and Ralph were married in real life, and I don’t know if that makes it better or worse.
So, Bill finishes having sex with Blanche and comes out to find Ralph trying to force himself onto Mary, but Bill then hallucinates that Mary is stripping down to seduce Ralph, despite Mary loudly screaming “NO.” Bill fights Ralph (again, not over raping, but over the thought that he’s being seduced by her, because what the hell 1930s?), and Jack intervenes, which… results in Jack pulling out a gun which goes off while pointed at the floor, but apparently ricochets to instantly (and bloodlessly) kill Mary. Jack then knocks Bill out and plants the gun in his hand, leading Bill to be charged with her murder.
Blanche then tells the cops that Jack or Ralph actually killed Mary, not Bill, signs a statement, then kills herself. Ralph is then committed to an asylum forever. Bill is released based on the statement Blanche made right before her suicide. So, Jimmy and Bill both commit various crimes and get off scot-free, but Mary’s dead.
Bill Cosby is a rapist. Gonna say that up front. He did terrible things to women, hasn’t really shown any remorse for it, and, despite that, he spent most of his life pretending to be the moral center of American comedy (even after admitting to cheating on his wife). As Hannibal Buress put it “It’s even worse because Bill Cosby has the f*cking smuggest old black man public persona that I hate. ‘Pull your pants up, black people, I was on TV in the ’80s. I can talk down to you because I had a successful sitcom.’ Yeah, but you raped women, Bill Cosby. So, brings you down a couple notches. ‘I don’t curse on stage.’ Well, yeah, you’re a rapist, so, I’ll take you sayin’ lots of motherf*ckers on Bill Cosby: Himself if you weren’t a rapist.” He may never be convicted, and I suppose there is a small chance that I am wrong, and that all these women have been falsely accusing him since the 1970s with similar stories that happen to match some partial admissions by him. But, I’m willing to bet otherwise.
filmed without fully forming the characters and the style of the series (in the case of 
The show’s humor was based on Bill Cosby’s stand-up routines, which mostly focused on his own family life, and incorporated his trademark over-the-top facial reactions (which were often so elaborate that Jim Carrey studied them for the part of his career where he was funny). This episode focuses on two of the more complicated issues in parenting: Explaining death to your child, and dealing with the fact that your children can be jerks.
when she starts to realize the truth, which is not helped by the other kids’ constant jokes about Lamont’s death. Cliff decides to hold a funeral for Lamont, less to help Rudy than to punish his other children for their callousness. He makes the whole family dress up for the affair, and proceeds to deliver the most monotone, unenthusiastic, and somehow still hilarious eulogy imaginable. Before the eulogy is completed, however, Rudy decides to leave and watch TV, because she’s five. The other children depart shortly afterwards, and Clair points out the obvious that only Cliff actually thinks a funeral for a fish is doing anything. Cliff flushes the fish, then shortly afterwards Rudy returns. Cliff, triumphant, tries to show Clair that Rudy appreciates the funeral, only for Rudy to say that she just needs to use the bathroom.
the show. We’ve seen the story arc, we’ve felt the rising emotions, and we’re going to enjoy the hell out of the peak. While it’s better if you’ve enjoyed the journey, sometimes a strong climax can even make up for a mediocre build-up.
J.D.’s best friend is surgeon Chris Turk (Donald “I deserve more work” Faison), with whom he shares an openly near-romantic bro-lationship. Turk is married to Carla (Judy Reyes), a Dominican nurse whose experience and knowledge often conflicts with the fact that most of the doctors in the hospital tend to dismiss her opinions for being a nurse. Carla’s best friend is J.D.’s love interest, and by this episode girlfriend, Elliot Reid (Sarah Chalke), a brilliant WASP-y doctor who also has issues with adulthood. The Hospital, Sacred Heart, was, for most of the series, run by Dr. Bob Kelso (Ken Jenkins), a stereotypical bureaucrat who later left his position and became much more normal and relaxed as a retiree. His replacement is J.D.’s mentor Dr. Percival Ulysses “Perry” Cox (John “You should be watching 
As this episode starts, it’s J.D.’s last day at work, and he attempts to get a grand apotheosis from all of the other characters. Dr. Kelso announces that he’s decided to resume being a doctor because he actually does like helping people, and will also be leaving Sacred Heart to do so. Kelso tells J.D. that nobody tends to make a big deal about it when someone leaves the hospital, but does offer him a handshake and best wishes. Dr. Cox, similarly, tells J.D. that it isn’t significant that he’s leaving, and refuses to show any sentiment or emotion about it. J.D. is disappointed, but acknowledges that this is just who Dr. Cox is, and that he is still a great teacher. Carla and J.D. share a moment reflecting on their friendship and their mutual love of Turk, before admitting how much they’ll miss seeing each other every day.
and, as he does so, he rounds a corner and dozens of people who have been on the show all appear in the hallway, reprising their characters. As J.D. literally walks out of the building surrounded and heralded by the past people that, for better or worse, he’s shared pieces of his life with, he finally exits the building, speculating upon the future. And that’s where the show does something that is incredibly difficult to pull off: It shows us the happy ending, and it doesn’t seem cheesy.
J.D. stands in front of a banner wishing him farewell, and an old projection plays upon it like a home movie, while Peter Gabriel sings “The Book of Love” by the Magnetic Fields. The projection is of J.D.’s hopes for the future: Marrying Elliot, having a child with her, holidays with Turk, Carla, and Dr. Cox’s family, his son marrying Turk’s daughter. And, rather than just ending with these projections, we’re instead shown images of the characters just hugging each other, maintaining their love and friendship long after the show is over. As J.D. finally walks off-screen, he remarks that his fantasies may come true “just this once.”
The last statement, that any state is obsolete which fails to recognize the worth of Man, resembles the sentiment of Immanuel Kant in his 
inspector, Mr. Carnegie (John Quarmby), declares that Fawlty Towers is below the health code standard, owing in no small part to the fact that he found two dead pigeons in the water tank. He gives the staff 24 hours to fix the problem or the inn will have to close. They immediately go about trying to save the hotel. Basil goes to alert Manuel of the emergency, only to find that Manuel has been keeping a pet rat whom he has named Basil. Manuel insists that it was sold to him as a “Siberian Hamster,” despite the fact that those are dwarf hamsters and this is a large rat, but I guess Google Image spoils us. Basil tries to get rid of it, but Manuel threatens to quit if he cannot keep the rat. Basil, not able to clean the hotel up without Manuel, agrees to let the rat stay with a friend of Polly’s, only for Polly to decide to let Manuel keep it in the shed. Manuel then decides to “let Basil get some exercise,” which, of course, results in the rat running into the hotel, setting up the rest of the episode.
First, unlike other episodes where the potential danger is looming, this episode starts in the middle of the danger, and it only gets greater throughout the episode. There is a tangible problem that has to be solved by the cast, not a future problem which may arise. It creates a more frantic atmosphere, something which can only benefit a well-done physical comedy. The panic makes some of the more far-fetched coincidences or misunderstandings feel more organic. It’s probably why a lot of modern shows tend to adopt this structure when trying to do physical-focused episodes. The escalation is also necessary. It starts off just with the potential closure of the kitchen, then soon becomes a matter of actual life-and-death, and one that the cast tries to handle without alerting the clientele. Every time it appears that a problem has been solved, another occurs, and in solving that, the original is brought back into play, creating a disorienting effect that puts us in the same mindset as Basil Fawlty until his inevitable collapse.
Second, at the end of the episode, we have no idea if they pulled it off. The health inspector himself appears uncertain of exactly what he’s been witness to, seeming to sit in stunned silence at the end of the episode. And that’s how the series itself ends. We don’t know if the hotel closed down due to rats, or if Basil and company managed to pull off the most absurd performance outside of Criss Angel filing unemployment. The show ends with lingering uncertainty, and it really feels appropriate for a show like this. We don’t know if Basil ever gets his higher-class status, or if this dooms him forever, and we should love it that way.
So, the stories are basically about times when Rick James (played by Dave Chappelle) would do something crazy, like come over and wreck Eddie Murphy’s couch, and then Eddie and Charlie Murphy would beat the crap out of him in retaliation. Then, usually, Rick James would realize he’d gone too far and apologize, at least once by convincing several women to have sex with Charlie Murphy. When asked why he did these things, the real Rick James could only deliver the singular truth, “cocaine is a hell of a drug.”
The Joker On The Sofa 