Never Go with a Hippie to a Second Location

Season 20, Episode 66

First aired 12 April 2016

We open at the pub, where Frances makes Tadhg even more apoplectic than usual by breaking the news to him that Terrible Annette has just been named manager of the kids’ football team. He makes vague threats against Annette of the sort he always makes, all hell this and hag that, and Frances asks, as she is required to do as his personal social worker, if he can just drop it. Tadhg claims that he will, which none of us believe, but he says that he’s going to the game to support his daughter whether Frances likes it or not, and if Annette somehow gets put in a headlock or pushed off a cliff, it will be pure coincidence.

Now we begin the 1990s computer hijinks portion of our show, which involves John Joe spilling tea all over Noreen’s laptop, on which is stored the ONLY COPY of her term paper. There is also a “tea + laptop = schoolwork catastrophe” story going on over on Pobol y Cym this week, for those of you who are keeping score. Anyway, Noreen is somewhere else and needs John Joe to email her the ONLY COPY of her paper, which means there is going to be a lot of scrambling. Mack drops by about this time, but unsurprisingly he is no help when it comes to repairing the picture typewriter, leaving poor John Joe with no choice but to envision his imminent death at Noreen’s hands.

We cut to two of our favorite characters in desperate need of a good storyline, Mo and Pádraig, in the café. She’s seen an advert in the newspaper for some sort of reality TV thing in which Gordon Ramsay or similar comes to your failing restaurant to scream at you about how disgusting it is and how pathetic you are, so of course she immediately thought of Gaudi. She thinks Pádraig would be perfect, but he doesn’t think it’s a good idea, because he gave up a long time ago on anything interesting ever happening in his life. If you think this is something I’m making up to snark on how pitiful Pádraig is, you are wrong. It’s the saddest Pádraig-related thing since his terrifying St Patrick’s Day costume. Mo tells him to think about it, so we leave with a tight shot on his thinking face.

At their place, Berni interrupts Bobbi-Lee’s makeup installation by arriving in a panic because she can’t find her credit card. She asks Bobbi-Lee if she’s seen it, and of course Bobbi-Lee pretends not to know what a credit card is, because she is a cash-based non-thief who certainly wouldn’t rack up €1942.57 on Berni’s stolen credit card and then forget to put it back in Berni’s bag. Berni is about to call the bank to cancel it and ask if there’ve been any recent transactions, which makes both colors of Bobbi-Lee’s hair stand on end, so Bobbi-Lee makes a big production out of helping her look for it.

At the community centre, Terrible Annette is being terrible, this time with a whistle around her neck. She’s bossing the parents and children around, and you can tell they’ve all decided that if their plane crashes in the snowy Andes, they’re eating her first. Or, if she’s being especially annoying, in the minibus on the way to the airport. Tadhg and Frances arrive, and there’s arguing, and Annette sneers over her clipboard that Tadhg shouldn’t even be allowed to be there since he’s a known hearse-shover-inner. Tadhg yells at her, and she puts on her scared bunny face for the other parents, who clearly hate her, but aren’t crazy about him, either.

Mack is drying Noreen’s laptop with a hair dryer, presumably because he saw it work on Pobol y Cwm yesterday. John Joe has phoned Dee to come help with this emergency, and when she sees Mack, she forgets that she was permanently furious at him at the end of last episode and now looks at him like he’s a delicious, stubbly ice cream cone. She agrees with John Joe and Mack that the laptop is fried, and since she seems to be the only one in the room who has ever used a computer, we trust her analysis. Fortunately, she has her laptop with her, and even more fortunately, there’s a printout of Noreen’s paper on the coffee table that we hadn’t heard about until just now, so John Joe concocts a scheme for Dee to type it while Mack reads it out loud, which is convenient, because Dee is wearing a scarf so voluminous she can’t possibly see over it. John Joe leaves, and there is awkwardness.

Back at their place, Bobbi-Lee has Berni looking for the credit card in the salt shaker, shampoo bottle, etc., so she can slip it out of her wallet and onto the counter unnoticed. Then she’s all, “Have you tried looking on the counter?”, and Berni finds it, and is profusely grateful. The subtitles tell us she says, “Thankfully I took your advice and didn’t cancel it,” which is another of those sentences nobody says outside a foreign-language textbook. “I need my credit card to buy an orange for my grandmother at the bus station, because she is quite sick.” The best part of this scene is that on her way out the door, Berni casually tosses the loose credit card into her gigantic bag, which is just what one would do after frantically spending all afternoon looking for it.

At the community centre, Tadhg is still yelling at Annette about what a hag she is, and he shouts, “I hope you rot in hell, you poisonous old pest!” Snerk. The parents and children are all standing there watching because this is the most exciting thing that’s happened in the village since Eimear got locked in that barn.

Over at the pub, Mo is talking about her newly acquired falling-down shack with Eoin, who has clearly been spending his long absences from the show in the gym. It’s nice that they’re friends again, since you may recall that the last time we saw him was on St Patrick’s Day when he was part of the group telling Mo she’s two-thirds of the way to “crazy old spinster in a filthy white dress watching a wedding cake slowly decompose in an attic.” Apparently Eoin is a builder or engineer or something, because he’s explaining to her that her house doesn’t have a foundation, and when she asks what that means, he’s basically like, “Well, it’s probably OK as long as you don’t mind if it implodes.” She asks him how much it will cost to do the work, so he starts figuring, and it’s clear he’s going to need a bigger piece of paper, and possibly an abacus.

Back at the community centre, a mini-court case has broken out, with each side arguing that the other is more awful and unfit to be around children. Annette presents into evidence the photo she claims shows Tadhg pushing the children into the back of a hearse, although it really is more like a picture of some children standing around in the general vicinity of a hearse, but there is gasping and fainting and Tadhg storms off, but not before telling them he hopes they all burn in hell. Well, his days as a football coach may be over, but this ought to put him on the shortlist to direct this year’s Christmas pageant.

At John Joe’s, poor Mack is demonstrating his inability to keep a stack of unstapled papers together, and it’s like a tornado hitting an office-supply store. I guess Noreen’s only staple was saved on that laptop, too. He manages to reassemble the stack of papers except for the missing page 7, which we discover has somehow become stuck to Dee’s bum despite the fact that she’s been sitting down this entire time. So of course he tries to grab it off her arse, and she gets offended, and then there is giggling, and it’s very Hepburn and Tracey, I guess.

David has stopped by the pub to invite Bobbi-Lee to an art exhibition with him, and she, halfway paying attention, says yes. Oh, by the way, he went online to buy his tickets to the Awful Suzanne Festival and noticed that Bobbi-Lee’s name isn’t anywhere on the bill. She is confused, and Pádraig, who’s been sitting there eavesdropping, reminds her that he told her that Suzanne is trouble. Bobbi-Lee begins a slow boil, and Pádraig suggests she call the Gardaí, and I’m imagining O’Shea showing up and giving them an angry lecture on what does and does not qualify as police business. Bobbi-Lee is furious, and Suzanne’s gonna get it!

After the break, Dee and Mack are just finishing up Noreen’s paper, and Dee exclaims that she better hurry up and print it out because it’s due at 5 o’clock. Wait, if what she needs is a printout … but there was already … oh, never mind. There is struggling with the printer, which Mack fixes by punching it like Fonzie at the jukebox, and there is giggling, and she wipes ink off his face, and then tries to kiss him, but he moves and she kisses his ear, and you can imagine it all.

Back at the pub, Eoin delivers the bad news to Mo: it’s going to cost €50,000 to renovate Mo’s house. She doesn’t have that much money, so he suggests she take out a loan, but she says she doesn’t want to be “corned” by the bank. I’m not sure whether this is a saying in Ireland or a typo in the subtitles. Eoin sadly breaks the news that it’s going to be hard to do the repairs if she doesn’t have any money, which seems to be a bit of an understatement, though I suppose she can always get John Joe, Mack, and David to install a foundation for free. She’ll need a lot of sandwiches.

At the bar, Bobbi-Lee is yelling at Suzanne on the phone for taking her money and leaving her off the bill, but Suzanne says she can explain. Bobbi-Lee wants to see her in person, because it’s hard to throw a drink in someone’s face and pull their hair over the phone, so Suzanne asks her to come meet her at her holiday home. On her way out the door, David stops her with some more nonsense about the art exhibition, which she has already forgotten all about, so she tells him he needs to get into his head that she’s not interested in him and that he can shove his art exhibition up his arse.

At the café, Mack is bragging to Jason that Dee tried to kiss him earlier, but that he’s playing hard to get. Jason has no patience for this silliness today, and complains that people need to grow up and be honest with each other. It seems Katy still hasn’t told Jason about the fertility treatments, and Mack’s advice to him is not to put his foot in it. Yes, I’m pretty sure it would help neither Katy’s mood nor her fertility for Jason to try to put his foot in there.

Bobbi-Lee has arrived at Suzanne’s House of Horrors in angry flurry of leopard print and, err, more leopard print. Suzanne’s going to think she’s being mauled by a wild animal when she opens the door. Bobbi-Lee shouts that she wants her money back, and that she wasn’t born yesterday, and Awful Suzanne looks nervous in addition to awful. We hear movement elsewhere in the house, and Bobbi-Lee puts 2 and 2 together and gets SEX, berating Suzanne for bamming some “young fella” when she should’ve been busy giving Bobbi-Lee her money back. Suzanne tells her she’s got it all wrong, and goes to the other room to bring back something Bobbi-Lee needs to see. Ooh, I hope it’s Cathal.

At the pub, Micheál sadly tells Frances that the children lost their game today, but of course she already knows because she got the breaking news alert from Sky Sports on her phone. Áine has reported that Annette was shouting at the kids afterwards for losing, and a puzzled Micheál doesn’t understand why Reailtín didn’t mention it. He should ask her about it when she gets back from robbing the bank. Tadhg arrives and chases Micheál off, and when he says he’d like to bang Micheál and Annette’s stupid heads together, Frances tells him to leave things to her, and it’s moments like these we’re glad Frances is at least 80% evil.

Mack has returned to the Dalys’ to deliver a print cartridge to Dee, which is the filthiest euphemism I’ve heard all day. There is flirting; there is kissing. John Joe arrives and Mack thanks him for concocting this elaborate plan to get him and Dee back together, which of course was not John Joe’s plan, but he takes credit anyway, so now Mack and Dee are a thing again, and we have to decide whether we are going to refer to them as “Mee” or “Dack.” There is a hideous puce wall in John Joe’s house that I am beginning to suspect is the same hideous puce wall in Jason’s house, and in Mo’s house, just shot from different angles.

Frances has brought Micheál a pint, on the house, so he knows she wants something. She asks for his help in getting rid of Annette, and sadly she means “from the team,” not “from the earth.” He’s reluctant, so Tadhg comes over and takes his pint away from him and gives it to John Joe on the condition that he go drink it somewhere else. Tadhg throws Micheál out of the pub, and Frances and her hair look exasperated.

Back at stately Suzanne Manor, Bobbi-Lee, who shouldn’t have ignored Jack Donaghy’s 30 Rock advice to “never go with a hippie to a second location,” discovers a photo of Cuán on the mantel and calls Suzanne back to ask her WTF. Suzanne admits she hasn’t been honest with Bobbi-Lee, and tells her there’s someone there who wants to see her. A shadowy figure enters the room, and we see in tight closeup that being left off the festival bill is now the least of Bobbi-Lee’s problems.

Pádraig bounces into the pub to tell Mo that he’s thought about it all day, and he’s decided he’s going to apply for the TV show after all. Mo has clearly forgotten all about it, but Pádraig seems pleased, and because Mo is a nice person, she is pleased, too. He explains that his new philosophy is “YOLO: you only live once,” which he obviously just read in a fortune cookie or off a can of Red Bull. Mo decides she’s also going to start only living once, so she picks up her phone and calls the bank, whose phone number she apparently has memorized (?), and asks to speak to someone about a loan.

At Suzanne’s House of Horrors, Andy is telling Bobbi-Lee how nice it is to see her, but she tells him to stay away from her. Suzanne says Andy has changed, and that she should give him another chance, but Bobbi-Lee yells that she has no idea what Andy did to her. Neither do I, but given that Bobbi-Lee’s freakout is about a 7.5 on the Richter scale, it must’ve been pretty bad. She tells them she never wants to see either of them again and storms out of the house, and the creepy piano music tells us we haven’t heard the last of this!

Next time: Suzanne visits Bobbi-Lee, who tells her to get out. Suzanne says defiantly that she’s not going anywhere till Bobbi-Lee hears her out, and if I had to put my money on either Suzanne’s willpower or Bobbi-Lee’s fists, I know which I’d be betting on.