Subscribe
Previous Post
Original Air Date: February 19, 2008
It’s breakfast time, and JIM promises the kids their choice of cereal, although the only kind in the cabinet is Raisin Bran. KYLE notes that the milk is out of date, too, but Jim assures the kids that dates on milk mean nothing. That’s just the milk lobby’s method of trying to scare moms into buying more of the beverage. When he pours some milk on Kyle’s cereal, however, it’s lumpy and congealed and extremely disgusting. As RUBY and GRACIE hold their noses, Jim announces that breakfast has changed from “cereal of your choice” to “cereal and cottage cheese.”
ANDY drops by later while Jim is in the living room folding laundry. Psyched, Andy goes on and on about his new girlfriend and the “sex trifecta” they just had. Jim comments that given the kind of women Andy dates, it’s more likely a sex in-fecta.
Andy’s boasts remind Jim how long CHERYL has been in Florida taking care of her and Andy’s mother, who broke her hip falling down off of her gardener Orlando in the shower (Andy thought she had fallen down in a mall in Orlando). So, when Ruby brings him the laptop later after a computer chat with her mother, Jim gets extra excited upon learning that Cheryl is coming home for a couple of days. Unfortunately, when she arrives, the kids command her attention with their whines for her to bake them a cake.
The weekend passes, and Jim and Cheryl never get the chance to be alone long enough to have sex. After the family drops Cheryl off at the airport, she calls to tell Jim that her plane has been sent back to Chicago for a three-hour layover. Now’s the chance for them to get some quality time alone, and Jim goes to the airport to rent a hotel room.
At the airport, Cheryl’s plane still hasn’t returned after two hours. With time rapidly decreasing, Jim goes to customer service to ask when the plane from Orlando will finally arrive. The representative isn’t very helpful, until Jim indirectly asks where he and his wife can have sex in the airport. If Jim just buys a ticket to somewhere, the woman informs him they can use the Captain’s Club, which has a leather couch and a big-screen TV.
Before heading to the club, Jim makes a bathroom stop. There’s Spanish music playing as he dances his way to a stall. While he’s tapping his feet inside, one of them touches the foot of the guy in the next stall. Then, Jim runs out of toilet paper, and he asks the person next to him to pass him some.
When the person doesn’t respond, Jim makes the mistake of sticking his hand under the divider while making ambiguous comments like “Help me out here” and “Don’t leave me hanging.” Too bad for Jim that the unresponsive guy is a cop who declares he’s going to arrest Jim for lewd conduct before finally handing over the needed toilet paper.
Jim tries to convince the undercover officer he’s making a mistake. That doesn’t work out, especially when Jim has to admit he saw another man, his brother-in-law, naked just two hours ago. Andy opened the robe he was wearing to get Jim’s mind off of sex when Jim was complaining that he and Cheryl never had the chance to be alone over the weekend.
As the cop writes Jim’s ticket for solicitation, Cheryl calls again from the plane to tell her husband she didn’t see him in the Captain’s Club and now she’s back onboard. The only way to get the cop to write the ticket faster is to admit he was soliciting sex in a public place, so Jim does. He then surprises Cheryl on the plane when he sits in the seat one over from her and announces he bought a ticket to Orlando. He’ll have to turn right back around to return to Chicago when they land, but at least they’ll get to renew their membership in the mile-high club.
MY TAKE: Many, many people describe According to Jim as a family sitcom. If this is family entertainment — meaning the kind of show you can watch with the entire family, kids included — I need to adjust my definition of “family entertainment.” I’m not even close to a prude, but recent plots seem too off-color to be appropriate for very young people. Just last week, completely non-family-friendly Law & Order featured the same gay-sex, public-bathroom pickup plot gimmick. And, also just last week, Jim was all about the girls getting their periods. Where’s the “family” in such storylines? What kind of “family” are we talking about here?
RESOURCES
1533 days ago
[...] she became pregnant from their little tryst in the airport bathroom on the previous episode “The Rendezvous.” Even worse (for Jim, that is), she’s heading home tomorrow after her sister Dana [...]