My Name Is Earl: 3.15 ‘I Won’t Die with a Little Help from My Friends, Part 2’ Recap

My Name Is Earl
Original Air Date: April 3, 2008

BILLIE (Guest Star Alyssa Milano) is in the room right next to EARL‘s at Camden County Hospital, and while he’s in a coma, his dream TV World has created a new theme for his sitcom The Hickeys. It basically revolves around his blissful marriage to Billie, which annoying RANDY, JOY, DARNELL, and CATALINA constantly interrupt.

In real life, the gang feels Earl’s predicament is their fault, and they decide to draw him out of his coma by enticing him with new stimuli. Randy tries bacon, Joy boobs, Darnell postcards of foreign places, and Catalina a celebrity magazine with current events about quasi-stars and wannabes. When those don’t work, they try singing to him together and ultimately lighting a row of firecrackers on his chest.

Although there’s no visible impact on Earl in reality, in his dream world, he wakes up and goes into the kitchen to find bacon from Paris — Hilton, not the country — who only says “That’s hot” repeatedly. Stoopid.

Frustrated, Randy asks God what he should do, and the response is to go see a kid faith healer named GERALD who’s called God’s Little Finger. The little guy is the real deal — Randy and Joy saw him cure some stranger’s blindness and heal Earl’s hurt leg a while ago. He was also about to heal another person when Joy jumped in at the last moment to get the gigantic zit on her forehead cured instead.

When Randy, Joy, and Darnell visit Gerald and his parents, they find he’s quit the healing business. Soon after the meeting that Earl, Randy, and Joy attended, he saw Earl and Joy featured on the news for their handiwork as Smokey and the Tube Top Bandit. Joy would distract male supermarket customers returning to their cars by wearing a tight tube top, and Earl would fly by and run away with their grocery carts. This caused Gerald to question his choice of people to heal, and he now wears plastic gloves to assure he never heals anyone else again.

Randy convinces the boy that Earl is a good person when he shows him the Karma list that Earl has been working on. The boy changes his mind, especially when they add an entry for him so that Earl can make up for causing a healer boy to be scared of his powers … until he realizes he has no proof that Joy is a good person, too. Her word isn’t enough, and without such evidence, he refuses to help Earl.

Meanwhile, Earl’s condition is worsening, and the inept doctors at the hospital have already started calling dibs on his organs to use with other patients. In his sitcom world, Earl gets a promotion to vice president. It requires him to move far away from his family and friends, however, including Billie, which is distressing news for the couple.

The gang makes a video of Joy doing good deeds in various fictional situations, such as running a marathon for charity and making a suggestion to the Pope for animal rights, and Gerald buys it. He agrees to go to Earl’s hospital room and lay his little finger on the coma victim. Unfortunately, it doesn’t work, and Gerald’s father explains why.

Basically, he’s an incurable con man, and he’s been faking his son’s powers from the get-go. When Gerald picked up a bird that knocked itself out by flying into their house’s window and thought he was responsible for the bird springing “back to life,” his father went along with it, proclaiming to everyone that Gerald was a healer. Later, he started paying people, including Earl with his fake bum leg, to pretend to be healed when Gerald touched them.

Gerald is glad to learn he’s normal, although he’s sad he couldn’t help Earl. Soon after he leaves, Randy discovers a way that he can. When he crosses “Made a healer boy scared of his own powers” off of the list, the machine Earl’s hooked up to registers an improvement in Earl’s health. Randy, who moments before had hoped aloud that Earl had crossed off enough items to get into heaven, knows what he must do now — continue completing his brother’s list for him.

In Earl’s TV World, Randy’s realization has a positive impact, too. After leaving to take a cab to his new job, Earl comes back inside his house, where Billie and the gang’s heads are hanging in sadness, and reveals he’s changed his mind about going.

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Photo: NBC