Season 3, Episode 19, “Those Better Not Be the Days”

Pre-Credits Gag:  Jesse tries to teach Michelle left and right and they have a lame “who’s on first”-esque exchange.

As the girls prepare for a day at the amusement park with Kimmie Gibbler’s family, they order the Dad’s around as a pimp would his hoes.  I wanted to make more snide comments about the girls’ atrocious behavior but then the collection of outfits presented onscreen in this moment totally stole my attention away.  Gaze upon them!

Just as the girls head out, Rebecca Donaldson comes over to “have a picnic” (aka vaginal intercourse) with Jesse.  Meanwhile, Joey and Danny are relieved to have the house all to themselves for once so they can watch sports and trade hand jobs.

But wouldn’t you know it?  It starts raining, so the girls all come back and immediately start demanding that the Dad’s do a bunch more shit for them.  Danny is forced into taking DJ and Kimmie Gibbler to the movies and Stephanie steals Jesse and Rebecca Donaldson’s pic-a-nic basket.  Later the girls demand to be taken ice skating and the Dad’s all get together to talk about how shitty they’re being treated.  See, you never know when the bullshit behavior on this show is going to be acknowledged.  It has seemed pretty piled on in this episode, but the girls behavior is only slightly more unbearable than usual.  Anyway, the Dad’s all lament the fact that they’re the subservient enablers to a bunch of future Long Island trophy wives until Danny cooks up a brilliant scheme.

He calls the girls into the room and tells them that they’re going to play a game where they switch roles.  The girls will be in charge but they’ll have to take on all of the responsibilities of being the grown-ups.  The girls agree and enjoy their first taste of power when they tell the Dads that they can’t watch sports until they clean up their rooms.

The girls raid the junk food and get ready to watch the top 10 video countdown when the Dad’s come in and start bitching and moaning about how they need to be fed lunch.  The girls plays along but Kimmie Gibbler decides that she’s had enough of the Tanner family’s dumb ass nonsense for the week and cuts out.  Oh, if only the camera would follow when Kimmie Gibbler goes!

The girls prepare sandwiches for the Dad’s and then the Dad’s all act like big finicky babies for like 4 minutes.  Eventually the girls get fed up and send the Dads to their rooms, completely missing the irony of the situation.  Maybe that’s why you should actually explain shit to your kids instead of acting out some bizarre psychological game every time you want to make a point.

Despite being grounded, the Dad’s all secretly convene in Joey’s room and share their genuine bafflement at the girls not getting the point of their game.  They decide that if they don’t figure out some way to get the girls to understand how they feel that they’ll be forced to play out these roles for the rest of their lives.  Again, I can’t help but mention that they never once consider resolving this problem with a straightforward conversation.  Instead they decide to sit around and imagine the bleak inevitable future that is being laid out for them.

Danny, Jesse and Joey all wear terrible old man make-up and ham it up in the kitchen as they bicker with their half-assed old man voices.  For some reason Danny becomes a stereotypical East Coast Jew in his old age.

It’s established by their antics that none of these men have made any personal progress whatsoever in the 40 or so years between the present and this fantasy.

Rebecca Donaldson comes over, as she and Jesse are still dating, and there’s a series of gags about how gigantic her ass has gotten as she’s aged.  Everybody rags on her enormous ass for the rest of the scene, which is just one more piece of evidence that Full House is actually just a racist caricature of white people.  Seriously, Rebecca Donaldson, take that big ass over to the set of Good Times and see how you get treated.

Jesse and Rebecca Donaldson get ready to head to the Smash Club so Jesse can do his routine as the world’s oldest Elvis Impersonator but before they can go the Dad’s have to bring the girls their breakfasts.

Here’s where the whole sequence gets totally bizarre.  The girls are all played by grown-up actresses, which is actually pretty jarring but more pleasant to watch than the kids they’re portraying.  The girls appear to be in their late 20’s or early 30’s, so I’m not really sure why they’ve aged 20 years and the dad’s have aged 40 or 50.  It’s made clear that in this dystopian future the Dad’s have developed an enormous contempt for the girls but continue to support them and bend to their every whim as they live out an endless arrested adolescence.  Grown-up Michelle enters the scene and there’s a lame gag about how she stills says “owse” instead of “ice” and then grown-up Kimmie Gibbler comes in and there’s a gag about how bad all the Dad’s wanna fuck her because she grew up to be hella fine.

She tells them, “eat your hearts out, boys.  Too bad you weren’t nicer to me when I was a kid.”  Yeah, I bet they’d be rail-roadin’ her all day long if only they’d be more tolerant of her eccentricities when she was 12.  Let that be a lesson to Dads everywhere.

The girls head off to spend the Dad’s money at the mall, but not before leaving them with a list of chores to do for them while they’re away.  The Dad’s all lament their awful lives and then get into an argument that involves playing keep-away with Jesse’s wig and Joey smashing the other Dad’s with his big fat gut, thus concluding the dream sequence.  When we come back to reality, the Dad’s all agree that there’s a valuable lesson to be learned from this fantasy sequence.  Before we move on, I just want to address something that’s always confused me about these kinds of sequences.  Are we to assume that Jesse and Joey are just sitting there while Danny conceives of this entire bizarre fantasy?  Is he supposed to be describing it word for word, like, “then Michelle comes in and Joey asks her is she wants some pancakes, but then she says, ‘no thanks…got any owse cream?’ and then Kimmie Gibbler comes in and she’s got big ass titties and we’re all like, dang.”  I can understand these kinds of sequences when they’re somebody’s daydream or something but it seems really odd to have this be a narrative that Danny is creating while the Uncles listen intently.  Even if they were all participating in the story, it just seems so fucking weird to me that they’d be spending their time sitting around making this stuff up.  It gets even worse when you step back for a second and look at the big picture.  These guys kids are totally out of control and so they decide to resolve it by staging some esoteric role-reversal game and when the girls miss the point of it the Dads all just sit together in the basement and share a collective hallucination about how the rest of their lives are totally fucked.  Seriously, have you ever seen more unskilled parenting in your life?

Eventually the girls come downstairs and scold the Dads for their ungrateful behavior.  The Dads point out that it feels shitty to feel unappreciated and then the girls finally realize that they never thank the Dads for anything.  The music comes on as DJ expresses her gratitude to the Dads and then everybody hugs.

I like how the whole problem gets boiled down to the girls never saying thank you.  I guess it’s fine that they’re totally pushy, demanding and egocentric, just so long as they occasionally express gratitude for the endless accommodations that are made for them.