Season 3, Episode 20, “Honey, I Broke the House”

Pre-Credits Gag:  Joey plays t-ball with Michelle and she doesn’t really get the rules.

The episode begins with an inspired mash-up:  as DJ and Kimmie Gibbler study with their headphones on, they sing that beloved Milli Vanilli tune, “Blame It On the Rain” and Michelle combines it with her own singing of, “Rain, Rain Go Away.”  I can’t help but notice that they’ve been mentioning Milli Vanilli like every fucking episode.  I wonder if this shows producers owned a piece of them or something?  Either that or some completely defected executive kept insisting, “that Milton Vanilly, that’s what the kids like.  Put that on the show again.”  Anyway, Stephanie interrupts the scene by entering in a manic frenzy, imposing on everyone because they only have 20 minutes to pay attention to her before she leaves for her dance class.  DJ and Kimmie Gibbler tell her to fuck off so she goes downstairs and harasses Danny and Rebecca Donaldson instead.  They gently tell her to fuck off as well on account of they’re working on topics for Wake Up, San Francisco but she just keeps bugging them by insisting they do an episode about her day.  She starts frantically listing all of the banal minutia of her experience until Jesse enters the scene and she latches on to him.  Jesse manages to pawn her off on Joey and then starts to make plans with Rebecca Donaldson so he can put his penis inside of her vagina later but she says that she’s busy because there’s some hot football player/nuerosurgeon who’s gonna be on the show and she has a dinner meeting with him.  Oh, great, this storyline again.  This shit happens like every 3^rd episode.  It was a 2-part episode last season.  Do we really need to see it again?

Stephanie starts yammering on and on at Joey but he deflects her with his own self-absorbed fascination with the car he just bought.  The two have a brief self-obsession sparring match that Joey wins when he starts kissing his car and then decides to run to the store to get some touch-up paint.  I don’t know why he didn’t decide to drive there, what with his new car and all, but since he chose to walk and leave his new vehicle unattended in the backyard, Stephanie starts to fuck around with it.

Before we get to the truly horrendous shit that’s about to go down, I just wanted to make a comment about the full house’s backyard.  It seems to have no rules to it whatsoever.  It looks like a fenced off grassy area but apparently you can pull a car or motorcycle up to it.  There have also been numerous occasions when guests have arrived at the back door, which always makes me wonder how they got in the backyard.  I’m not talking about Kimmie Gibbler showing up back there, I’m talkin’ about total strangers.  I just don’t really understand where it’s supposed to lead to back there.  Anyway, it’s not much of a point.  I think I just wanted to digress for a moment before we moved on because right about now some SHIT IS ABOUT TO GO DOWN LIKE YOU WOUL D NOT BELIEVE!!!

Stephanie starts fucking around with Joey’s car and, mistaking the r in “reverse” for the radio, she backs it into the kitchen!  Can you believe that shit?  That’s like thousands and thousands of dollars worth of property damage!  Golly!

In the moments that followed I was kind of surprised to see that they gave Stephanie an appropriately slow reaction to what she’s just done.  They probably just did it to kill time but it’s interesting to see someone actually stop and reflect on something on this show.  It makes things feel uncharacteristically serious and almost even relevant for about 15 seconds there.

Stephanie decides to flee the scene and tries to discreetly pack her shit up while DJ and Kimmie Gibbler’s attentions are diverted by the sweet siren song of Paula Abdul.  As her ride to dance class honks from off screen, Stephanie says an ominous farewell to her 2 obnoxious sisters.

In the next scene DJ and Kimmie Gibbler discover the car in the kitchen and start flipping out.  Jesse then enters the scene and I want you to guess what he says when he sees the car.  No, really, I want you to really think about it and make a guess.  What do you think Jesse says when he sees the car?

He says, “have mercy.”

Everyone stands around the kitchen trying to wrap their heads around the situation until they hear Danny come home.  The next bit’s kind of weird because it’s kind of like one of those lame situations they always do where everybody does a shitty job of hiding something from someone except in this case they’re not really hiding the situation from Danny, they just want to find a good way to break it to him.  I don’t know why stalling him in the living room and acting really awkward is supposed to help, especially when it only leads Danny to reach the egomaniacal conclusion that the family is hiding a wonderful surprise for him in the kitchen because they all love him so very much.  When Danny sees the car he is paralyzed with rage and then DJ actually takes a picture of his face.  Can you think of a more antagonizing thing someone could do to you when something really shitty is happening than take a flash photograph of your facial expression?

The next scene opens inside of Rebecca Donaldson’s house, which we’ve never seen the interior of before (we saw the outside once when Jesse came over to serenade her after the last time he acted like a total dickhead because he was jealous).  Dang, it’s pretty classy.  I guess she would be loaded, seeing as she has the same job as Danny and everything.  I’d bet our sexist patriarchal society would probably see to it that she only made like 2/3 of what he does, even though she’s like 5 billion times more qualified for their job than he is.  But even with less pay, she doesn’t have 2 worthless fuckheads and 3 self-centered vortexes that always want to go to dance class and Dinseyland and shit living in her house, so all things considered, Rebecca Donaldson’s gotta be livin’ large.

Anyway, whatever:  Stephanie comes to the door to say goodbye to Rebecca Donaldson.  She tells her that she fucked up really bad and so she’s running away to start a new life in Mexico, and since she’s obviously not really going to do that the whole thing is very clearly an emotionally manipulative cry for help.  Rebecca Donaldson tries to talk to her about what went wrong but Stephanie struggles to say what she’s done and then they’re interrupted by Jesse knocking on the door.

Stephanie hides in the closet before Jesse enters the house to apologize to Rebecca Donaldson about being jealous earlier.  While he’s there his situation with Rebecca Donaldson is quickly dismissed in favor of a wacky cover-up for Stephanie’s whereabouts.  Oh, see, there’s a little twist for yez: Usually the Jesse-getting-jealous routine is part of a lame storyline about his and Rebecca Donaldson’s crappy relationship, but in this case it’s actually a lame device to get him over to her house while Stephanie is hiding.  The only times this show succeeds at being unpredictable is when they don’t even bother to put enough effort into the story to reach it’s clichéd ending.  I also like how incongruous Jesse coming over at this point in time is with the rest of the episode.  Jesse’s like, “oh, dang, there’s a car in the kitchen.  Well, guess I’d better go over to Rebecca Donaldson’s to apologize for being a dickhead earlier…”  He doesn’t even mention the incident when he gets to her house.  Anyway, Jesse apologizes to Rebecca Donaldson but then gets suspicious when he sees a suitcase in the living room and Rebecca Donaldson tries to keep him away from the closet.  He opens it up, expecting to find that talk show guest with his dick in his hand but instead there’s a really weird visual gag with Stephanie hiding by hanging from a coat on a hook.  How did she even get up there?

Jesse discovers Stephanie and, after some initial confusion, finds out that she was the one who drove the car into the kitchen.  He advises her to go home and face the music and she hesitantly complies.

The next scene opens with a pretty great shot of Danny looking at a bunch of bills like, “what the fuck I’m gonna do?”  Joey comes home and Danny gets all up in his face due to his assumption that Joey is responsible for the car in the kitchen.  There’s an extended miscommunication between them until Joey finally sees his car and freaks out.  DJ takes his picture, too.  Seriously, that’s gotta be the most antagonizing joke on the show so far.  It’s really bugging me.  Anyway, Danny and Joey try to piece together what the fuck happened until Jesse comes home with Stephanie.

Stephanie explains what happened and apologizes.  Joey seems upset but fairly able to accept the incident as just the latest in the endless succession of humiliating failures that is his life, but Danny is pretty perturbed.  You’ve gotta wonder if this isn’t going to be the moment when he’s finally forced to realize that his daughter is the most annoying asshole on the planet.  Open your eyes, Danny Tanner.

Stephanie goes up to her room and then Danny comes in to have a very special talk with her.  The scene that follows is actually unnervingly somber, so much so that you have to really wonder what they were going for.  Maybe it was sweeps week, or someone had something to prove to themselves about the show being able to handle serious drama or something.  Danny is about as pissed off as we’ve ever seen him and he tells Stephanie, “what you did today is the stupidest thing you’ve ever done,” which was pretty rad.  Stephanie goes on this whole self-loathing rant and actually starts crying, which is pretty forced and awkward but at least she tried.  The real clincher is when Stephanie tells Danny that he shouldn’t have to live with her or hug and kiss her ever again and Danny very earnestly tells her, “there is nothing you could ever do that would make me stop hugging and kissing you.”  Oh, ick!  Is that her punishment?  That’s like the most unnerving shit I ever saw.  I’d fucking kill myself if Danny Tanner said that shit to me.  I can’t think of a worse fate.  Seriously, like imagine if you were wrongfully committed of a crime and you went to prison and you got to pick your cellmate between 2 guys.  The first guy is a big scary raper and the second guy is Danny Tanner, who immediately tells you, “there is nothing you could ever do that would make me stop hugging and kissing you.”  Who would you pick?  It’s a real conundrum.

Oh, sorry if that little aside took the thunder out of this little dramatic moment.  Anyway, Danny tells Stephanie that he’ll always love her to matter what a shitty pain in the ass she is and then they hug and that’s it, man.  What an unsatisfying conclusion!  I guess we’re just supposed to assume that Danny has the wall replaced between now and the next episode and Joey’s car will probably just never be mentioned again, just like so many things that show up conveniently in a single episode.  This brings me to the first of many, many things that are wrong with this episode:  there actually already is a beloved car that was featured in a previous episode that they could have brought back for this episode.  I think it was in Season 1 that there was a whole episode about Danny’s fancy car, so why didn’t they just use that car instead of having Joey buy some new one just so Stephanie could drive it through a wall.  Joey didn’t even play much of a role in this episode.  Why was he the one with the car?  But I guess that can be seen as fairly arbitrary and the kind of thing you’d only notice if you were obsessively cataloging this show, so let’s move on to the larger issue, which is that this whole storyline is totally fucked.  Seriously, what jobber ass tv writer dreamed up the kid-drives-a-car-through-the-house scenario?  The craziest thing about it is that they recycled this premise on multiple shows.  I know for sure that they did it on Family Matters, but I can’t remember if it was Eddie who drove the car, or it might have even been Judy back when she still existed.  That was in the earlier episodes, before Urkel would inflict at least that level of property damage on the Winslow’s house like every 3^rd episode, so it wasn’t even a big deal anymore.  I think they did it on Step By Step once, too.  I wonder if Full House invented this premise or if they stole from an earlier shitty show?

Anyway, the point is that driving a fucking car into the side of the house seems like a really gratuitously shitty thing for a kid to do.  Even for a tv show, it’s really just implausible.  That degree of damage would set most families into financial disrepair for years.  It totally baffles me that this would ever be a storyline on any tv show, much less one that’s used enough to become clichéd.

Finally, just to wrap things up, I had to point that even though Danny makes a point of acknowledging that what Stephanie did was totally shitty and he’s gonna have to punish her, the whole conclusion just ends up being all about accommodating her fucking feelings again.  I don’t know, you guys, it’s starting to really seem like Stephanie is some sort of sociopathic mastermind.  She spends the entire first half of the episode in a manic frenzy for attention and then when everyone tells her to fuck off she lashes out at the entire house.  Once she realizes what she’s done she strategically manipulates everyone and in the end is met with no clear consequences, only the unconditional love of her father.

Firsts:  Rebecca Donaldson’s house (interior)