Season 4, Episode 17, “A Fish Called Martin”

I try to keep things strictly business ’round these parts but I just had to acknowledge real quick that FHR was mentioned on metacritic last week and then it got straight up blasted all over the whole mufuckin internet (including by the Huffington Post!!!).  I’m not quite sure who to thank (aside from this snazzy blog, I can’t say I’m too internet savvy, so it’s all kind of mystifying to me…) but my readership just increased like cray cray, so I just wanted to welcome all you new readers (especially those of you who have been going through the archives and commenting as you slog through my backlog) and send a big thank you out to all you famous bloggers and twitterers and tumblerers who spread the word about this ridiculous, masochistic hobby.  Welcome to my dumb ass waste of time!  Also, big ups, as always, to Teebore at the Gentlemen of Leisure Blog, who is this blogs blood brother and the only reader who leaves me a comment every single week.  What a great guy!

Anyway, I’ll save all other shout-outs and self-promotion till the Season Review, so without further adieu:

Pre-Credits Gag:  Michelle jams out with Jesse’s shitty band.  Surprisingly, his band features the same members that we saw the last time they played together, which is probably just to prove me wrong from when I made a snarky observation during their previous appearance about how the band always has a completely different roster.  Anyway, the band lets Michelle screw around on a fake guitar in front of them, which is all well and good, but then Jesse forces them to back her up while she sings, “Doo Wah Diddy.”  This one’s pretty rough, you guys.  I think I may have been abusing the word when I said that she “sings,” but I don’t know what the fuck else to call it.  She just coughs out this off-key, garbled mess…  And then, as if that wasn’t bad enough, she insists that the band play, “I’m a Little Tea Pot” and we have to watch the whole thing!  This is the longest pre-credits gag ever, by a lot!  It just goes on and on.  Up until this point, the only good thing about pre-credits gags is that they were short.  At least it explains why the members of Jesse’s band are always changing, because being forced to back some monkey faced little girl during rehearsal is a total deal-breaker.

As Jesse and Rebecca Donaldson make out on the couch in preparation for their wedding next week, she mentions that her family has a tradition of celebratory square dancing that they have to prepare for.  Holy shit, this explains everything!  For the past 2 Seasons I’ve been totally baffled as to why Rebecca Donaldson would ever give anyone in the full house the time of day, what with her sense of reasoning and her totally hot ass.  She always seemed too good for the rest of the assholes on this show, and I always wondered what hidden psychosis she must be harboring that would explain why she stuck around.  Well, today I got my answer: she’s a square dancer!  What an epiphany!

As Jesse tries to weasel out of square dancing, as if anyone in the full house could ever be too cool to do anything, Michelle comes home from a fair with the other dads and shows off a goldfish that she won.  She explains that she won the fish when she, “threw a ball into his bowl” and the audience laughs.  Really?  That’s not even kind of a joke.  It’s just straightforward information.  Anyway, Jesse exclaims to Michelle that she’s got her very first pet, which is a total disservice to Comet the dog and, more importantly, Bubba the turtle, the Tanner’s long lost, never-mentioned-again pet from Season 1.  I loved that amphibian.

DJ met some hot piece of man-meat at the fair and as he walks her to the door she’s about to offer him a rim job when Stephanie comes up and totally salts her game.  Bobby, the man-meat himself, is enthralled by a passing car and starts blathering on about how cars are the best thing ever.  He asks DJ if she likes cars, too, and she fakes interest because she’s so very, very desperately lonely.  Bobby is all jazzed about meeting a girl who likes cars as much as he does so as he’s leaving he tells her, “I’ll call you tomorrow…  and we can talk about cars.”  Although I think it’s pretty unhealthy of DJ to feign interest in something just to get a boys attention, I can’t fault her too much because it’s been clearly established that every character on this show is strictly limited to 2 or 3 characteristics that define their entire personality, so they really couldn’t possibly have anything else to talk about if she wasn’t interested in cars.

Michelle names her fish Martin and Joey offers advice about how to take care of him:  keep him clean and feed him once a day.

As Rebecca Donaldson makes another attempt to get Jesse to learn how to square dance, DJ comes into his room and asks if she can borrow some car magazines.  She explains that she lined up some hot schlong at the fair and all she needs is to learn about cars to seal the deal and then Rebecca Donaldson says that it’s shitty to pretend you like something just to win someone’s affections.  Jesse sees this as an opportunity to justify his refusal to square dance but Rebecca Donaldson’s like, “fuck you, Jersey, I’ve put up with more stupid bullshit in the last 2 years than in the rest of my life combined, plus I’m fine as hell and have a successful career, whereas you have some made up job and you live in your brother-in-laws nursery.  I wear the pants in this relationship, and you’re fuckin’ square dancing!”

Joey walks in on Michelle standing beside a full bubble bath and discovers Martin’s limp, lifeless body within.  How many times have I said that they shouldn’t let that fuckin’ kid walk around unsupervised all the time?  You see what happens?!!?

I’m really surprised that they showed Martin’s floating corpse inside that bowl.  That’s gotta be the most graphic image in the entirety of the series.  Full House has always featured the most vanilla, non-controversial visual vocabulary possible, seemingly taking place in a world without pubic hair or violence or drug use or bodily fluids of any kind, and yet they took something that would be pretty darn easy not to show and they held it out right in front of the camera for us all to see.  The really fucked up part about it is that Joey’s too inept to explain to Michelle that she killed her fish, so he just lets her believe that Martin’s sleeping and lets her carry his corpse back to her room inside of the fish bowl.  Now Michelle’s like the Norman Bates of fish owners.

Joey takes Danny and Jesse aside and tells them that Michelle killed Martin and he doesn’t know what to do about it.  You’d think that Joey failing to explain to Michelle that her fish died and letting her walk around with his rotting corpse in a bowl all day instead would be the final signal to Danny that he absolutely should not be housing Joey and allowing him to raise his daughters, but no dice.  After further discussion with the uncles, Danny decides that they should have a very special talk with Michelle to explain what happened.

Jesse, Danny and Joey all fumble through their attempted very special talks, the worst being when Joey just rambles about Road Runner cartoons and makes sound effects.  Danny eventually manage to spit it out about Martin being dead and Michelle gets all confused and asks how he died.  Joey explains that he died in the tub, which is clearly his way of substantiating to himself that the incident was all Michelle’s fault when he’s the one that told her to clean him and then he just let her walk around unsupervised.  Joey is totally ruining this little girls childhood right in front of Danny, week after week, and yet he never gets kicked out of the full house.

The dads all buy Michelle a new fish with a decked out ass fish tank but she’s all bummed out about fish and doesn’t want it.  The weirdest part about this scene is that Jesse carries Michelle into the room at the opening and she’s smiling and laughing, and it’s not until they give her the new fish that she gets upset.  It seems like she was pretty over the whole death of Martin incident, so why didn’t they just leave well enough alone?  Anyway, Jesse’s like, “we already paid for this tank and fish food and shit so if you don’t like it howsabout he’s the family fish?”  Michelle hesitantly agrees and then expresses a little more self pity before sulking off to the living room to do some more unsupervised activities.  Once she’s gone, Jesse asks the other dads what they’re gonna do if the new fish dies and then they unveil a secret stash of spare fish in the dining room cabinet.

That’s gotta be the weirdest joke ever once you think about it.  You hardly ever see that cabinet but, from now on, whenever you do I want you to remember that it’s filled with spare pet fish.

Stephanie quizzes DJ about cars and DJ gets all nervous because she’s learned jack shit.  Rebecca Donaldson comes in to summon everyone for the family square dancing practice but she’s distracted by DJ’s boy problem.  She explains to DJ that it’s fucking dumb as hell to lie about your interests and that she should just be honest with Bobby.  Just then the phone rings and when DJ answers she tells Bobby, “look, I want to be honest with you.  I think cars are boring and they cause pollution.”  Bobby promptly hangs up on him and then DJ just reacts by telling Rebecca Donaldson that any guy who hangs up on her is probably not her type.  How’s that for totally fucked up!??!  If this had been last Season I think that Rebecca Donaldson would still have had the sense to point out to DJ that she was being a rude bitch and maybe dropped some knowledge about social tact.  First the square dancing, now this…  I guess since this is the last episode before the wedding they wanted to make Rebecca Donaldson as crazy as possible to finally fully initiate her into the full house.

Oh my god, you guys, the Tanner’s fucking square dance.  I’ve seen so much at this point that I’m not even sure if I can call this an all-time low, but it’s certainly down there.  At the same time, it’s pretty unsurprising if you think about it.  Full House, at its essence,  is pretty much a cruel stereotyped rendition of white people, so it only makes sense that the corniest, white-breadiest family of all time would eventually engage in the crackerest activity known to cracker ass crackers.

Once they’re done hoeing down, Rebecca Donaldson gets Jesse to admit that square dancing is fun after all and then they promote once again that the wedding episode’s next week.

Michelle breaks up the square dancing party by frantically shouting about there being something wrong with the new fish.  The family runs to investigate and discovers that the fish has given birth.  Michelle is commended for alerting the family and they explain to her that they’re gonna put the mom fish in her own bowl, followed by an extended shot of them doing so.  What’s that all about?  Is that something that you’re supposed to do when a fish has babies that I don’t know about, like she’s gonna eat them or something?  It just seems like a really unnecessary detail to me.

Anyway, Danny tells Michelle that she can keep all the baby fish in her room and then the family calls her a hero and actually applaud her.  What?  She didn’t even do anything!