Season 4, Episode 21, “The Hole-in-the-Wall Gang”

Pre-Credits Gag:  As Joey moves the last of his shit into Jesse’s old room, he directs Michelle as she carefully carries his Popeye figurines, which leads her to ask him, “how come you play with dolls?”  Joey evades answering her by doing a routine with his Popeye toy and then he gets her to sing along to the Popeye theme with him and then they both do lame Popeye impressions.  Dang, Joey, it’s bad enough that you gave these kids scabies, now you gotta infect them with whatever personality disorder causes you to do terrible impressions all the time, too?

Jesse comes into Joey’s new room and tells him that he just shut the water off, which cues Danny to come in with shampooey hair and his bathrobe on, looking hella pissed.  Jesse responds to Danny’s annoyance by taking out a big squeegee and running it over his head.  What!??!  Why didn’t he check with anyone before he turned the water off?  And not only is he not sorry at all, he’s downright antagonistic!  Also, where’d he even get that big squeegee?

As DJ and Kimmie Gibbler practice getting gussied up like hoes so boys will want to touch their emerging bosoms, they lament the fact that Stephanie’s moving back into DJ’s room because Stephanie is so young and lame and doesn’t even have any friends who get their period.

Meanwhile, up in the attic, Becky starts to show signs of annoyance towards Jesse’s insistence that he’s going to build their entire attic apartment himself.

For crying out loud, now he’s building their new attic apartment?  They might as well have a fucking animated spaceman that lives up there with them, this shit’s gotten so preposterous.  Remember when Joey moved out of that creepy alcove in the living room into that slightly less creepy basement apartment?  Danny paid to have that shit done in like 2 days or something. Plus now, among the 7 people that live in the full house, there are 2 people with actual income, one of whom is impatiently awaiting the attic renovation project.  Anyway, who cares about anything, right?  Jesse’s building his fucking apartment in the attic, with his own two hands.

There’s a gag where Jesse turns the electricity off and then Danny comes up and he’s all mad because he can’t use his hair dryer.  And yet, it is not dark in the full house.  Anyway, Joey eventually realizes that since he, too, is unemployed and just sits around the full house all day making sandwiches for himself and laughing about what a sucker Danny is, he might as well waste a bunch of time being terrible at renovating the attic along with Jesse.  And that, my friends, is how comedy gold is forged.

Stephanie tries to show off how cool and mature she is by wearing a long shirt over some tights and putting a Nelson poster on her wall.

DJ comes in and says, “Oh my lanta!” when she’s sees Stephanie’s new digs.  What does that even mean?  It sounds like something a race horse would be named.  Anyway, DJ sees that Stephanie is sporting clothes like hers and she’s like, “quit bitin’ my steelo.”  DJ and Kimmie Gibbler then make plans to go hang out at the mall, but first DJ goes into Danny’s room to borrow something to wear and all the girls follow her.

As the girls enter Danny’s eerily well kempt room, DJ warns Kimmie Gibbler not to touch anything because Danny is all obsessive compulsive and will notice if anything’s been changed in any way, then she goes into his closet to borrow some clothes.  She picks out a shirt of his to wear because that will make her look cool at the mall for some reason and then Stephanie says that she wants to borrow one of Danny’s shirts, too, and they start fighting over it until the rod that the shirts hang from is pulled down.  DJ grabs the rod to fix it but then Stephanie starts grabbing at it and the ensuing struggle sends the rod right through the wall.

As she always does when shit starts to go down in the full house, Kimmie Gibbler cuts the fuck out immediately.  You know, there are a lot of reasons to like Kimmie Gibbler, but the fact that she never has DJ’s back at all is probably the biggest one for me.  Anyway, DJ starts really freaking out and trying to come up with a solution while Stephanie just sort of stands around, noticeably less perturbed.  At first I found Stephanie’s reaction odd but then I remembered that they already did an episode where she drove a car through the dining room, so I guess after that a hole in the wall doesn’t seem like such a big deal.

Joey complains that Jesse is just giving him bitch work to do on their attic-building project but Jesse seems pretty aware of Joey’s uselessness in this particular scenario and sticks to his guns.  The girls come up and ask the uncles about what they would do, hypothetically, if they knocked a hole in the wall and Jesse explains how he’s fix it as Joey makes mocking gestures behind him.

The girls create a diversion and then they sneak a bunch of repair supplies out of the attic.  Jesse continues to boss Joey around until Joey decides that he’d rather just go back to beating off to The Grind on MTV all day than put up with Jesse’s shit.

Just as Joey’s leaving, Jesse mishandles the wiring to the electric murphy bed he’s building and gets stuck behind it.  He calls to Joey for help and, naturally, Joey is a real dick about it and refuses to help him until he admits that he learned a valuable lesson about accepting help from others.  Wait, I’m sorry, I just glossed over the fact that Jesse is building an electric murphy bed, which is a totally amazing detail.  I wonder if it’s just going to be used for this one gag and then disappear or if he and Becky will conceive their ugly children on it.

The girls do a really shitty job of spackling the hole, although I’m pretty impressed that they managed to find paint that matched Danny’s wall.  They decide to push Danny’s dresser in front of the hole to cover it up but just as they start to move it they hear Danny announcing that he’s come home.  They enlist Michelle to stall him, prompting one of those never-worth-watching bits where someone does a terrible job of distracting someone else while some mischief is going on in the other room.  They must have done like 50 of those by now, and this one might be the least inspired of all as Michelle recites her phone number to Danny to avert his attention.  Danny realizes that something’s up and heads upstairs, where he finds the girls in his room, looking guilty as hell.

They stammer through the most obvious impromptu lie in the world about how they’re in his room because they’re doing research for a song they’re writing about him.  Danny skeptically requests that they perform the song and then the girls struggle through a shared improvisation of a song about Danny which is mostly made up of them droning on with, “Dad, Dad, he’s our Dad…”  I can actually see how a routine like this would be pretty funny if it was performed on a different show, but all I can say about it here is that it’s about as funny as Full House gets when it’s actually trying to be.

Danny says that he can tell that there’s some bullshit going on but since he can’t figure out what it is he’s not gonna sweat it.  The girls run back into their room and bond over pulling one over on Danny and celebrate by singing the “Dad” song again.  Michelle comes in and tries to sing it with them and Stephanie starts talking about what an annoying pain in the ass she is because she’s always bitin’ her steelo.  DJ points out to Stephanie that that’s how she feels about her and then Stephanie pulls a classic Urkel move by getting all butt hurt about being called out on being an obnoxious asshole.  The music comes on as DJ explains that she likes her and everything but Nelson totally sucks, even in 1990, so maybe she should just stick to being a lame kid who plays with dolls and stuff.  Their gentle reconciliation is cut short by Michelle entering the scene with a wig on, which is really bizarre not only because she just went and got a wig from who knows where, but also because this isn’t the first time that’s happened.

In the final moments of the episode Danny comes in and requests that the girls sing the “Dad” song and then they all sing it together as the credits come on, and that’s it!  They actually got away with putting that hole in the wall!  They didn’t learn a valuable lesson about being honest or not putting holes in walls, Stephanie just learned to stop bitin’ DJ’s steelo.

Firsts:  the girls get away with something