Season 6, Episode 14, “Birthday Blues”

Pre-Credits Gag:  For some reason it’s Becky’s job to wake Michelle up for school, so she makes the twins crawl all over her.

As Jesse actually spends time with his children for once, sculpting clay animals, Michelle enters the scene and immediately makes him feel guilty for being too busy to pay attention to her.  Lucky for her he’s a deeply negligent father, and all too willing to ignore his kids to make plans to help her with her stupid Honeybee craft project.  This scene actually clarifies that Michelle hasn’t always gotten everything she wants all the time purely because she’s the youngest.  There’s got to be some other explanation, then, and I’m sure that it is evil and horrible.

Danny is all nervous about his date with Vicky for some reason even thought they have an incredibly bland relationship in which nothing remarkable ever occurs.  Stephanie comes in and complains to Joey about how she has zero plans for the evening and, surprise, surprise, he doesn’t have shit to do, either, so they decide to go see a drive-in movie.

Kimmie Gibbler shows up and tells Stephanie that it’s her 16th birthday and she’s anticipating some sort of big surprise party from DJ.  Vicky comes to the door and Danny greets her with some passionless smooching, which causes Kimmie Gibbler to remark, “hey horndogs, get a room.”  “Horndogs”?  Really?  That’s a surprisingly racy term for this show.  I guess the writers must not have known what it meant.

Stephanie goes up to DJ’s room and ascertains that DJ is planning to hang out with Steve that evening to celebrate their 6-month anniversary and has completely forgotten that it’s Kimmie Gibbler’s 16th birthday.  Kimmie Gibbler comes in and tells DJ that she knows that she’s throwing her a surprise party but promises to act surprised anyway, then she mentions that her parents offered her a trip to Wrestlemania 6 but she passed it up for the party.  Damn, that’s the one where Hulk Hogan fought the Ultimate Warrior!  DJ is struck with guilt over her friend missing the greatest wrestling event of my childhood to attend a party that she didn’t even think about trying to plan so she decides to try to throw something together while Kimmie Gibbler goes home to change.

DJ rallies with Stephanie to try to figure out how to put a party together so quickly and the two of them actually seriously consider changing all of the calendars and telling Kimmie Gibbler that they went through a time warp and it’s now a month earlier.  Unfortunately, the plan that DJ ends up devising really isn’t much better.  She runs downstairs and tells everyone in the full house that they have to cancel their boring dates or lame plans or stupid craft projects or whatever to help her put a party together.  Everyone says that they do not collectively give one fuck about Kimmie Gibbler or her stupid birthday but then Vicky convinces them all to rally together to help out, seemingly because it’s way past time that her character ever did anything.

After everyone has been assigned a job for the party, DJ tries to make a cake and discovers that there’s no food in the house, which is apparently because Steve has eaten it all.  Man, that guy’s becoming a real menace with that insatiable hunger of his.  The moment Steve is spoken of, he shows up at the full house and has to learn that his g-rated date with DJ, which was going to climax with hand-holding on the beach, has to be cancelled because of Kimmie Gibbler’s birthday party.

I don’t know, I kind of feel bad for Steve.  I can’t really blame him for eating all of the food in the house all the time after having to put up with all this stupid bullshit every time he comes over.

Kimmie Gibbler arrives at the cobbled-together shambles that is her surprise birthday party, which begins a long and painful sequence of unconvincing explanations about why it sucks so bad being fed to her while she remains unflappably enthusiastic.  She is unphased by decorations consisting of toilet paper and leftover holiday adornments, Vicky not knowing her name, the people who live in the full house being the only ones there, tinfoil-wrapped presents that are obviously old junk that was laying around the house, and a hash brown and ketchup cake, but it is only when Steve mentions that DJ threw the whole thing together in 15 minutes that Kimmie Gibbler realizes what’s happening.  Yes, that’s right, it took someone putting exactly what was happening into words for her to get it.

DJ follows Kimmie Gibbler into the kitchen and Kimmie Gibbler’s like, “go fuck yourself.  All you even care about is holding hands with your stupid hungry boyfriend” and then DJ’s like, “Why you gotta hate?  Just because you aint got no man…” and then Kimmie Gibbler gets doubly butthurt and leaves.

Danny come in and tells DJ that she has been a pretty shitty friend to Kimmie Gibbler ever since she started going out with Steve.  It’s kind of understandable, though.  I mean, DJ is a really undeveloped character, so it’s only natural that having a boyfriend would dominate most of her life and characteristics.  What else does she even have going on?  Anyway, Danny rattles on about the importance of friendship, and then he recalls that Joey and Jesse moved into the full house when he needed them, which is a weird analogy because those guys are both worthless pieces of shit who obviously only moved into the house for the free rent.  What’s most interesting about it is that, in this case, DJ is the worthless shitty friend.  If only this were the episode where Kimmie Gibbler finally accepted that DJ and her corny family are all a bunch of shitty assholes and it’s time to move on to bigger and better things.  But, no, all Kimmie Gibbler does is sit and wait in the backyard for DJ to come out and patch things up while gentle music plays.

Kimmie Gibbler tells DJ that it really sucked dick when she said that she was jealous of Steve because she’s not jealous, she just misses her and feels like she has a new best friend.  Um, yeah, that kind of sounds like jealousy to me.  But logic be damned!  The music is playing, which means that it’s time to patch things up, so they agree to be best friends forever, followed by hugs and the audience going, “aww.”  Problem solved!

Damn, Kimmie Gibbler, that really was your chance to get out.  It’s kind of your own fault from this point on.