Season 7, Episode 1, “It Was a Dark and Stormy Night”

Well, here we go.  Season 7.  Before I get started, I want to give a shout-out to FHR supporter Hebrewersfan for purchasing the Season 7 DVD’s back when I said I wouldn’t keep writing this blog unless somebody purchased them for me.  Hebrewersfan, what happens next is all your fault.

Ok, for reals now.  Season 7, here we go:

Pre-Credits Gag:  The twins refuse to sleep in their new racecar beds, insisting on sleeping with their parents instead.

The opening credits are largely unchanged, except that each of the non-adult cast members has a new shot for their credit.  Steve’s throwing a football!  I guess that this is because the kids age much more conspicuously than the adults.

What’s really important, though, is that we still get that great shot of Lori Loughlin bending over and showing us her ass with her credit.  That shot will live forever in all our hearts.  It is a true silver lining.

The episode opens at Camp Lakota, where the kids have spent their Summer.  Michelle demonstrates her new acting technique of extending her arms out with her palms up to convey sincerity as she says goodbye her friends because it’s the last night at camp.

Stephanie comes in and asks Michelle if she’s said goodbye to all of her bunkmates and Michelle says that there’s one that she hasn’t gotten to yet, which prompts her to bring a caged rabbit into view, which makes the audience go, “aww.”

Stephanie says that she’s had a hard time saying goodbye to all of her friends at camp, too, and then she starts counting all the friendship bracelets she’s gotten from boys, which are the middle school equivalent of notches on your belt.  Damn, y’all, Stephanie handled more dicks than Samantha on Bewitched!

DJ and Kimmie Gibbler, who are camp counselors, enter the cabin. They tell all of the kids to go to bed so they can go party with the other counselors, which will probably involve some serious consumption of pixie sticks.  Steve enters the cabin next, because he is of course a counselor, too, but he covers his eyes at the door to prevent the possibility of accidentally seeing a bare breast because he wants the first time it happens to be special.

The children all coerce Steve into telling them a scary story so he shares the tale of old man Cropsy, who lived on the site where the camp was built until his house was bulldozed on top of him, which transformed him into some sort of mud creature.  He tells the girls that when it rains outside, Cropsy returns to fuck with the campers, and then he smears mud on his face and pretends to be Cropsy, which strikes terror in their impressionable little hearts.

Meanwhile, back at the full house, there is a montage of the twins bugging Becky and Jesse all night as they refuse to sleep.

In the morning, Jesse bitches to Joey about how the twins wont sleep in their new beds and are keeping him up.  Although I find Joey’s unsightly mullet pretty distracting, I couldn’t help but notice that the kids’ drawings that are posted on the cabinets behind him have been updated, which is probably the most astute attention to detail that there’s ever been on this show.  It’s like somebody actually gave a shit!  They must have gotten a new set decorator who isn’t jaded yet.

The uncles lament about how much they’ve missed the girls until they make their big return, which leads to a flurry of hugs.  The girls all rant and rave about how fucking rad their camp was and then Michelle gifts the twins with paper lion masks she made them, which makes the audience go, “aww.”

The girls jabber some more about the baller ass camp they went to and then when Jesse refers to Michelle as “Munchkin,” she asks him not to do it anymore because she’s outgrown the name and now wants to go by her camp nickname, “Trailmix.”  Jesse is clearly hurt by the request, which makes the audience go, “aww.”

Stephanie excuses herself to go write letters to all the dudes she banged over the Summer,  DJ follows her because she wants to call Steve, and Michelle trails behind them for no real reason other than that the premise of this episode is that the dads are all butt hurt about how the girls totally like going to camp more than living in the full house and didn’t miss their corny dads at all.

As the girls unpack upstairs, Michelle reveals that she brought that rabbit from camp home instead of freeing it into the wild like she was supposed to.  Danny enters the room to gather the girls’ laundry and is less than thrilled to discover the rabbit.  Steve shows up moments later and gives DJ a sexually repressed hello hug before Danny addresses the fact that the rabbit can’t live in the full house because it’s a wild animal, plus they already have a dog and like 50 fucking people living in that goddamn house. He tells Michelle that the rabbit needs to live in the woods with its friends but Michelle replies that she is the rabbit’s friend, which makes the audience go, “aww.”

Michelle concedes that the rabbit needs to be returned to nature and then Steve offers to drive it up to the camp.  The rest of the girls jump at the opportunity to return to camp as well so they all leave together, leaving Danny alone to wear a stupid sad expression on his face while sad music plays.  Curiously, the audience does not go, “aww.”

After a shot of the car pulling up to the camp with really cheaply superimposed rain over it, the girls enter their old cabin and are distraught over how different it looks because everything’s all put away.  What’d they think, that camp just went on all year?  They open the box that they were keeping the rabbit in and are dismayed to discover that he chewed his way out.  What’s the problem?  They went back to camp to get rid of the rabbit and he’s gone now.  Problem solved.  Michelle pouts over never having gotten a chance to say goodbye to the rabbit, which makes the audience go, “aww.”

Steve enters the cabin and tells everyone that his car’s stuck in a big mud puddle.  Rather than addressing the fact that they’re stuck at the camp unless he finds a way to get his car out of the mud, Michelle just worries about whether or not Cropsy is going to come in and murder them.  Oh, if only!

Meanwhile, back at the full house, Jesse and Becky join their kids in their racecar beds in attempt to get them to finally sleep there.  The kids still don’t like the beds for whatever reason but their parents are so exhausted that they fall asleep in the tiny plastic racecar frames.  The twins sneak away from their sleeping parents to go sleep in their bed while this really weird music that’s never been featured on the show before plays.  It sounds like something from an old Disney cartoon or something.  The twins say goodnight to each other and then they hug, and that is the end of the twins-wont-sleep-in-their-racecar-beds storyline.

As the kids grow increasingly frightened in the cabin, they’re alarmed first by the power going out and then by a strange groaning sound approaching the cabin.  As the kids all brace themselves, the door swings open and a shadowy figure covered in mud looms in the doorway.  Steve actually totally mans up and clutches the figure in a wrestling hold while the girls all shriek helplessly in the background.  During all of this excitement, a second figure appears at the door and, as the girls rush to attack him with a broom, they discover that it’s Danny, because he has enough sense to exclaim, “girls, it’s me!” unlike the muddy figure, who turns out to be Joey, who fell in some mud and then decided to stand in the doorway groaning for some reason and never once said who he was even while Steve was grappling with him for a remarkably long period of time.  There’s never an explanation about why he was groaning as he approached the cabin, but it’s not like any of this shit makes any sense anyway, so whatever.

The girls ask Danny what he’s doing there and then he tells them that they left something at home, at which point he pulls the rabbit out of his bag and hands it to Michelle, which makes the audience go, “aww.”

That very second, the power comes back on and the rain stops, both miraculously, and everyone decides that it’s time to go even though Steve’s car is still stuck in a giant mud puddle.  I guess it’s fair to assume that when the lights came on and the rain stopped, Steve’s car was lifted from the puddle by an angel or something.  Michelle asks Danny why they came back to the camp and the music comes on as he explains that the camp is a place that the girls loved and they expected it to be the same when they returned but things change and sometimes the magic is gone even if you don’t want it to be.  That doesn’t in any way address the larger problem, which is that Danny’s kids are growing older and more independent and he’s being a big fucking crybaby about it, but it’s not like any of the lessons on this show are ever very thoughtful or constructive anyway.  The girls acknowledge that Summer is over and Michelle tells the rabbit that it’s time for him to go home, which makes the audience go, “aww.”

Back at the full house, the family all make s’mores in the fireplace and leave a plate of them on the couch while they wait for them to cool down.  Naturally, Joey comes into the room and sits on them and then he runs around screaming about his burning anus.  This is one of those checkpoints in this series, where a moment is so stand-out terrible that you can’t help but acknowledge that, even though it’s always been awful, it has now reached a new level.  As the family all stand around guffawing while Jesse sprays whipped cream all over Joey’s ass, it’s impossible not to recognize that the stakes have been raised.

After the family is brought closer together than ever by Joey’s ass being covered in desserts, the girls say that they really missed everyone while they were at camp.  The music comes on again as the girls apologize for not paying enough attention to their corny family the minute they got back from camp and then there’s hella hugging.

Michelle asks Jesse if he’ll call her Munchkin again and then he kisses her on the mouth and the audience goes, “aww.”

Bringing the episode to a close, the dog starts eating the desserts off of Joey’s ass.  What did he think would happen?  That’s what he gets for not going and cleaning that shit off like a sensible human being.

Holy shit, you guys, Season 7 really hit the ground running.  The only thing that ever impresses me about Full House is how it somehow manages to find new ways to be an even shittier show.  Danny’s speech about the magic being gone is actually kind of an interesting analogy here.  It’s almost like the writers are trying to warn everybody that, even if they somehow liked the show up to this point, it’s now a dried out husk of its former self and there’s nothing left but an empty caricature of something that wasn’t ever any good anyway.  The nosedive in quality here is truly remarkable.  I’ve been pretty excited about the prospect of this review project being over in less than a year but now it’s clear that these last 2 Seasons are going to be fucking grueling.  Not even that shot of Lori Loughlin’s hot ass in the opening credits will console me.  There is no silver lining.