Season 7, Episode 2, “The Apartment”

Have you ever seen The Apartment, with Jack Lemmon and Shirley Maclaine?  It’s a really great movie.  But we’re not here to talk about that.  We’re here to talk about a really shitty episode of Full House that has the same name.

Pre-Credits Gag:  Jesse pretends to be sick so his kids can play doctor, then he gives them horsey rides.

DJ and Kimmie Gibbler come home from the mall with hella bags of stuff and it turns out that they’ve bought presents for Kathy Santoni’s baby shower.  Say what?  It’s really interesting how Kathy Santoni is like this endlessly-referenced avatar for all prematurely aging girls throughout the entire series.  I think we’ve only seen her like twice but every time a girl grows boobs or acts slutty or something it’s always Kathy Santoni.  It’s also interesting how they clarify that she’s already gotten married before she’s having the baby even though she’s only in high school.  All of this subject matter seems a little too heavy for Full House, and yet they decided to address it anyway for some reason, so they found the most implausible and ridiculous way to try to sanitize it for us.  Kids get pregnant by accident all the time, but this almost sounds like it was planned.  I don’t know, maybe it was a shotgun wedding…  Danny is understandably perturbed by all of this information but it doesn’t lead to any further clarification or context.

After this strange bomb is so casually dropped, DJ mentions that she and Kimmie Gibbler are going over to Steve’s new apartment after school.  How the fuck can Steve afford an apartment in San Francisco?  I can’t afford an apartment there, and I’m a grown ass man with a pretty decent job.  I guess we can assume that his parents are rich, seeing as how we’ve never seen them or even heard one thing about them so we can pretty much draw whatever conclusions we want without any threat of being contradicted.  Anyway, Danny is uncomfortable about DJ going over to Steve’s, probably because she told him about it 2 seconds after telling him about her pregnant teenage friend.  Both of these pieces of information really seem like they would have come up earlier, by the way.  Seriously, DJ never once mentioned to her family that Steve was getting his own apartment until after he moved in?

Joey listens to a tranquility tape on his sweet ass walkman (man, I miss walkmen.  I used to make mix tapes all the time… oh, the glory days are gone!) and, just because there hasn’t been a new reason to totally hate his guts in a while, he’s wearing a beret the whole time.  Ugh.  Jesse and Becky fuck with him while he’s listening to his tape and he says that they’re interrupting his attempt to escape the pressures of everyday life.  What pressures?  Joey lands a high paying show business job every time he steps outside and he doesn’t have to pay rent.  I can’t think of another grown man whose life is so completely devoid of responsibility.

Michelle comes home and says that she’s having a terrible day because next Monday is hobby day and she doesn’t have one to speak of.  What a conundrum!  See, that’s the bad example Joey sets in action is what that is.  Michelle’s life is equally devoid of pressure and responsibility and yet she just can’t handle it.  This moment also brings us another example of how Michelle extends her arms out with her palms up to convey sincere emotion.  I guess her acting coach must have taught her that one between Seasons.  Anyway, this whole premise is nonsense because we all know that her hobby is being a condescending asshole, and she’s really, really dedicated to it.

Jesse lists some of his own hobbies and mentions that he’ll be cementing the driveway over the upcoming weekend.  Becky suggests that he hire someone else to do it because he’s a completely incompetent piece of shit but he insists that they’ll save a bunch of money this way.  Yeah, we all know that this is gonna work out fine. Just to eliminate any chance that it might not be a disaster, he enlists Joeys help.

Steve shows off his sweet new apartment to DJ which, even in the mid-90’s, probably cost like 3 grand a month.  I couldn’t help but be distracted during this entire scene by the fact that Steve is wearing a choker necklace, which I’m pretty sure can only be worn by teenage girls and women over 40 who are attempting to dress like teenage girls.  It has a peace sign on it.

Steve demonstrates the benefits of having his own apartment, like playing music really loud and eating ice cream out of the container.  Naturally, it’s vanilla.  DJ mentions that Kimmie Gibbler couldn’t make it over there and learns that Steve’s roommate is at the library, so they find themselves alone together for probably the first time ever, what with all the legions of people who have no regard for privacy that live in DJ’s house.  They start making out and then DJ leans over and turns the light off, heavily implying that she is ready to fuck.  I guess she understood what that vanilla ice cream was alluding to.

After they make out in the dark for about 5 seconds, DJ stops it and says that something doesn’t feel right.  She goes on to explain that their new-found freedom is a little scary to her and that she wants to take things slower.  For reals?  Steve’s been rushing home to jerk off every time he leaves her house for over a year now!  How can things be going any slower?  To be fair, I remember seeing scenes like this on a lot of shows of this era, where characters would make out briefly and then get into a heavy conversation about sex.  It always seemed pretty unnatural, but I guess you can’t really explore the compromises that come with waiting to go all the way on network television.  It’s not like they’re gonna roll around naked for half an hour before having the sex talk, or we’re gonna see him coerce her into giving him a hand job or something.  Ah, the old hand job coercion… makes me almost as nostalgic as that walkman we saw earlier.  Anyway, I don’t care how anyone reacts to what I have to say about this:  I think that DJ should fuck her boyfriend.  They’ve been going out for over a year and there’s no chance that either of them has any diseases.  What are the odds that 2 people who are so corny and boring would ever find each other?  Seriously, it’s time to consummate that shit.

Steve reacts in a way that is contrary to the behavior of every teenage boy in history: he’s totally cool with it.  He shoulda tried that line about how when you get a hard-on for a real long time it makes your balls hurt real bad and he’s just trying to relieve the pressure.  It’s a crucial step in the hand job coercion.  Instead they just decide to watch The terminator.

Meanwhile, back at the full house, Jesse and Joey try to calculate how much money they’ll save by cementing the driveway themselves while Joey still wears that stupid fucking beret!  I feel like he’s doing it just to aggravate me!  Anyway, Danny comes downstairs and says that he’s worried about DJ because it’s after midnight and she still isn’t home.  Why are the uncles sitting around in the living room doing calculations after midnight?  I kind of always assumed that everyone in the full house would be in bed by like 8:30.  Danny doesn’t have Steve’s phone number so he calls up Kimmie Gibbler, who has a rad fish pillow and a shoe phone in her room, which we see for the first time.  Kimmie Gibbler scolds Danny for letting DJ go to her boyfriend’s house unsupervised in the first place and calls him T-bag, which is a reference to a favorite activity of his.  Eventually she tells him that Steve’s phone isn’t hooked up yet but gives up his address. Why didn’t Danny get any of this information beforehand?  Even a dad that wasn’t all paranoid would want to know that stuff.

Danny knocks on Steve’s door but when they don’t answer he stands on a chair and looks through this big glass window pane that’s above Steve’s door for some reason.

The site of them sleeping innocuously is deeply unsettling to him and he continues to stare at them through the window pane until his chair breaks.  The sound wakes up DJ and Steve, who realize that they slept through DJ’s curfew, and then they let Danny in.  Danny flips the fuck out and demands that DJ come home with him, but not before declaring Steve’s apartment off-limits.  Hey, wait, how come Steve’s roommate never came home?  I guess he was out getting laid like a normal college student.

Jesse and Joey finish smoothing out the cement on the driveway, which seems to have gone pretty well except for the fact that it doesn’t lead to anywhere.  It’s literally just a big slab of cement sitting on the grass in their backyard in-between the house and the fence.  Steve appears in the backyard and everyone gives him the stink eye and then Danny decides to follow him when he goes into the house to see DJ.  Yeah, I don’t get this at all.  It makes a lot of sense that Danny would be pissed off about DJ missing her curfew and being somewhere where he couldn’t reach her by phone, but this whole issue about him not wanting her and Steve to be alone together seems pretty tacked on, especially since it really couldn’t be more obvious that they are not having any kind of sex.  Yes, Danny saw them asleep together, but he also saw that they were fully clothed.  He literally caught them doing nothing.

Adding to all of this nonsense, Becky gleefully points out to the uncles that they worked backwards when they cemented the driveway and now the cement mixer is stuck in the backyard until the cement dries.  She seems really amused by their failure for some reason.  Jesse decides that he has to run the cement mixer to keep the cement from hardening and Joey rubs his temples and quotes his tranquility tape.

Michelle shares her new hobby with Stephanie, which is collecting leaves.  For some reason this requires her to spread dirty ass leaves all over their room, including Stephanie’s bed.  I guess it’s because this is just an extension of her real hobby.

Stephanie gets all pissed and starts throwing the leaves out of the window and then Michelle starts throwing Stephanie’s stuff out of the window in retaliation, and then they get into a throwing-each-others-stuff-out-of-the-window battle.  I thought that the stuff they were throwing out of the window would end up in the cement mixer but I guess nobody cared enough to combine these storylines.

Danny barges into DJ’s room and starts vacuuming while she’s trying to be alone with Steve.  Steve and DJ leave the room and before Danny can follow them he’s intercepted by Stephanie and Michelle’s stupid conflict.  Because he’s so preoccupied, Danny actually acts like a real dad for once by telling the girls to cut the shit and then leaving abruptly.  There’s no music or anything.

DJ and Steve sit inside the cab of the cement mixer so they can be alone.  Sure, why not?  They kvetch about what a hard time everyone is giving them and then DJ tells Steve that it’s “sexy” that his nostrils flair up when he’s angry.  Ew, gross!  This leads to them making out, which they never really did before this episode, by the way, and then DJ steps on some sort of lever or something that makes the mixer lower it’s cement pouring thing (yeah, sorry, I don’t know the terms here), which crashes through the window and starts pouring cement into the kitchen.  Joey is sitting right in front of the window while this is happening but he allegedly can’t hear it because he’s listening to one of his tranquility tapes, but it’s not like he ever does anything to help anyway and is probably just choosing to ignore it.

Jesse and Danny come downstairs and see what’s happening and then they spend the next several minutes flailing around, ineffectively trying to resolve the problem.  Man, this is actually worse than the time Stephanie drove a car through the kitchen.  It’s not so bad that the mixer broke the window, but that cement pouring everywhere is gonna do some serious damage.  Jesse and Danny keep trying to find containers to collect the cement in while Joey just sits there, not helping, and I noticed that they never open that big cabinet next to the window while they look for containers, but then I remembered that it’s because they established in an earlier episode that the cabinet is filled with replacement fish for the pet that Michelle keeps killing.

After several minutes it finally occurs to them to turn off the truck.

The next scene is of Danny and DJ reconciling in her room.  Wait, what?  Didn’t he find her and Steve gettin’ busy in the truck, which was the cause of all of that destruction?  It seems like that would actually validate all of Danny’s concerns.  Seriously, that cement pouring into the kitchen is like a metaphor for the destructive nature of DJ and Steve’s sexual urges (the cement represents Steve’s sperm).  But, anyway, it’s not like any of this shit makes sense anyway, but we’re 22 minutes in so it’s time for the music to come on and for everyone to feel better.  Danny apologizes for not respecting DJ’s privacy and then he says that things are getting more complicated as she gets older and he wishes her mom wasn’t dead so she could help him deal with it.  Wait, but what about Vicky?  She’s supposed to be the replacement mom now, right?  Maybe she really is gone forever without any explanation.  Anyway, DJ reassures Danny that she’s totally lame and will never give it up, then they hug.

End-Credits Gag:  Wait, what?  This is new. Man, I hope they don’t start doing these regularly.  Anyway, Jesse and the twins chisel Joey’s feet from a block of cement while he’s still wearing that stupid fucking beret.  Great, they just had to make us look at it one last time.

Firsts:  Kimmie Gibbler’s room, Steve’s apartment, Danny acts like a real dad (by not putting up with his daughter’s stupid arguing), end-credits gag