Season 7, Episode 8, “Another Opening, Another No Show”

Pre-Credits Gag:  The twins crawl all over Jesse while he tries to finish up the accounting for his new club.  As he plugs in the last of the numbers, he discovers that they’re wildly inaccurate and then, instead of just assuming he fucked up the numbers just like he fucks up everything else, he looks inside the calculator and discovers that the twins have filled it with Play-Doh.  I don’t know why that would cause miscalculations rather than just totally prevent the calculator from working at all.  Seriously, that makes zero sense. It just doesn’t add up.  Oh!  See what I did there?  No, but really though, that’s fucking bullshit.

Danny comes into the living room acting all jittery because he’s responsible for the Smash Club’s coffee supply and has been abusing it.  It almost seems like this might be the makings for a very special episode.  This show’s definitely lame enough to do an episode about coffee abuse.  Jesse grabs Danny to keep him from shaking and then Joey walks in on them in a suggestive pose, which is the kind of homoerotic mishap that we used to see all the time on this show back when it was just remarkably terrible instead of unbelievably terrible.

Joey tells Jesse that he was able to book R.E.M. for the Smash Club’s opening night and Jesse is overjoyed.  Then Joey says that Jesse’s hair smells like melon.  I’m not really sure why that happens.

Jesse unveils to his family the garish monstrosity that is the new Smash Club.  It’s even got a disco ball, just to make it extra tacky and awful.

The girls start fucking with the stage equipment and then Danny starts futzing around with the coffee maker and Jesse gets all uptight about it.  DJ and Kimmie Gibbler display their waitress uniforms and Jesse immediately starts criticizing the modifications that Kimmie Gibbler’s made to hers.  Wait, so how are we supposed to understand that her uniform looks bad but the club doesn’t?  There’s never been any means of qualifying aesthetics on this show whatsoever.

Jesse gets all pissed off at everybody for fucking around and then, to top it off, Joey comes in and explains that instead of R.E.M. he booked the Del Rubio Triplets.  They’re not playing themselves, but rather performers named Renee, Esther and Martha, hence Joey assuming that they were “R.E.M.”  Yeah, even after it’s explained it still makes no sense.

Jesse yells at everyone some more for being gigantic fuck-ups and then he goes into the storage closet to get some napkins.  While he’s in there he finds Kimmie Gibbler hiding out and then, as they head back out to the club, the handle to the door comes off, trapping them.

Danny frantically taps the counter to work out his nervous coffee energy as Becky does a remarkably inefficient job of filling the salt containers.  Seriously, she’s doing it like she’s 5-years old.

Stephanie and DJ tell Danny and Becky that they can’t find Jesse after looking everywhere, except for the storage closet, which is one of the few places that it would make sense to check.  Danny continues to struggle with the coffee maker and I didn’t really realize until now that he’s doing this because it’s actually his job to serve the coffee.  You know what would make this opening go a lot better?  If Jesse hired some actual employees.  What, are the people who live in the full house supposed to come to this club every night and do bullshit jobs now?  Danny hosts a morning show and supports like 15 people and now he has to work nights as a barista, too?  That wouldn’t even make sense if he seemed qualified for the job. No wonder this whole opening is such an unmitigated disaster.  Jesse can’t even do one job well, and now he’s trying to do the work of like 20 people.  Anyway, Becky starts to tell DJ to set all the tables and then they realize that Kimmie Gibbler is also missing. If only they went into the storage room to get the stuff to set the tables, all of these problems would be solved so quickly.  Instead they get sidetracked by a large group of Steve’s college buddies filling up the club while chanting “R.E.M!”

Kimmie Gibbler calls being stuck in the storage room with Jesse a “crazy twist of fate” and he interprets it as her making a pass at him but then she’s like, “get real, sucka, I wouldn’t fuck you with Joey’s dick.”  Awkward!  Jesse continues to complain about how badly everything’s going and what a shitty job everyone’s doing and Kimmie Gibbler points out that he’s the one that’s fucking everything up, plus he’s being a real dick while he does it.

Joey tries to warm up the crowd with stand-up and then when nobody laughs he walks to the side of the stage and asks Steve what the problem is, which is something that lots of stand-up comedians do when their set isn’t going well, I’m sure. Steve explains that all of his friends are foreign exchange students who don’t speak english, as if we needed an explanation as to why nobody was laughing at Joey’s jokes.

DJ runs around and tells all the customers that the coffee they’ve ordered is on it’s way and then she’s accosted by Ben Stein, who’s playing a food critic named Elliot who writes a column called, “Eating Out with Elliot” for the local newspaper  I seem to remember a column in Hustler with that same name, and it sure wasn’t about food.  Also, check out Ben Stein’s amazing ponytail wig.

Becky comes over and Ben Stein tells her what a piece of shit the club is so she starts yelling at him until DJ tells her who he is, at which point she tries to pretend that her angry tirade was a performance piece.  Pretty smooth.

Everyone considers closing the club because everything is going so poorly but then Becky gives an inspiring speech about her high school volleyball coach and the resulting upswing in morale inexplicably causes the coffee machine to start working.

Kimmie Gibbler tells Jesse that it really hurt her feelings when he said that her outfit looked like the inside of a dogs asshole and then the audience goes “aww.”  The music comes on as Jesse realizes that he’s been being a real prick and that nobody had a good time as a result.  So I guess the lesson isn’t about being prepared or working hard or doing your job well, it’s just about being nice to people, even if they’re doing a really shitty job.  If that’s not the lesson, I don’t know what is.  I’m really grabbing at straws here.  But what’s important is that the music is on, so whatever the problem was, it’s fixed now.  Jesse finds an air conditioning vent in the ceiling and decides to climb up into it.  Maybe that’s the message that the music brought us:  “If you’re ever trapped in a storage closet, climb through the air conditioning vent.”  Aww.

The girls bring Ben Stein his coffee and he seems to really like it.  The horde of foreign exchange students continues to chant, “R.E.M!,” so the Del Rubio Triplets come out and start performing and then everyone’s like, “what the fuck?”

The audience starts booing so the triplets cue some unseen drum machine and start performing the DEVO song, “Whip It.”  For some reason this totally wins the audience over and they all get up and start dancing.  Even Ben Stein likes it.

No, really though, what the fuck?  This might be the most nonsensical occurrence in the entire series.  Don’t get me wrong, I like 80’s New Wave more than most people, but even still, I am at a complete and utter loss here.  Why does a cover of a DEVO song appease the crowd?  If they were performing an R.E.M. song it might kind of make sense…  were we not supposed to know the difference?

Jesse descends onto the crowd atop the disco ball and everyone applauds and congratulates him on doing such a great job, including Ben Stein, and then Jesse falls onto an older woman who kisses him on the mouth.  Ok, seriously, that’s gotta be the most baffling 2 minutes of television ever made.  I’m not even angry this time, just totally mystified.

Back at the full house, Jesse tells everyone that he just had the greatest night of his life and then the music comes on again as he apologizes for being such an asshole, then he hugs Kimmie Gibbler.