Season 8, Episode 3, “Making Out is Hard to Do”

Pre-Credits Gag:  Joey plays a trick on the twins but then it turns out that they were just humoring him, presumably out of pity.

As Stephanie enters her room with Gia, we catch the tail end of their conversation, with Gia saying, “I’m telling you, they’re fake.”  What?  Eww!  Anyway, Stephanie kicks Michelle out of the room so she and Gia can talk about dicks and stuff.  Gia tells Stephanie that some boy named Bobby is gunnin’ for her vag and Stephanie seems pretty excited about it.  Gia follows up by saying that she’s going to have a party on Friday while her mom is at work and wants to invite Bobby for Stephanie’s benefit.  Stephanie seems too naive to understand what Gia’s lining up here but so she jovially goes along with the plan.

Danny enters the room and starts making high pitched growling sounds, which calls for Stephanie clarifying that he’s got laryngitis.  She asks if she can go to Gia’s party and Danny asks via a notepad if there will be adult supervision there, at which point Gia tactfully withholds the truth.

Jesse and Joey host the radio show that they only ever work at when it’s convenient for the premise of the episode.  Joey introduces himself with a mouth full of “chocolate boing boings” (which I assume are supposed to be like Hostess snacks… R.I.P Hostess snacks… aw, man…why’d they have to remind me.  That’s a tragic loss that I’ll never get over…  I know what you’re thinking.  “There are plenty of knock offs.”  Well you know what?  They’re not the same.) because one of the rules of this show is that everyone has to be extremely terrible at their jobs all the time.

They bring on their guest, whose appearance gets big ass applause from the audience and who I didn’t recognize at all, but before I bothered to IMDB him they clarify that he was Greg Brady.

Greg Brady says that he wants to talk about his new project but Joey and Jesse just bombard him with questions about the Brady Bunch, which must be some sort of subtle nod to what the cast of this show should start preparing to deal with for the rest of their lives.  John Stamos is the only one to have found any success whatsoever doing other stuff but even he must get asked Uncle Jesse questions galore anytime he goes anywhere.  The most annoying thing about all the questions they ask Greg Brady is that they don’t even give him any time to answer.  They just interrupt him with another dumb question as soon as he opens his mouth.

Greg Brady finally tells them to shut the fuck up and let him talk for 2 seconds and then he plugs his new band.  He busts out their CD and it’s revealed that he’s the new front man for the Rippers.  It’s kind of odd that none of the Rippers would have ever mentioned to Greg Brady that Jese was their old front man.  It’s made clear that Greg Brady isn’t going on the Rush Hour Renegades to be a dick about it, he just didn’t know.  Jesse tries to show what a good sport he is by playing the Rippers new CD on the air and then there are a series of shots of San Francisco as the song plays.

The song is called “April Girls” and as far as I can tell without doing more than googling the title and looking at the first few results, it’s an original song.  It’s pretty bland but at least it’s not another terrible cover of a Beach Boys song.  Way to make progress, the Rippers.  Anyway, the song playing over shots of the city seems to be an implication that it’s being played and heard all over the place, an intimation that’s backed up by the following scene, which opens with Jesse walking into the kitchen of the full house while the family all dance around like black comedians doing impressions of how white people dance as they listen to “April Girls” on the radio.

Jesse is so dismayed by the Rippers success that he declares that he’s quitting music for good, a decision that took about 5 years longer than it should have and brings disappointment to exactly zero people.  He decides that his days of being a terrible musician are behind him and he’s going to focus a lot more time and energy on being a terrible father instead.

After an entirely unremarkable scene about Danny’s laryngitis, Stephanie asks DJ for a ride to Gia’s party.  DJ agrees to take her and then it turns out that Gia lives in the exact same building that Steve used to.  I get why they would just reuse the old set of Steve’s apartment (especially on this no money spendin’ ass show), but did they have to use the same exterior shot, too?  They really couldn’t have found a different picture of a building to use?  That’s not cheap, it’s just lazy.

The kids at Gia’s party are all just standing around and then, when the doorbell rings, Gia looks at them and says, “great, Stephanie’s here.”  Stephanie come in with Pictionary in her hands but Gia just tosses it aside and then turns out the lights so that everyone can start making out.  It seems really weird to me that all of the kids were just standing around waiting until Stephanie got there and then, as soon as she arrived, they all immediately began their make out sessions.  Why is Stephanie the make out catalyst?  That would be weird even if she wasn’t a total boner killer.

Stephanie is paired up with Bobby, who immediately starts trying to make out with her, what with this being a make out party and all.

Stephanie hesitates, saying that she doesn’t really know Bobby and would like to at least have a friendly chat before they start making out.  Bobby points out once again that they are at a make out party and intimates that if they don’t start making out soon, everyone will think that they’re dorks.  Stephanie, persuaded by this logic, finally concedes and starts making out with him, which makes the audience go “whooooo!”

A few seconds later she stops and awkwardly asks Bobby how long they have to make out for, at which point Gia pulls her aside and tells her that her stupid naive bullshit is infringing on everyone else’s opportunities to advance to heavy petting.  Stephanie tells her that she was too immature and oblivious to deduce that Gia was hosting a make out party and Gia is surprisingly understanding and sympathetic about it.  Stephanie decides that it would be best if she called DJ to pick her up and take her home so she can stop ruining everyone else’s good time.

DJ isn’t home to answer her phone because she literally dropped Stephanie off 3 minutes ago.  Danny hears it ringing and answers and Stephanie is unable to discern the difference between DJ’s voice and the way that Danny sounds when he has laryngitis so she starts divulging her circumstances into the phone.  She arranges to be picked up by Danny after providing way more incriminating information than she needed to and never realizing that he isn’t DJ.

Jesse does exactly what you’d expect him to after making a major life decision: lays down on the couch.

A TV special about Greg Brady and the Rippers comes on and it’s very quickly apparent that this is a dream sequence.  The host of the show talks about what a big hit “April Girls” is and then begins to discuss the band’s old front man and what a giant fuck up he is. There’s an interview with Becky and she opens by saying, “Ok, alright, so I married a failure.  I can deal with it.”  You know, it really wouldn’t have been any harder to sell that statement outside of a dream sequence.

The show continues with everyone from the full house talking a bunch of shit about Jesse, none of which consists of unfair statements.  Joey talks about what an asshole Jesse is and then reveals that he’s now dating his wife, at which point Becky walks onscreen, offers him a “chocolate boing boing” and then puts it in between their mouths, which is, no exaggeration, the most upsetting image I’ve ever seen.  It’s like the g-rated version of Two Girls, One Cup, and yet somehow it manages to be so much grosser.

The show catches up with Jesse, who has somehow aged about 20 years while everyone else has stayed exactly the same.  Old, fat, bald Jesse greets the camera with hostility while current Jesse watches in horror.  Wait, I don’t understand this at all… how are both of these versions of Jesse supposed to be existing at the same time?  If he was supposed to be looking into the future or something it would make sense but in this case he’s actually supposed to be learning about his present self…  But… the Jesse that’s watching himself doesn’t look anything like the one on the TV, so…  I don’t even know what that means.

As if that wasn’t weird enough on its own, it’s revealed that old Jesse is engaged to Kimmie Gibbler, who’s dressed up like Peggy Bundy for some reason.  I’m not saying that she’s a Peggy Bundyesque character, she’s literally dressed exactly like Peggy Bundy.  Like, if you went to a costume store so you could be Peggy Bundy for Halloween, that is the costume that you would buy.  Regardless of how she’s dressed, she’s still about 17 years old, and therefore this sequence is illegal.

For some reason this weird dream sequence makes Jesse realize that he should never give up music.  I guess he feels upset and wants to enact revenge on the world by making terrible music forever.

Danny shows up at the make out party, hella mad.  Moments after he arrives, Gia’s mom shows up at the back door.  Wait, how is there a back door in an apartment like that?  Maybe they’re on the ground floor, but… no, it still doesn’t make sense.  Maybe if they’d gotten a new photo for the exterior of the building it wouldn’t seem so odd.  Anyway, all the make outers run away as soon as there are parents on the scene, leaving Gia and Stephanie alone with their single parents.  Danny is introduced to Gia’s mom, Claire, and then he starts lecturing her in his high pitched, scratchy voice.  Claire spoon feeds him some weird liquid that she has in her kitchen and it immediately cures him of his laryngitis.

He asks her what she just fed him and she just says it’s a family secret.  Wait, what?  Don’t get me wrong, I really didn’t want to sit through Danny having a long, serious talk with Gia’s mom while he did that high pitched, scratchy voice the whole time but that resolution is just total nonsense.  She just happens to have an undocumented cure for laryngitis sitting around in her kitchen? And what was the point of Danny having laryngitis for the whole episode anyway?  So he could be mistaken for DJ on the phone?  It would have made more sense, and spared us of this totally absurd miracle cure device, if he’d just been kicked in the nuts before answering DJ’s phone.  Plus then we’d have gotten to see him get kicked in the nuts.  Anyway, whatever.

Danny’s interrogates Claire about how her kid could host a make out party without her knowing and she’s like, “whatever, bitch, your kid was at that party and you didn’t know about it, either.” Danny and Claire reach an understanding and compare parenting tips and I guess we’re supposed to recognize some chemistry between them because this show seems to be on one last kamikaze mission to convince us that Danny is not gay.  Yeah, good luck with that.

Stephanie enters the scene as Claire exits and Danny tells her that it was shitty of her to lie about the make out party but he appreciates her being super lame and calling someone to bail her out like a pathetic little baby.  He grounds her for 2 weeks and, oddly enough, the music never comes on.