Fuller House Episode 10, “A Giant Leap”

After a healthy dose of baby and dog exploitation to get the crowd going, the doorbell rings and everybody in the house excitedly rushes to the door.  Some helpful exposition is delivered which informs us that Stephanie has been dating Hunter Pence, who is one of the San Francisco Giants.  Is this guy like a famous sports guy or is he just some lame sports guy that they got because they couldn’t get a better one?  I don’t know enough about sports to evaluate this guest star.  This could be really impressive for all I know.

The family all loom around Hunter Pence and take pictures of him and stuff while he provides stilted delivery of a bunch of one-liners.  There’s a bit about how he eats pizza with a fork that he keeps around his neck that I thought was kind of ok, but other than that they’re just photographing him and bringing up factoids about his career and shit like that.  Hunter Pence gives everyone tickets to his next Giants game and we learn that Stephanie will be singing in front of the stadium during the seventh inning stretch because of course she is.  How much do you wanna bet that she’s not the only member of this family that finds a way to ruin the game for everyone else in the stadium?  At least they have her singing in a slightly modest capacity.  She’s not doing the national anthem or anything.

Because free baseball tickets are not enough, DJ’s middle kid gets all whiney and asks Hunter Pence to hit him a foul ball during the game so he’ll have something to share for show and tell at school.  Rather than point out that show and tell is a tremendously outdated concept and even if it was still a thing it’s not his problem whether or not some shitty kid whose aunt he bangs has something to show to his stupid classmates, Hunter Pence provides a very reasonable explanation about how he’s in kind of a batting slump so he can’t guarantee whether or not he can hit a ball to an exact location within a large stadium, but he’ll try his best.  Stephanie wonders if she isn’t some sort of succubus whose maelstrom vagina is robbing him of his baseball prowess and then it turns out that there are a lot of internet rumors going around about this very theory.  The family all proceed to give Hunter Pence unsolicited batting advice that would really irritate  a working professional and then he attempts to make a gracious exit but Matt walks in and starts giving him even more advice.

Matt picks up his baseball ticket from DJ and then she’s like hey also I need to talk to you outside so they go out on the porch and she starts tugging all up on his junk.  The audience does some serious whooing.

DJ comes back into the house and the whole family is waiting for her because they don’t care about privacy at all.  DJ’s kids approach her and she worries that they might object to her dating Matt, what with their father’s recent, tragic death and everything, plus the fact that it might make for some plausible and meaningful tension and/or drama, but the kids are just like yeah that’s fine.  DJ checks in with every single member of the house and they all say that they don’t give a shit if she dates Matt but then she realizes that she still has to tell Steve, who will probably cry like a sorry ass bitch because he’s been trying to get at that for 20 years and now he’s about to get passed over.

Steve and DJ come back from walking their dogs together and I realized that the backyard set is really different than it was in the original series.  I guess that’s why I was confused when they had a party back there in an earlier episode.  I know that’s not very interesting but I noticed it so there.  Steve wants DJ so bad that it’s kind of disgusting and then she declares that they should have a talk.  She opens with how they’ve been spending a lot of time together lately and I’m glad that she mentioned this piece of information because we, the audience, have not seen this at all.  Steve’s like, DJ, I’m so into you that I could chain you to my radiator or cut you up and drive around with your pieces in the trunk of my car and DJ is like aw Steve that’s sweet and then he starts smooching on her.

Even though Steve is kind of desperate and overbearing, his smooches bring about a special wetness that DJ hasn’t felt since Model’s Inc was cancelled.  She goes inside to tell Stephanie and Kimmie Gibbler about it but they already know because they are creepy peepers.

DJ realizes that she just smooched 2 guys on the same day, which is the Full House equivalent of banging a whole football team, so she decides that she’d better hurry up and settle down with one of these fellows.  She reasons that Matt is moving away soon so she’d better pick Steve, who has more long-term potential.

After a bunch of delightfully time-consuming footage of the baseball stadium, we cut to some actual on-location scenes of the family at the game.  Not content with free front-row seats, Kimmie Gibbler brings a bunch of advertising material for her event planning business to impose onto the unsuspecting crowd.

DJ’s oldest kid asks for money for stadium food but Matt’s all, don’t you know I’m trynna fuck your mom? and hands him his credit card.

Lola makes an elaborate food request and Ramona does DJ’s kid a solid by being like, he can’t remember all that shit, why don’t you just go with him?  For those of you who may not recall, DJ’s oldest kid hella wants to bang Lola.  He is like the Steve to her DJ, except way less interesting.

Hunter Pence goes up to bat and he makes a very sexual hand gesture at Stephanie.  An irate baseball fan notices and starts to boo Stephanie because he deduces that she’s the one that’s supposedly causing Hunter Pence to suck at baseball.

Immediately afterwards, Hunter Pence strikes out.  Maybe this is all because she gave him syphilis and it’s corroding his brain.  That’s my theory.  Or maybe it’s just a coincidence.

At a stadium merch shop, Lola ogles a really expensive souvenir jersey so DJ’s oldest kid decides to buy it for her with Matt’s credit card.  I can’t decide if DJ’s oldest kid is to blame for taking advantage of the situation or if Matt should blame himself for giving a horny 12-year old his credit card but either way, the purchase gives Lola a ladyboner.

The weirdest part is that the cashier is suspicious about the kid using a credit card to make this expensive purchase but he doesn’t stop him or even ask for ID or anything.

Ramona gets all butt-hurt about being ditched by Lola after being a pretty solid wingman for DJ’s boring kid and then DJ’s other boring kid bitches and moans about his stupid fucking foul ball problem.  Man, it would really suck to take these kids anywhere.

Matt tells DJ that he’s gonna move to San Francisco so he can continue to have non-threatening sexual chemistry with her, which makes her even more conflicted about the Matt vs. Steve situation.  Her middle kid continues to whine about catching a foul ball but then, right after Stephanie mentions how implausible such an occurrence would be, Hunter Pence hits one right to him.  Just as he’s about to catch it, the same irate baseball fan that scowled at Stephanie earlier catches the ball and starts to tell DJ’s kid about how life is hard and you don’t get what you want most of the time, which really must be the first time that this kid has heard this kind of thing in his whole life. Actually, all of the people from the full house must be getting a real news flash right about now.

DJ’s oldest kid takes Lola up to some romantic lookout spot and talks her into letting him put his arm around her, which by 12-year-old Full House terms is like going all the way.  What a baller!

Kimmie Gibbler and Romana do some guerilla advertising for Kimmie Gibbler’s business, which gets them thrown out of the stadium.  Feeling as though the crowd hasn’t been through enough, Stephanie comes out onto the field to sing.

The irate baseball fan immediately starts booing her and I felt conflicted because his behavior seemed pretty unnecessary and yet, it sure was nice to see her get booed.  In some ways you might even call this man a hero.

The crowd turns on Stephanie’s incredibly cheap looking greenscreen performance (like, they couldn’t even position her so it looked like she was standing on the field?  They really had to put her at the bottom of the screen like that?) and then she asks them if they want her to break up with Hunter Pence, which they do.  She calls their relationship off in front of everyone and then has an emotional outburst that leads to her being escorted away by security and you’d think I’d be used to how hard these people ruin every event that they go to by now but this was kinda some next level shit.

The Kiss Cam comes on and DJ and Matt show up on it but she kisses her annoying kid instead.  Since everything that ever happens has to be about these fucking people, the camera repeatedly cuts back to DJ and Matt until she finally kisses him.  Naturally, we learn right at this moment that Steve is also at the game so he sees the whole thing.  He couldn’t even be watching it on tv.  He had to be there.

As the family leave the stadium, Hunter Pence goes up to bat again and hits a game-winning home run which of course DJ’s stupid fucking kid catches because there’s just no way that he was going to learn a lesson about unreasonable requests or not getting what you want all the time.

By the way, that’s the last we’ll see of Hunter Pence.  What an odd story they gave him.  It feels totally unresolved, but that’s really the end of it.

Back at the fuller house, Lola apologizes to Ramona for breaking the chicks before dicks rule and then she asks DJ’s oldest kid what the repercussions were for spending all of that money on Matt’s credit card but there’s not much to report.  I guess Matt wants to bang DJ bad enough that he’s willing to get ripped off by her kid.  Well, that was a great subplot.

Steve shows up and then Matt comes over about 5 seconds later.  People always arrive at the fuller house in rapid succession, and yet they never seem to see each other outside first.  Anyway, both of the guys are like what the fuck, DJ, which one of us can claim you as our rightful property?  DJ says, “this is the second time today you guys were in the same place at the same time” and I’m pretty sure that she was talking about her vagina.

DJ fumbles through a reasonable explanation of how this all came about but the two guys are too busy sizing up each other’s dicks the whole time.  Matt refers to the undeniable chemistry of their first kiss and then we get a flashback of it because it was like 2 whole episodes ago.

The only thing that could make a flashback from such a recent moment any weirder would be having the actors poorly superimposed over the scene, making comments about it.  It looks as bad as when Stephanie sang at the baseball game, and it doesn’t even make any sense or add to the story at all.  We also get a flashback of DJ and Steve at their prom, which is also pretty unnecessary but at least it didn’t JUST happen so it’s a little more appropriate.

It sort of feels like they decided to have the Steve flashback in there, which is kind of understandable, but then they wanted to balance out the sequence so they added the Matt flashback from a few episodes ago, but since it was such a recent scene, they thought that they could do something interesting with it by adding superimposed commentary from the characters but then they couldn’t think of anything clever for them to say or do so the whole thing just ended up being a big waste of time.

DJ’s finally like, I’m just trying to get back into dating for the first time after my husband’s fiery death so this is like too much bullshit to deal with and then the guys both agree to stop competing for her for like 10 seconds before they get right back into it.  They both make date plans with her and then they try to smooch her at the same time, which results in them accidentally smooching each other, which was kinda magical.  Wouldn’t it be great if Steve and Matt ended up together at the climax of all this.  Oh what a climax that would be.

Both guys go home and then Stephanie and Kimmie Gibbler come in and are like damn, everybody’s trynna stick it to you, DJ, and that’s the end.

Although all the baseball game stuff really brought out the worst of this show, what with all the “let’s ruin a public event for everyone but us” bullshit that happened, I do think that this overarching narrative is actually sort of interesting.  My natural inclination is to want DJ to end up with Steve because he’s proven to be as corny and wholesome as she is and they have a whole history together.  On the other hand, he’s also sort of desperate and creepy and Matt seems to be the more fuckable of the two, so who knows?  I’m almost a little bit interested to find out what happens.