AshI want to start somewhere stupid. For three days now I have been stuck on whether a lasso counts as a personality.
JohnIt absolutely counts. That's the whole tragedy of Ann Perkins this week. And we haven't even gotten to her.
AshShe buys a lasso online. Online. There is no ranch. There is no horse. There's a browser tab and a decision.
JohnAnd she cuts every pair of jeans she owns into Daisy Dukes. Which you cannot undo. You can't un-cut a jean. That's a commitment to a bit.
AshSee, I read that as the saddest thing in the episode.
JohnI read it as funny first, sad about ninety seconds later. Which is how the whole show works. You laugh. Then it comes back to collect.
AshHold onto that frame. Everyone in this hour is wearing an outfit that isn't theirs.
JohnLeslie's wearing a law she hates. Tom's wearing a phone. And there's a congressman in D.C. wearing a human costume. With the human switched off.
AshYou're doing my job for me and I haven't even said welcome back.
JohnSo say it.
AshWelcome back, scriptnerd superfans. I'm Ash.
JohnI'm John. And I want this on record early. The government orders a public health expert to teach the opposite of public health. And everyone treats that as normal.
Ash"Sex Education," season five, episode four. Let's walk the whole hour. This one opens on Tom in a courtroom, actually.
JohnThe crash. He's on trial. Were you alone in the car, they ask him. He says yes. Then he tries to have the case dismissed himself, from the defendant's chair, like he wandered into the wrong role.
AshCase dismissed, plain and simple, he says, on his own behalf. The judge keeps going. Then the prosecution reads his tweets into the record.
JohnThis is my favorite bit of writing in the episode. Nine fifteen, four green lights in a row, hashtag blessed. Nine seventeen, drive faster blue Civic. Nine eighteen, gotta pass this lady. And that's the tweet where he hits the fire hydrant.
AshMid-sentence.
JohnMid-sentence. Then nine twenty, just hit a fire hydrant but I survived, hashtag unbreakable. He files a report about the crash. Airbag still inflating.
AshWhat does that tell you?
JohnThat he narrates his own life to an audience instead of living it. Ron says the exact same thing to him much later. Over a splinter.
AshHe objects to one word, too. You were texting, the prosecutor says. How dare you sir. I was tweeting, Tom says.
JohnThe platform matters more to him than his eyes on the road. He's genuinely offended by the imprecision.
AshThe judge doesn't care. One week, no screens. Phones, tablets, computers, television, all gone. Tom's counteroffer is jail.
JohnSend me to jail, please, he says, and it plays as a bit. Here's where I'd push, though. I don't think it's only a bit. A week alone with his own head scares him more than a cell would. And the episode proves him right.
AshI'll agree entirely. He gets one last tweet as the bailiff takes the phone. Press send, bailiff. And it's gone.
JohnCut to Ann in a cowboy hat. Which is how we get back to the lasso.
AshA cowboy hat from your cowboy boyfriend, someone says. And the room can't stop mangling it. Your cowboyfriend. Your boycow. Just call him Ricky.
JohnThe garble is the joke. It's also a warning shot. Nobody can figure out what to call this version of Ann. She has no stable name yet. She put on a costume and the language falls apart trying to describe her.
AshYou're reaching. I like the reach.
JohnI contain reaches.
AshNow Leslie comes in with the A-plot. Great news, everyone. Lots of old people have chlamydia.
JohnDelivered like a grant just cleared. Whoo. Fist in the air. She's thrilled.
AshSeniors in Pawnee have time on their hands, she says. And what they're doing with it is going at it hard, old people style. A lot never had proper sex education. So STDs are having a field day.
JohnIt's amazing what a few old guys can do with a little charm and a lot of crabs. Four sentences, no embarrassment in any of them. That's the tell for the whole episode. Leslie's the only one who can talk about sex like it's a spreadsheet. And she's about to get punished for exactly that.
JohnPunished how?
AshWe'll get there. Sex avengers, she calls the team. These old fogies are set in their ways, hopped up on E.D. medication, nothing to lose. Also seniors can be pretty ornery. Actually, someone corrects, I think it's pronounced horny.
JohnSmall joke, big thesis. The whole town keeps mishearing repression as decorum. Ornery, horny. One letter. Pawnee would rather say the wrong one.
AshThen the prep. Let's pretend we're old people and ask Ann our grossest questions, Leslie says. I'll start. I'm an old lady. Why do I need birth control? Haven't had my monthly since LBJ was president.
JohnAnd Ann answers it completely straight. With the elderly we're not concerned with pregnancy, we're concerned with disease.
AshShe's the only one in that room bringing data. The show sets that up early. It'll strip her platform later. It wants you to feel it go.
JohnThen the questions rot fast. Do pubic hairs get longer as you age, because that's happening to me, what do I do. Where can I get lube that's healthy to eat.
AshA man says he ran over his testicles with his Jazzy scooter and asks to jump on the caboose. Choo choo.
JohnAnd Ann holds the line. Never eat lube, see a doctor, and sir, you have to be under forty to ride this train. She turns every innuendo back into medicine. That's a job. Everyone else is doing a bit.
AshI called that a prep scene. You'd call it what?
JohnA bit that doubles as prep. And the difference matters. The show never lets a scene be one thing. It's prep for the class. It's also four coworkers being disgusting on the clock. The episode won't choose.
AshFair. Now the class itself. Folding chairs, Leslie up front. How many of you are sexually active?
JohnI have two partners, one woman says, often at the same time. Leslie says thank you and moves on. She never flinches.
AshAnd the best two lines in the plot, off to the side. Tom leans to Chris. Are these old people really having sex with each other? What did you think they were doing, Chris says. I thought we were just talking about it, says Tom.
JohnThe whole misunderstanding of the episode, out of the two least equipped men in it. Tom's got seniors filed as a category. And what does that category allow? It leaves out desire entirely.
AshSomeone asks what happens if the banana is soft and mushy and doglegs sharply left. Leslie takes that one straight too.
JohnAnd Jerry gets shredded for going to AltaVista and typing please go to Yahoo dot com. You don't have your email bookmarked, someone yells. What's bookmarks, Jerry says. God, Jerry, you don't deserve the internet.
AshNice rhyme with the Tom plot, honestly. One man can't stop being online. One man can't get online at all. The show finds both equally ridiculous.
JohnThen Ann demos protection, states the risk plainly. And that's the exact second Marcia and Marshall Langman walk in.
AshThe town's morality watchdogs, in the show's own voiceover. Marcia motivated, calculating, hyper-vigilant. Her husband Marshall is, quote, vivacious. Hell of a word. His one job is shutting down a sex-ed class for retirees.
JohnThis, that's happening here, is not allowed, Marcia says. We at the Society for Family Stability Foundation object to this smut. It's against Pawnee's abstinence-only law.
AshLeslie's first move is reasonable. That's only for schools, she says.
JohnAnd Chris corrects her instantly. Actually it's not, the bill prohibits any government employee from teaching anything but abstinence, city-wide. Thank you, Chris. You're welcome.
AshOne sentence from the department fact-checker and the class is dead, condom still in her hand. And I want to sit on how that works. It drives the entire plot. Nobody out-argued Leslie's expertise. It got outvoted, in an election it was never allowed into.
JohnHere's where I want to actually disagree. I know where you're heading. You want to make this the tyranny of the eighty-five percent, a majority compelling a public employee to certify a falsehood. And that's in there. But you're skipping the part that makes it play as television. Nobody in the room believes the law either. Marcia does. Everyone else is scared of Marcia's voters. So it isn't a clean fight between the expert and the mob. It's a fight between the expert and people who agree with her privately and vote against her in public. The mob is mostly cowardice in a trench coat. Chris knows the science. Ron voted for her. Even the mayor's office that censures her almost certainly wears condoms at home. Not one of them believes a word. They're a chain of scared employees passing a law none of them would defend at their own dinner tables. Bleaker than a dumb electorate.
AshThat's better than what I had. I'll take it.
JohnGood. You were about to get abstract on me.
AshI was about to get abstract on you. The task force meeting is where that private agreement goes on camera, though. Ann lays out the science. Objective studies show abstinence-only doesn't work. People still have sex, they don't know how to use protection, the disease spreads.
JohnAnd Leslie's reply is the tell. Ann Perkins, your expertise is thrilling and frankly almost arousing, but the law is the law. She agrees with every word. She does nothing.
AshYou're on city council, Ann says. Change the law. And Leslie's answer explains the whole hour. Eighty-five percent of Pawnee supports abstinence-only. I couldn't fight those numbers if I wanted to. It's political suicide.
JohnSo we're just gonna do the thing we know doesn't work, Ann says. Great plan. And there's no counter. There's no other option, Ann, Leslie says. The scene dies right there.
AshThat's the part that gets under my skin. It isn't cowardice. It's a woman who built her whole identity on competence agreeing to be professionally incompetent on purpose, because the alternative costs her the seat. The eighty-five percent isn't a fact about biology. It's a fact about what a room of voters will sit still to hear. The whole department reorganizes around that number instead of around what stops an infection. The law doesn't need to be true. It doesn't even need anyone to believe it. It just needs enough votes to make refusing it expensive. Ann's on the record that it fails. Leslie agrees off the record. The policy survives both of them. And the cruelty is that Leslie is the most qualified person in the county to run that class. The system doesn't ignore her expertise by accident. It removes it by design. The expertise is the thing the eighty-five percent voted against.
JohnWhoever holds the poll numbers decides what comes out of the expert's mouth. And it isn't the expert.
AshNow the class limps on under the new rules, and Marshall gets his own segment. Walk it slow, because the whiplash is the joke.
JohnPerd, we strongly believe in teaching and practicing abstinence, Leslie reads off the script. We all have crazy urges, but you can't act on them. Bury them way down deep. Get out of here you crazy urges, you are not welcome in this brain of mine.
AshThen her statistics, which are, quote, numbers. Eighty-five percent support abstinence-only, and the other fifteen percent are perverts, J-K you guys.
JohnAnd Perd coins perd-verts, for fans of the show, because his name is Perd. A man who's confused broadcasting with existing.
AshThen Marshall raps. Actual rap. I'm Marshall Langman and I'm here to say, sex outside marriage is never the way. I waited till marriage and then some to do it, if you decide to sin you'll rue it.
JohnWord, Perd says, and claps along.
AshWord.
JohnA piece of local media applauding a rhymed threat about premarital sin, right after a statistics segment. And nobody in frame registers the collision.
AshMarshall gets a return trip to the seniors, still preaching. One woman tells him flat she's not taking sex advice from a man ten years her junior.
JohnAmen, Gladys, someone says. And Marshall goes, you're right. Not about the age thing, about the other thing. A man conceding a point purely to keep talking. He never defends the age gap. Just slides back to the sermon.
AshThen he reads from the pamphlet, and this is the line to sit on. Our bodies are God's gift, he reads, but they're also the devil's playground. The devil likes to hide in all your private nooks and crannies, and if you open too wide, he might get out, or in.
JohnThere's no medicine in it. There's barely any religion. It reads like a warning label off a carnival ride, printed on official abstinence letterhead.
AshAnd that's what gets me about the pamphlet as an object. Leslie's real numbers about disease and prevention got carried out of the room the second Marcia said the word law. And what replaced it? Silence would have been mercy. Instead, a document describing the human body as demon-infested real estate, printed with the same civic authority her condom demo had ninety seconds earlier. The state didn't go quiet about sex. It swapped which fiction it would put its seal on.
JohnAnd a senior cuts through it. Can we see the condom demonstration again, she says, because I don't know where Lou has been. What is that? The audience of the fiction telling the fiction, out loud, that it isn't working.
AshAnd Leslie caves, mid-class. Screw it, she says. Okay, this is a penis. You put a condom on it. You pull the tip. You roll it down. Condoms for everybody. Safe sex for everybody.
JohnShe breaks the law she was reciting thirty seconds ago, on camera, in front of both Langmans. That's the second government employee this hour to say the quiet part where they can be punished for it.
AshAnd it costs her fast. A censure from the mayor's office. Tom delivers the news, admiring the paper. It's so official, look at the quality, this is no joke.
JohnLeslie's own read on it, to Ron, is the most honest thing she says all hour. I know I'm supposed to help educate the public, but I also have an obligation to uphold the laws.
AshAnd Ron flips the whole dynamic in one line. Actually Leslie, you're my boss now. That's right. Why am I still weirdly scared of you, she asks. I'm very confident and I make a lot of eye contact, he says. Dead flat.
JohnAs her city manager he tells her to apologize and stick to the letter of the law. Then, off the record, as her best friend, he admires what she did. Says it made him happy he voted for her.
AshTwo contradictory instructions out of one man in one breath, both completely sincere. That's Ron's entire function on this show. Official caution, stacked right on top of private approval. He sees no contradiction. For him there isn't one.
JohnPerd hands her the apology segment. And here's a take I want to plant a flag on. I think the seniors are the least repressed people in this whole episode.
AshMake the case. On its face that's a strange thing to say about people who just got lectured by a man doing a rap.
JohnLook at who's actually holding something back. The seniors ask blunt, filthy questions with zero shame. When the demo gets pulled, they say so, right away. Now put that next to Leslie reciting a script she knows is false. Or Ann, all the data and no platform. Or Marshall, who needs a pamphlet about demons in your crannies just to say the word body. Everyone at the podium is performing. Only the folks in the folding chairs are telling the truth.
AshLet me take the other side for a round. I think you're romanticizing an outbreak. This class only exists because these seniors were having unprotected sex without real information. That isn't liberation. It's a hole in the system. Showed up as chlamydia.
JohnSure, but the hole isn't in their appetite. Nobody's arguing the seniors should want less. The hole is upstream, in what the state was ever willing to teach them.
AshFine, but does that rescue the inversion? Uninformed enthusiasm isn't freedom from repression. It might just be repression with worse medical outcomes.
JohnI'll grant the outcomes are bad. I still think they're less repressed than anyone at that podium. None of them are performing a belief they don't hold. Leslie is. Marshall might not even be, honestly. Hard to tell with him.
AshWe can leave that one sitting there. Neither of us wins it, which is probably right. Now Tom's plot, which mirrors Leslie's. A state punishment that exposes something much bigger than the crime.
JohnHe's an hour and a half late to work, first thing. Can't use GPS. Drove in circles until something looked familiar. He lives three miles away.
AshI built a real-life Pinterest board, he tells Ann. I really wish you could click those.
JohnA cork board standing in for an app. Funniest possible object for withdrawal to produce. And it's a real attempt. Built by hand. Missing the one function that made the original worth anything.
AshHe makes a paper iPhone too, and it's just not the same, he says, staring at it. This is the work of a lunatic, Ron says, and decides on a detox.
JohnHe takes him to the cabin. So far from civilization, Ron says, the electric company doesn't know there's a structure there. That's Ron's paradise. It's Tom's hell. Same sentence.
AshAt the cabin, Tom's chopping wood, badly. You're a regular Paul Bunyan, Ron says. Then Tom gets a splinter. Pure reflex. I need to get on WebMD now, he says. I need an iPhone or a Samsung Galaxy, something with 4G, there's no time for the edge network.
JohnRon tackles him away from an imaginary signal over a splinter. And this is where the crash from the cold open finally means something. We've watched him meet a green light, a fire hydrant, and now a splinter, all the exact same way. Everything that happens to him is an input to be posted.
AshRon tries an actual technique. Purge all this garbage from your system, he says. Talk about everything you do on those screens. Let the words float into the fresh air. Then we're done.
JohnWorth a shot, Tom says, and delivers the densest monologue in the episode. Every day I start with Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, Instagram. Sometimes I throw in LinkedIn, for the professional shorties. Then Reddit, because it has all the important links.
AshRon interrupts to ask about his shirt. And Tom picks the list right back up, unbroken. Wikipedia, mankind's greatest invention. A page on Ray J leads to Brandy's brother, then Snoop Dogg's cousin, then a Tim Burton movie. Suddenly you're on the Mars Attacks page.
JohnThen GChat, where he messages a Brad Pitt who turns out to be a teacher named Brad in Pittsburgh. Then a whole defense of emoji as a pictographic language, with an aside about which cartoon faces read as racist. Then podcasts. Then his own podcast. Nacho Average Podcast, rating nachos with Jean-Ralphio.
AshAnd Ron cuts him off. That's enough. You told me to get it all out, Tom protests. And Ron's answer is joke and diagnosis at once. I had no idea how much you had in your system.
JohnNow, I know you love this monologue. I want to slow you down so you don't canonize it. There are two readings and only one is actually in the show. The generous one is what you're about to say. The list is an X-ray of where Tom's self lives. The platforms replaced the story he used to tell about his own life. That's genuinely there. But the cheap reading sits right next to it. It's just a joke about a shallow guy who likes Twitter too much. The episode flirts with both. I won't pretend it fully commits to the deep one.
AshSo what wins it for me?
JohnTell me.
AshThe order. He runs those apps the way you'd recite a route you've walked a thousand times. He never hesitates. Each stop cues the next. That fluency usually belongs to a prayer, or a childhood address, or a parent's old phone number. Here it belongs to a list of platforms.
JohnOkay, the fluency point I'll give you. That's real. His job gets none of that detail. A single human being in his life gets none of that detail. He saves it all for the feeds.
AshSo when Ron takes the phone, he isn't removing a habit.
JohnHe's removing the thing Tom uses to know who he is. Fine, you got me there.
AshThat sets up the diagnosis a scene later. This is a real problem, Tom, Ron says. You are an addict and you need to change. And Tom takes it with zero resistance. You're right. I am an addict. I've hurt all my friends and family. I will accept this gift of rehabilitation.
JohnAnd then Ron immediately retreats from the moment he just made. I'm proud of you, he says, but also a bit fearful we're verging on feelings territory. So let's stare at the fire in silence.
AshA man who can name someone else's addiction cleanly and cannot survive one sentence inside the aftermath.
JohnTom relapses almost instantly. Says he's had a breakthrough. Offers to chop more wood if Ron takes the car for victory steaks. And he drives straight to Best Buy. Yes, I went to Best Buy and bought a phone, he tells the camera, shameless about it.
AshOut of the car now, Ron says, catching him. And Tom doesn't hide it. Where are we going, are we walking to Best Buy to get a better phone? Caught mid-relapse, he proposes escalating it.
JohnAnd it does escalate, into the crash again. He's driving Ron's car and tweeting. A deer jumps in front of the car, then a bear jumps in front of the deer, and he wrecks it. Same crime that put him on trial. Now against Ron's own vehicle.
AshAnd that's where Ron finally asks the real question, standing at the wreck. Why do you need to be constantly distracted, Tom?
JohnAnd Tom answers with no bit attached. Rare for him. I spend a lot of time looking at screens because recently a lot of the stuff in my real life isn't going that great. So I'd rather play Doodle Jump than think about that.
AshThat's the floor the whole plot was falling toward. It was never about Twitter. He built himself out of feeds because the unmediated parts of his life feel too bad to look at head-on. Take the phone and you don't get a sober Tom. You get a man standing in front of the reality he was avoiding. Nothing left in between.
JohnRon sends him to the office to consider whether to report him. Go sit there, he says, and neither doodle nor jump. Great line. And quietly the meanest thing in the episode. He's telling Tom to do the one thing Tom just spent a week proving he can't do.
AshWhich is?
JohnSit still.
AshRon doesn't turn him in. Gives him a paper book instead. A 1982 auto repair manual, cover to cover. And has him help fix the car he wrecked. Plus two rules for when he gets the phone back. Don't stare at it during a conversation. Look a man in the eye when you speak to him.
JohnAnd the third thing closes a loop across the whole hour. If you ever need to discuss your problems with someone, find Leslie. She lives for that crap.
AshWhich hands Tom to the one character who's been eating the cost of telling people uncomfortable truths all episode. Ron solves it by outsourcing the feelings. Straight to the town's designated feeler.
JohnWhy the manual though? Ron already had the judge's screen ban doing the work.
AshBecause it's the only object Ron owns that forces a person to finish something slowly. Page by page. Hands dirty. No feed to bail into halfway through. The manual was never about cars. It's about not being allowed to skip to the end.
JohnBetter answer than I had. I was going to say it's just the funniest object in the cabin.
AshIt's that too.
JohnIt's mostly that.
AshNow D.C., which is the thinnest plot in the episode on purpose. Ben, April, and Congressman Murray.
JohnThey introduce Ben to Murray. The introduction is the whole joke. Wow, there he is, April says, like she's pointing at a landmark. Barack Obama. His name is Congressman David Murray, he's our boss, and he's white.
AshThat last clause does nothing for the sentence and everything for the joke. Same flat weight as the name. Same flat weight as the title. Like it's a fact of equal importance.
JohnAnd Murray gets introduced through inaction. He hasn't said a word yet. Ben and April watch him through the window, sitting perfectly still, staring straight ahead, doing nothing.
AshHe's a robot, April says. He's not a robot, Ben tells her, he's just thinking, he's got a lot on his mind.
JohnLike what, one one zero one, must eat babies for fuel, April says. And then she questions her own bit. Why would a robot need to consume organic matter? Sorry. She fact-checks her own joke against robot lore. In real time.
AshAnd when Murray does activate, he delivers the identical line twice, word for word, to two people in two scenes. Stay cool, it's a hot one out there today. Both times an aide reflects it right back. You could practically cook an egg on the sidewalk. Thank you, congressman. Word for word.
JohnSo is that even a conversation?
AshCalling it one is generous. It's a fixed broadcast getting rebroadcast by whoever's standing nearest. Ben clocks it too, asks an aide directly, does he seem a little robotic. And the aide just confirms it. He turns it on when he has to, the aide says, and when he doesn't he just sits there, never a surprise. It's perfect.
JohnPerfect is the aide's actual word. Skips right past competent, skips right past effective, settles on perfect, meaning nothing unscripted ever escapes the room.
AshAnd April's assassination joke lands twice for a reason. Hey, we're still gonna assassinate him, right, dead deadpan, both times. Ben shuts it down both times. Don't say that. It isn't about violence. Nobody in that office can produce one convincing argument for why Murray specifically, over any interchangeable congressman-shaped object, needs to keep occupying that chair.
JohnHe gets a satellite-feed test later, runs his stump speech on command. We've gone through difficult times, but we're from Ohio, we're tough, we won't just survive these dark times, we will thrive. And the review he gets is, cool beans.
AshCool beans. That's the entire critical response to a politician's moral vision. And April watches it and says, God I love him, he's the best. Genuine affection. She means every word of it.
JohnWorth a comparison the show sets up itself. Earlier this season there's the McCain cameo in the coat closet. McCain reacts. He gets insulted to his face and walks off as a real person treated rudely. Murray never gets that. A real politician would produce a reaction. This one produces a loop.
AshSo which is the more honest picture of the office?
JohnThe furniture. A real senator behaving like a person is the cameo. A fictional congressman behaving like a chair is the accurate read. Fiction gets to be that blunt where a real senator never could.
AshThat's the verdict. Back to Pawnee. There's a fight between Ann and Leslie I skipped. It earns its beat.
JohnRight, the fight that leads into the apology. Ann calls the abstinence stance crazy, Leslie snaps, and it turns personal fast. You're not acting like yourself, Ann says. Really, Leslie says, you want to go there?
AshAnd Leslie lists it out. When you dated Andy you dressed in flannel. When you dated Chris you dressed in spandex. Ann, do not lecture me about acting like myself. And it lands. Ann just goes, God, I'm off my comeback game right now.
JohnGreat fight. Both of them are right. And both are wearing someone else's clothes while they have it. Leslie in the abstinence-girl costume of a law she hates. Ann in the cowboy costume of a man she's about to dump.
AshAnd Ann's the one who does something about it. She breaks up with Ricky. Tells Leslie she lost herself in the relationship. The lasso, the Daisy Dukes, all of it. My personality kinda gets swept up in whatever guy I'm dating, she says, and I want to change that.
JohnAnd that's the one thread all hour where somebody changes something without a law forcing it. No censure, no judge, no eighty-five percent. She just says the ugly thing out loud, about herself. And walks away from it while the episode's still running.
AshWhich answers the thing the episode keeps circling. Everyone in Pawnee this week is performing an identity handed to them from outside. Leslie, a law she doesn't believe. Murray, a stump speech on cue. Tom, a feed-based self that vanishes with the feed. And Ann's the only one who catches her own performance and quits it.
JohnIn this season that's not nothing. Mostly people get forced into performances they didn't pick. She picked hers. Then she un-picked it. Practically heroic by the standards of this hour.
AshNow Leslie's last real beat. Perd, I'd like to apologize, she says, on air. And everyone assumes it's the mandated apology for the condom stunt.
JohnIt isn't. Apologize for the antiquated laws in this city, she says instead. States that teach abstinence-only have the highest rates of teen pregnancy and STDs. To continue this policy? Insane, she says.
AshWe all want the same thing, she says. Fewer unwanted pregnancies. Fewer STDs. Why don't we use every weapon we have? I know most of you don't agree with me, but I'm going to fight very hard to change your minds. Until then, I'll take this censure and wear it proudly, like a badge of honor.
JohnAnd Perd undercuts every word. Strong words, he notes. From a woman literally trying to pin a piece of paper to her own blazer as she says them.
AshThat deflation is the method. Real speech, sight gag, same breath. The show never lets the sincerity sit alone without a joke next to it. Which is why it works and doesn't feel like a lecture.
JohnAnd the button is her getting called Loose-ly Grope in the Pawnee Sun. She doesn't care. I'm gonna go drink a thousand Red Bulls and draft a bill to undo abstinence-only, she says. Man, you are just a machine, someone tells her. Get stuff done.
AshSame word the aide used for Murray. Machine. Call Leslie a machine and it's a compliment about how hard she works. Call Murray a machine and it's an admission that nothing human is left running in there. One word, two very different jobs, across one episode.
JohnThat's a good catch. I didn't have that. One personal thing on the way out, since we're near the end. Tom's cork board got me somewhere specific.
AshGo.
JohnI did the exact same thing once. Corkboard of magazine clippings, after I quit a job that had me on a laptop fourteen hours a day. I stood in front of it a week later feeling as stupid as Tom looks. Genuinely wishing the photos would open into something when I touched them.
AshDid it help? The board.
JohnIt did nothing for me. Took it down after nine days and bought a new laptop. Slower relapse than Tom's. Same exact shape. I get the guy.
AshIf the long history of the auto repair manual reveals one thing, it is that we have more questions than we have answers.
JohnLike why the manual and not just the ban, which we already chewed. Or why Ron owns a 1982 auto repair manual in a cabin the electric company doesn't know exists. That man is prepared for a very specific apocalypse.
AshThat's the discourse for this one, scriptnerd superfans. Leslie gets a censure and wears it like a medal. Tom gets a car crash, a cabin, and a repair manual he probably won't finish. Ann gets her personality back with time to spare. And Congressman Murray, bless his perfectly maintained circuitry, stays cool. Because it's a hot one out there today.
JohnWe hope you've enjoyed the discourse. Until next week, scriptnerd superfans.