"The Rock and Roll Show"

This isn't helping Laverne's ulcer.

"The Rock and Roll Show"
January 25, 1983
C+

Maybe I'm so beaten down by Season Eight that I sort of liked this episode, even if there's something a little heart-breaking about an episode with this title not only missing Michael McKean but with Lander soloing in the opening credits.  (And Squiggy isn't even in it that much.)

In Jill Gordon's third and final L & S story, Laverne encourages Chuck to pursue music because of his harmonica skills.  (Fleischer's harmonica had perked up a dreary final-season Welcome Back, Kotter episode four years earlier.)  He recruits a bunch of science geeks from work, played by Jack Mack and the Heart Attack, and it's up to briefly Carmine but mostly Laverne to teach these nerds how to rock out.  That they achieve only at best a sort of Huey Lewis and the Far from Headline News isn't her fault.  And don't get me started on the stadium audience that looks like it's from 1957 rather than '67.

Promoter Bob Perlow had written three episodes but this is his only onscreen appearance on L & S.  Former writer Chris Thompson does his only directing gig on the series, here in the post-Bosom-Buddies phase of his career.  Note that IMDB claims that "Weird Al" Yankovic is uncredited as the keyboard player, but I don't buy it, especially since the keyboardist looks too tall and not really anything like WAY would look in the "Ricky" video from later that year.

"The Monastery Show"

"The Monastery Show"
 January 4, 1983
D-

Damn.  This episode.

Deep breath, I'll try to unpack this without going into great detail.  (I don't know if I can sit through it again for actual quotes.)  The episode begins with Laverne going to Confession for the first time in fifteen years, which is nonsense.  Are we supposed to believe she hasn't gone since she was 13 or 14?*  Without Frank noticing?  What about the time she was going to have a church wedding to Sal Molina and it was Lenny who hadn't been to Confession in three years?

Wait, forget continuity.  Let us talk about the Queen of Flanderization.  Laverne has run to church from the pier, in a torn outfit, after waking up on an aircraft carrier, which was after getting blackout drunk.  And all the sailors saluted her and said, "Oh, Baby!" as she left.  If this was "consensual," this goes well beyond her kissing 2000 sailors goodbye when Bobby Feeney shipped out.  And if it wasn't consensual, oh God!

No one in the entire episode, which admittedly includes a lot of nuns who have taken a vow of silence, ever suggests that maybe, perhaps Laverne is a victim of gang rape.  Instead it's a question of whether she's a "good girl" who made a mistake or an irredeemable "bad girl."  Laverne herself wants redemption, so, on the priest's advice, she checks into a convent.  (Not a monastery, which would be an even stranger episode.)

The nuns play football (offscreen), some of them roller-skate and sing (the St. Andrews Sisters, ha ha, no, that's really a joke in the script by people I'm not going to let get away with just a parenthetical mention), and they all do pottery.  But they mostly don't talk, except when the plot calls for it.  Laverne, who somewhere took on the trait of klutziness**, makes a shambles of things of course, including when she decides to turn bell-ringing into an excuse to do a Quasimodo imitation (comedy gold, I'm tellin' ya) to the tune of "Frere Jacques," causing the far too obedient nuns to randomly wash, eat, sleep, and make pottery.

I mostly watched with my jaw dropped, but when Sister Margaret (Louise Lasser, post-Mary-Hartman and even post-Alex's-wife-on-Taxi) got a spotlight for her speech to Laverne, and then Laverne got one for her speech to God, I snapped, "What is this, Our Town?"***

Mother Superior Fran Ryan was on a lot of shows, but is probably best known as Arnold the Pig's "mother" on Green Acres.  That series looks like Shakespeare compared to this episode, with its story by Ken Sagoes (first of two), Nick LeRose (who also co-wrote "Death Row: Part 2"), and teleplay by Jill Gordon (middle of three) and Ed Solomon (last of three).  Ken, Nick, Jill, and Ed, I'm sure you're not bad people.  You're just good people who wrote something really bad.  And Brother Garry, thanks for taking time out of your busy schedule to direct your kid sister's humiliation.


*On the Adam West episode, she was suddenly 28 again, although she must be 29 by now.

**Remember in Season One when Shirley was Klutzy, while Laverne was Gutsy and their future nun friend Anne Marie was Nutsy?

***For the record, I've never seen a production of Our Town, but throwing in this bit of staginess somehow took me even further out of the episode.

"Of Mice and Men"

Chemistry?

"Of Mice and Men"
December 7, 1982
C-

I almost went with a C for this episode about Laverne's new boyfriend, "Wheezer" (28-year-old Jim Belushi, several months after his big brother John, and Penny's old friend, died) but I have issues with it, and I think there is some sloppy writing.  Susan Jane Lindner (who'd do the final episode) and Jack Lukes (who'd also write one more) came up with the story, while Jill Gordon (who'd do two more) and Ed Solomon (on his middle of three) did the teleplay.  I'm not sure who's to blame among these relatively inexperienced L & S writers, but why, for instance, are we introduced to Carmine's girlfriend Suzi and not told anything about her?  Is this the woman he conveniently fell in love with while Shirley was getting engaged to Walter, or has he already moved on?  She has a few lines, but she's basically a prop, since they needed Carmine and Laverne to be on a double date.  If Carol Kane can give 150% to a fortune-teller role, why couldn't they get someone to at least offer something besides bland good looks?  And not to pick on poor Delyse Lively, but the series had had a lot of recognizable stars on recently, so why not bring back Carrie Fisher and at least give Laverne a female sounding board again?  (Even Rhonda is absent this time.)

So let's pick on poor Jim Belushi instead.  By this point, he was already the veteran of two failed sitcoms.  (One of them, Who's Watching the Kids?, was Garry Marshall's reworked version of Blansky's Beauties, still with Scott Baio and Lynda Goodfriend.)  He knows how to act in this world, but unfortunately he's been saddled with two insurmountable problems.  One is, his character is a "wimp"* and is ashamed of being a wimp.  Even when Laverne tells him she likes him for his other qualities, he doesn't believe her.  And frankly, neither do I. 

Don't even ask me what the other two guys represent.

I suppose it's not Belushi's fault, or Penny M's since she's certainly trying hard, but there is no chemistry between Wheezer and Laverne.  (Sorry Wheezerne shippers, I call 'em as I see 'em.)  I could more easily believe that Laverne wants to make out with just-friend coworker Chuck.  I can buy Wheezer as Laverne's not particularly close buddy but that's about all.  And it's not about looks, because he's probably about equally as attractive as Jay Leno, and I bought that Laverne would put on a Southern belle act for Joey.

And then, I don't know if this is sloppy writing or just the series' ambiguous attitude towards Lavmine, but Wheezer has a dream where he not only is an extreme wimp, but he has to fight for Laverne against Carmine.  And this plays out as an Apache dance, so Laverne's own boyfriend ships them sadomasochisticly!  Season Eight, sigh.  (I know, I know, it's just an excuse for Penny and Eddie to dance together, but couldn't they have found another pretext?)

Murphy Dunne has his third and final L & S role, as Gonzague.  Director Paul Sills has almost no other IMDB credits.


*I'm willing to bet cash money that "wimp" was not in wide popular usage in the 1960s, certainly not on the level it was in the '80s, when it was applied to a wide range of men from Woody Allen to Alan Alda to George Bush, Sr.  Merriam-Wesbster Online claims it was first used in the 1920s, but I don't even recall it in the '70s.  Yes, there was Wimpy in the Popeye cartoons of the '30s and later, but he wasn't really "wimpy" in a modern sense.