"Defective Ballet"

"Defective Ballet"
January 11, 1983
C+

Nick LeRose soloed on this not-bad-for-Season-Eight (and not-bad-for-LeRose) episode, where Squiggy has a lookalike, a defecting Russian ballet star.  Not that the plot makes much sense even as such plots go, but it's kind of fun to see Lander in a dual role (and credited separately), and I thought Laverne and Ivan were cute together.  Also, it is interesting to see Squiggy struggle to tell Laverne thank you in the tag.

Note that when Squiggy hears that his wife is coming in, he first thinks of Lenny.  It is instead his doppelganger's wife, Viviana (Wendy Cutler, who was Mrs. Plout in '79, presumably no relation to the Sergeant), who Squiggy is happy to make out with.  Cutler posted a one-minute video from this scene in 2014 and it is still up there as of today.

Paul Willson, who's Kovitch, had appeared twice as the girls' old classmate Eraserhead.

"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.

"Death Row: Part 2"

"Death Row: Part 2"
November 23, 1982
D

Well.  This episode.

This is simultaneously worse than Part 1 and capable of more entertainment than its predecessor.  And Lenny and Squiggy are somehow the best and worst aspects of the episode.

In Nick LeRose's second of four L & S stories, Laverne and Sheba are now on Death Row and going to be executed at midnight of the following day.  They aren't allowed last phone calls because "Smith and Jones" already had their phone calls.  Luckily, sort of, Lenny and Squiggy like to visit women's prisons.  (If I recall correctly, this was actually a hobby of theirs in at least one early episode.)

Newman as a Valley Girl in '75

They are very surprised to see her and she's so happy that she tries to hug them through the bars, causing them to accidentally kiss.  (Lenny remarks, "See, I told you she was a good kisser.")  Laverne wants them to deliver a note to her father, and they're reluctant!  Squiggy fears Mr. DeFazio's violent temper and won't touch the note with a ten-foot pole.  Lenny says he's just "a six-foot Pole" so he can deliver it.  (OK, I laughed at that line.)

Still, even when the guys are sitting at Cowboy Bill's, they hesitate, so of course Mr. DeFazio gets understandably violent with Squiggy when he finally finds out.  He goes and gets a judge, who suggests running a match on the fingerprints.  Laverne is released and (Lavmine shippers take note) carried from the car all the way up to her bedroom when she's sleepy.  Why is she sleepy after almost dying?  Who knows?

At least it makes more sense than her joining in the gospel number with the black priest and the black prisoners.  Not that the song is "bad," I mean, it's well sung (except by Laverne and the monstrous Anne Ramsey, who was a nameless Lady in '79 and here plays Killer), but this isn't like the song at Frank & Edna's wedding, which worked surprisingly well.  This musical number actually made me cringe more than Laverne teaching the other inmates the "Schlimiel!  Schlimazel!" song and dance.

Screw Lavenny!  Fourteen-year-old Rebio had a new ship!

The episode ends with Lenny and Squiggy, who had raided Laverne's refrigerator and assumed she was dead even when Carmine carried her in, wondering what her still being alive will do to "the funeral."

No wonder I have much fonder memories of the Square Pegs episode that week, where Johnny's New Wave band, Open 24 Hours, debuted.

"Crime Isn't Pretty"

"Crime Isn't Pretty"
May 4, 1982
C+

For a few weeks, Joanie Loves Chachi was the Happy Days spin-off in the 8:30 Tuesday slot.  (It would return to the air for a half season in the Fall.)  When Laverne & Shirley came back, we got this episode that feels like an unconscious preview of the cast of much of Season Eight, with the girls only at the beginning and end, and Lenny completely absent, although referred to.  It's not a bad episode, and I was amused by Carmine reading Shirley's diary only to find romantic passages about himself, as well as, again, some of Squiggy's lines.  Note that Frank served in Italy in World War II, when Laverne would've been a little girl.  And Squiggy is still lusting after Rhonda, kissing her to the shock of policemen.

One of the Policemen, Bob McClurg, had an unknown role on "The Horse Show."  Alan Aidekman wrote this episode with newbie Nick LeRose, who'd do three scripts for the final season.