Desperate Housewives Episode Recap: "Kids Ain't Like Everybody Else"

• Oct 13, 2008 04:36 AM ET
• by Mickey O'Connor

Edie's new husband, Dave Williams, is a bully, and Sunday's episode of Desperate Housewives revealed more of his subversive tactics, this time aimed at the ever-squabbling Scavos. Mary Alice's ghostly voiceover told us that bullies can be found all over – not just on the playground, and boy, was she right! Check out this list of Wisteria Lane bullies, and note that only one of them is under the age of 18. (Yes, Juanita Solis!)

Danielle Katz (née Van de Kamp)  Little Benjamin Katz (né Hodge) is no longer invisible — hooray! He's now 6, and calls his mother "Danielle" and Bree "Granny" (heh). As we saw last week, Bree and Orson have really missed Invisible Benji, so they've extended a series of olive branches toward Bree's combative daughter to facilitate some visiting time with him.

Danielle is a hippie now (OK…), as evidenced by her "delightfully ethnic ensemble" and her husband, Leo, who is an environmental lawyer. They're home-schooling Benji and raising him vegetarian. Also, when he's 13, he'll have a bar mitzvah. Needless to say, most of this new information rubs the starchy Bree the wrong way, as Benji was once her invisible baby, and she would have raised him differently.

Naturally, sabotage ensues, as mother and daughter use their differing personal choices against each other. Bree shows Benji an old photo of his mother eating a hot dog, piquing his curiosity, and gets him hooked on the ol' tube steak. His tofu-weaned system is not ready for hot dogs, though, and the poor kid blows chunks all over Bree and Orson's dinner party.

Though the Bree-Danielle sparring was pretty predictable stuff based on their history, Orson's reaction took me by surprise. It was fun to see him play "grandpa" to Benji, and it's clear he missed the little bugger and has a lot of guilt about abandoning him when he went off to the slammer. He expressed that guilt by blaming Bree for losing Benji, which I thought seemed a little severe, and for ruining their visit with him, which I thought seemed exactly accurate. After last week's episode, in which Orson felt abandoned by Bree and her burgeoning career, Orson is verging back into the sad-sack territory he was in at the end of last season when Bree threw him out. Which bums me out, because Kyle MacLachlan is infinitely more watchable as a lovably out-of-touch yuppie (remember his "sexy" talk with Bree when Susan caught him sleepwalking naked?) than as a menacing, shadowy force of evil.

Juanita Solis  Holy crap, how impossibly adorable is Mason Vale Cotton, the little nugget they've cast to play M.J. Delfino? M.J. is getting picked on at the park, and while this isn't exactly new TV territory, I think the thoroughly modern parenting trio of Susan, Mike and Jackson has some fun with this scene. Mike thinks it's time for 5-year-old M.J. to learn how to fight (really?); Jackson suggests Brazilian capoeira, which Mike likens to "jazz hands" — oh, you two, and your crazy bromance!

When they discover that M.J.'s tormentor is the plump terror Juanita Solis, Susan asks Mike to turn M.J. into "a killing machine." "Show him one of those kung fu cha cha things," says Susan, clearly demonstrating that someone isn't reading my Dancing with the Stars recaps. But Mike backs off, and Jackson agrees: No hitting girls, they say.

So Susan gives M.J. a rape whistle, which is a terrible idea for a 5-year-old, isn't it? When Susan catches Juanita playing "Godzilla of the sandbox," she decides to show her how it feels to be bullied, and pushes her down. Gaby sees this, of course, and then the two mothers go tete-a-tete, proving that the children of Wisteria Lane are often more mature than their parents. Susan calls Juanita fat; Gaby calls M.J. a girl. Nice. And then… catfight! "And they call me white trash," Edie mumbles as she drives by and witnesses the girl-on-girl action.

Ultimately, Gaby and Susan make up over a bottle of vodka with a self-congratulatory chat in which they tell each other what great mothers they are. Which is meant to make us laugh a little, especially when Gaby's kids whine from the kitchen that they're hungry and a soused Gaby directs them to the frozen waffles and asks them to "bring Mommy more ice." Very funny.

Andrew Van de Kamp This week's stop on the Solis' continuing tour toward downward mobility, Gaby has to sell her convertible. "This car is the last thing that I own that tells the world, 'I'm better than you.'" Gaby says, and she's serious. Once Carlos convinces Gaby to allow a very posh Indian couple to buy her car, they go look at Andrew Van de Kamp's very used car. "Full disclosure — it's a piece of crap," says Andrew, but the Solises need something to get from point A to point B, so they buy it anyway.

For some reason, once it breaks down, despite Andrew's honesty, Gaby wants Andrew to pay $300 for a new radiator. In my view, it's not his responsibility, but I think the writers needed Gaby to get her groove back this week or whatever, not be a victim. So just when Evil Andrew was starting to reappear (oh, how I've missed him!), Gaby gave him kind of a lame smackdown that involved threatening to hit his car with her uninsured one. Um, OK, you go, girl?

Karen McCluskey  As I said last week, I think Katherine and Mrs. M. teaming up to spy on Dave is pretty genius. Dana Delany and Kathryn Joosten are among the ensemble's most talented players, and I enjoyed watching their charming bumbling. But Katherine isn't so convinced about Mrs. M's hunch that Dave is e-vil; she likes him. "Is that supposed to comfort me, given your track record with men?" McCluskey asks.

At Bree's dinner party, Edie joins Team McCluskey by questioning Dave about his background because she's all: Hey! It's kind of weird that I married this guy and don't know anything about him. Also: He's all yellow; that's weird, right? When Edie, Karen and Katherine press Dave to reveal where he went to college, he finally admits that he didn't go to college, which is embarrassing to him. When he confronts Edie about it later, she concedes that it was all Mrs. M.'s fault. This new information leads Dave in a weird direction, in which he tells Edie that he thinks Mrs. M. is in the preliminary stages of dementia. An interesting seed to plant at this stage; we'll see how that develops.

Dave Williams  Until Dave can render Mrs. M. totally insane, though, he's biding his time by… starting a garage band with Tom Scavo? I love this storyline, mostly because of late, Tom Scavo has become my favorite character on this show, and I love when the Desperate Househusbands act like children. Why should the ladies have all the regressive fun? I was kind of sad for Tom when Lynette systematically tore down every one of his life's hopes and dreams, symbolized as they were by a pile of discarded items in the garage.

Yes, Tom is having a midlife crisis, and who's there to comfort him? Yellow Satan, who apparently is also not so bad on the skins! (I thought The Devil played the fiddle, but never mind.) Yellow wants to jam, but Tom's nag of a wife is making him clean the garage. "Give me a couple of hours; I've got to stash these old Playboys," Tom says, gleeful at the possibility of "gigs" — and a new friend with a 64-inch flat-screen. Dave looks like something out of Wizard of Oz on that bike with the wide-set handlebars, doesn't he?

When Lynette sees the garage-band writing on the wall, she decides to take matters into her daughter Penny's hands. By proxy, she stages a tableau of carelessness that fingers Penny when Tom accidentally runs over his bass pulling into the garage. And Lynette says nothing when an angry Tom wants to yell at his unsuspecting daughter! Kind of twisted, right?

I know you all think I'm out to get Lynette, but I'm really not. I think Lynette's devious creativity is extremely entertaining, and the staggeringly talented Felicity Huffman is one of my all-time favorite actresses. Sure, parenting involves making tough decisions, and of course Lynette loves her kids. And I know that this is just a tee-vee show. But come on, Lynette is not the best parent. At the least, by example, Lynette teaches her children deception on a nearly weekly basis.

Anyhow, Dave does something really weird when he hears that Tom's guitar has been busted: He buys Tom a new one, and then gives it to Lynette to give to Tom. The new guitar comes with a long diatribe about the strains of marriage, and how important it is to keep Tom happy. This is weird for many reasons, chief among them Dave's relative newness to the neighborhood, the cost of an electric bass guitar and the fact that Dave knows that Lynette is against the idea of the garage band in the first place. But even weirder is that Lynette actually listens to him! What fresh hell does Dave have planned for the Scavos?

Next week! They're drunk! (Who?) But it's immaterial! Bree wants to hire Orson! Katherine wants to cut Bree! Gaby wants "blind sex"! Whatever that is!

What did you think of this week's episode? Did all that bullying send you into the fetal position? Who do you think should raise No-Longer-Invisible Benji? What parenting lessons did you learn tonight? Any progress on your theories about who Dave will ultimately target?

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