Thursday, December 30, 2010

Episode 19, Part 2: Doug On His Own

This episode doesn't begin in the middle of a fantasy. Doug's parents are leaving with Mrs. Dink to chaperone Judy's school dance. They are leaving Doug home alone. Phil makes a big deal about the fact that a big storm is coming.

They give Doug a little bit of money and tell him to order a pizza, and then they leave. Mrs. Dink reminds him that Mr. Dink is right next door if anything goes wrong. This is how excited Doug is about the whole thing.

He can jump higher off the ground than a dog.

So then there's a short montage of things Doug and Porkchop do to celebrate having the house to themselves. First, it's a little Risky Business.

Please note that Doug actually had to take off his pants to do this. This wasn't something he did in the morning when he woke up, before he could be bothered to get dressed.

Since Porkchop has a small carton here, I'm going to assume Doug gave him the creamer to drink. Doug is a dick. Also, gross. Especially to let the dog drink straight out of the container. Throw that shit away.

This is just good fun.

And now it's time to order the pizza from Speedy Pizza.

He orders one with everything on it. Yeah...

While they wait for the shittiest pizza ever, Doug turns on the tv.

Probably a good choice for the first time he's home alone, during a storm.

The setup in the Freak Out Theatre movie is the same as this episode. The blue Doug character makes a comment about how great it is to have the house to himself, and then reveals that the dog's name is Cutlet. Get it?

Then suddenly there's a knock on the door. The blue Doug is hesitant to answer it because it might be that bandit. What bandit? Who knows? But it actually is the bandit. The bandit says he's from Express Telegram.
Then, impossibly, a gutter drain on the house taps the bandit on the shoulder and eats him.

It's just a movie, so whatever. But then Doug gets really into it. He starts freaking out, yelling at the blue Doug to get out of the house before it eats him too! And then...well...

Shit.

Shiiiiiiiit. He was doing so good too. He had only ordered a really shitty pizza and ruined a quart of half and half until now. Oh well. Time for the house to come alive.

At this point, it's hard to say if this is happening in the movie, or if Doug's imagination has taken over the plot of the movie and he's just imagining this is happening in the movie. Either is possible. Have you ever seen Death Bed?

Anyway, they're surrounded.

Doug calls on Porkchop, because he apparently has the tv remote.

The picture fades out to show Doug staring blankly from the couch.

This is Doug gasping for air, as he apparently stopped breathing during this freak out. Not a good sign.

He turns off the tv and then the pizza arrives.

Why are there two of them? This pizza place sucks. How incompetent! Doug says it took them over an hour. Terrible business. I would not tip or order from these stupid fuckers again.

Oh, but Doug is still freaked out by the movie, so like the crazy little shithead he is, he refuses to open the door for them. He makes them pass the pizza slice by slice through the mail slot.

This is gross as shit. You don't know where those delivery boys hands have been. And the mail slot on your front door can't be that clean, and even if it is, it's that Pledge kind of clean that you don't want to taste. This is also entirely unnecessary. It's good that he's cautious about strangers at the door, but once he knows it's the pizza guys, shouldn't he stop being such an unreasonable dick and just open the door?

Later, Skeeter calls to talk about how the power is out at his house. He's watching tv by candlelight. Even Doug points out how stupid that is. Then Skeeter complains about the commercials.

And then right after Doug says, "well, at least our phones are working," the phones go out.

Doug follows that up with, "what more can go wrong?" He says this in a way that implies a lot of stuff has gone wrong. The only thing that's gone wrong is he was an unreasonable dick to the busy pizza guys and he had a mild psychotic episode...

Well now the power is out.

Fuck. Doug grabs a flashlight to go down to the basement to reset the circuit breakers. Time for another psychotic freakout.

A coat and hat turn into Frankenstein's monster.

Then more stuff in the basement comes to life.

And more stuff...

They're all walking towards him, telling him to get out of their house while he still can! So naturally he grabs the monster version of the vacuum and hits the Frankenstein with it.

And this fades to...

Right. It's just ordinary stuff. Way to show that hat and probably break the vacuum, crazy asshole.

So he finds the circuit breaker and flips one switch and nothing happens. No big surprise there. But then he hears footsteps upstairs. Now would be a pretty reasonable time to freak out. The mysterious steps make their way over to the basement door. Doug freaks out, trips over something, drops the flashlight and gets trapped under some boxes. The basement door opens and a man starts coming down the stairs. He steps on a dog toy (a real dog toy. the kind that squeaks. the kind Porkchop would never play with), freaks out and falls into the laundry. Porkchop picks up the flashlight.

Of course. But seriously, what an asshole. Maybe during Doug's freak out in the basement, he just didn't hear Mr. Dink knock on the door or ring the doorbell. Entirely possible. But he did still creep through the house without calling out for Doug. It's creepy.

As it turns out, Mr. Dink is actually more scared of the storm than Doug is. He offers to stay with Doug if he's scared, but Doug declines until he realizes Mr. Dink is actually the one that's scared. So they start a fire in the fire place and make stupid shadow puppets.

There's one last crazy moment before the end. Porkchop is popping popcorn over the fire and it explodes.

They catch the popcorn in their mouths. Most of it is just wasted though. But seriously...Doug, this is not how popcorn works.

That's it though. I like that this episode is mostly Doug just being Doug. This does reveal that Doug has a sort of superiority complex as well. His interactions with others is proof of that. He criticizes the Speedy Pizza guys for their slowness based on one delivery. Who knows? It might be a really busy night, full of unreasonable dicks that refuse to answer the door and waste their time passing slices through a mail slot. He has a brief conversation with Skeeter, who is acting more ridiculous than Doug. As stupid as Doug is being, at least he's not complaining about the commercials in the tv programming he's imagining. And he may have attacked a coat rack with a vacuum, but at least he's not scared to be alone because of some lightning, unlike his adult neighbor!

Yeah, Doug's pretty badass, compared to the incompetent, slow, idiotic, scared wimps around him.

3 comments:

  1. Yeah, Doug's pretty badass, compared to the incompetent, slow, idiotic, scared wimps around him.

    At least you have something nice to say for Doug than the usual regimental statements!

    Those two guys from the pizza place appear to be the same two reoccurring figures that get used for any occasion in the show, whether they're delivery guys, school janitors or movers, they're just there, so don't be surprised if they show up in more episodes that follow!

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  2. What's weird about this ep is that Doug already freely goes about town without his parents. The idea of him being on his own for a few hours really shouldn't be all that exciting to him.

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  3. On a sidenote, I like the Evil Dead homage in the movie Doug is watching.

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