Episode 25, Part 1: Doug's Hot Ticket

Doug, Skeeter and Porkchop are singing The Beets. They are thrilled with their brilliant idea. See, The Beets are playing 60 miles away in Bloatsburg, and tickets are going on sale today. Doug and Skeeter thought of the best way to get tickets; they're lining up 2 hours early. Oh, except that didn't work. They walked up to the box office, where there was no line, and told the depressed individual working the window that they were there to line up for tickets. The woman cheerlessly told them to get in line as she pointed to the line. There are people in tents in the line, so it's safe to say a 2 hour head-start was a bit of an under-achievement. To think they were so proud of their idea...

Anyway, the tickets go on sale and you'll never guess who gets the last tickets. That's right, it's the people right in front of Doug and Skeeter. If only they had lined up 2 hours and 15 minutes early. Oh well. Doug takes this particularly hard and has a vision of the future. The Beets are doing an interview in their retirement home.

Sorry. They're doing an interview in the Old Beet-Heads Home. The interviewer asks them, of the 5,000+ shows they played, what was their best/favorite. They say the Bloatsburg show was without a doubt the best. Old Doug and Old Skeeter are upset, as they are watching from home.

Let's just assume that they moved in together after their wives died. Maybe? Actually, I'm just glad that Doug's current vision of the future doesn't involve him going all Mark David Chapman on the lead singer of The Beets. With how much he fantasizes about meeting them, and how much The Beets always like him when it happens, and what...3 episodes ago he claimed to have convinced them to play at his school...it just seems he could turn out like that.

At home, Doug is complaining to himself, alone in his room, when Judy enters dangling two tickets in his face. Apparently some douche she's dating bought them so they could go on a date, but she hates The Beets.

She agrees to give Doug the tickets if he'll paint her entire room black. What a crazy bitch. I guess she wants her room to be black so that she'll be even more depressed and maybe screaming at herself in the mirror will be more satisfying? I don't know, but as for her date...I guess it's a lesson well learned for him.

Doug calls Skeeter and tells him the good news and then they finally pause to think...how are they going to get there? Bloatsburg is 60 miles away. They can't ride their bikes. Their parents aren't going to take them, I guess. They don't even address this issue. They only mention their parents by saying, "well, they'll never let us go alone." I guess they assume their parents are unwilling to drive them. But Skeeter has a plan. He heard about it on the radio. It's the K-Bluf Beets Bus

It's a free ride to the show by the local radio station. They give the guy their permission slips and get on a bus full of the most annoying people alive. You do find out some "interesting" bullshit though. The bus organizer says the original title of Killer Tofu was Szechuan Bean Curd, but it was just too hard to rhyme. According to one of the crazy people, if you play "I Need More Allowance" really slow, you can hear one of The Beets say "I love cheese." Similarly, if you take the second letter of the one-hundredth word of every post I've made on here, it spells out "I love how much this show loves cheese."

The bus stops and Doug and Skeeter start to freak out, thinking they've finally arrived, but no. It's just a pit stop at a diner. The bus organizer steps off and says, "Okay, remember folks! This is a 10 minute break. 1/5 of an hour. 600 seconds." 1/5 of an hour is 12 minutes, jackass.

Look at that nerd. That's a guy that should know his fractions, because what else is he going to do? Date? Ha.

Inside the diner, a trucker gets annoyed with Doug and Skeeter's annoying enthusiasm for The Beets. She comes over and tries to act tough with her trucking skills, which the bus organizer totally matches her claims on. This turns her attitude around. So now she's friendly, and telling Doug and Skeeter trucker stories.

That's the organizer in the back, walking out the door as he reminds them about the 10 minutes they have. It doesn't matter. They are totally captivated by the trucker. There's a time dissolve so luckily we only have to hear the end of her irrelevant story, and then she leaves. Presumably because the speed she took before they entered the diner is starting to kick in and she needs to get on the road for her all-nighter.

Doug and Skeeter are having such a great time. They can't believe they met a real trucker. Skeeter got her autograph!

Simply unbelievable. I stopped getting autographs from famous people because really...who cares? You meet some musician you really like and they scribble something illegible on whatever you have on you, and you take it home and it sits in your room forever, wishing you actually cared about it. So now Skeeter has this Eat, Then Gas truckstop menu signed by the great Charlene. I feel like he should've lost interest in this autograph halfway through the question, "can I have your autograph?" At least for a moment after she left, he's still excited about it.

Oh, and Doug and Skeeter missed the bus. That's what you get for getting useless autographs and trucker stories. So how are they going to get there now? They're stranded at some diner in the middle of nowhere. Doug looks at one of the trucks and has a fantasy.

Don't be alarmed. Porkchop is not riding on the hood. The hood ornament is shaped like him. What you should be alarmed by is Doug and Skeeter's rapid facial hair growth that came with stealing a truck from the Eat, Then Gas parking lot. Also, they can't drive it and they run off a cliff. Another good, productive fantasy from Doug.

A sheriff overhears them talking about their dilemma and offers to help.

He's from Bloatsburg and headed back there anyway, so I guess it's cool if he picks up a couple of hitchhikers.

He gets them to the venue and uh oh...

"The tickets! We left the tickets at the diner! OH NO!"

That's right. For some reason, Doug took the tickets out of his pocket at the diner and then just didn't bother to put them back. Incompetent.

Then they see that The Beets crew is still unloading the truck. Apparently the band was late too.

Doug and Skeeter offer to help the guy unload the van and he enthusiastically says "sure" and throws them a couple of backstage passes.

This asshole is going to lose his job. Not in this episode because Doug and Skeeter are honest strangers. He tells Doug to grab the guitar and follow the amp. Other people might grab the guitar and you know...fuck off with it. And I guess because they carried it in, they get to set it up on stage.

Fuck the drum and guitar techs. These helpful 11 year olds seem like they know what they're doing.
And so the band walks past Doug and Skeeter onto the stage and the show begins. They get to watch from "the best seats in the house. That would be here...

Peeking out from behind a curtain. And that's how they saw The Beets.

This episode certainly gives credence to the idea that Doug did not get The Beets to perform at his school, as if it really needed it. Three episodes ago, he claimed they came and played a free show at his school. Now he's claiming he helped set up the band's gear and watched the show from backstage. It feels like he's inventing these great stories about things that make him happy because he's just so depressed. I mean really...his best friend is an idiot, he's completely unable to do anything about his crush on Patti Mayonnaise, he's stalked and tortured by a kid with rickets who may also have a crush on him, his sister is crazy, his parents are so useless he barely mentions them and almost never consults them on his problems, and his dog apparently outshines him in every possible way. All he has is The Beets. They mean everything to him. I really hope he doesn't kill one of them. For real.