About Last Night: Monday

Desperate Housewives: Hypnotoad

Paul continues Boner Quest 2010, but Beth still doesn’t want to put out. Not even couples therapy can help them. So, Paul gives Beth an ultimatum: It’s his lay or the highway. There’s some fall-out from his blackmailing of Susan last week, as she tells Mike about her job as a cleaning whore. But Paul still has some dirty tricks up his sleeve! But not down his pants, since Beth’s not giving him even a handy j.

Tom’s mom exhibits some more strange behavior, but he refuses to admit that she has a problem, so he ignores the issue. That is, until his mom goes totally ape-poopy.

Gabby continues to shower her love on the skinny daughter, and Juanita rightly becomes a bit jealous of all the attention that Grace is getting. So, of course the only thing to do is sabotage their relationship. Atta girl, Juannie Sue.

Bree and David Silver continue to be the most boring couple in this show’s history — and I’m including the time Oprah and her “husband” moved to Wisteria Lane for that lame 5 minute special. Even finding out a few secrets in Keith’s past can’t make them interesting.

And Paul’s plan to buy Susan’s house gets kicked up a notch when he gets Susan fired from her teaching job. And of course, this has big repercussions. And of course, those repercussions piss me off.

The Walking Dead: St. Claire of Assisi

Happy All Saints Day!  This is the first mini-recap of The Walking Dead, aka, that new zombie show on AMC.  Last night’s premier was an hour and a half long, so I don’t have any more space for an introduction.  Let’s go!

We start out with a sheriff’s deputy, Rick Grimes.  His cruiser has just run out of gas and he is walking to a gas station.  When he arrives, he finds it’s deserted and full of cars apparently abandoned on the spot.  There’s no gas.  Then, he spots what he thinks is a little girl, but sure enough, she’s a zombie.  Rick pulls out the largest handgun I have ever seen, bigger even that Dirty Harry’s Colt .44 Magnum, and blows her away.  Rick looks pretty sad about it, even if she was a zombie.  He probably hasn’t killed very many zombies yet.

But the episode really begins a few days earlier than this, with Rick and his partner Shane hanging out in their cruiser, shooting the shit about their various marital problems.  Shane and his wife fight all the time, while Rick’s been having trouble communicating his feeling with his wife, Lori.  They’re interrupted by an APB about a high-speed chase, and during the ensuing pursuit and standoff Rick gets shot a few times and falls into a coma.  He wakes up much, much later in a hospital, which is deserted and looks like a war zone.  Rick stumbles outside and finds an entire loading dock filled with dead bodies covered in sheets.  Not good.  A ways away, he finds a bike right next to, holy shit, a legless zombie woman trying to pull herself after him so she can eat his brains.  He pedals away as fast as he can.  Once he arrives back at his house, Rick discovers Lori and his son Carl are gone—but he assumes they’re alive because they took suitcases.  Still, Rick sits on his front steps in dismay, unaware another zombie is approaching, but luckily a non-zombified man and his son show up, kill the zombies, and rescue Rick.  To show his gratitude, Rick promptly blacks out again.

When Rick wakes up, he finds himself in a boarded up house being used as a hideout for the man and his son.  Here the man helpfully provides a ton of exposition for Rick, and for us.  Let’s see…the man’s name is Morgan Jones and his son’s name is Duane.  We don’t know what caused the zombie outbreak, but the symptoms are your classic rotting open sores, transmission by biting, reanimating dead flesh, etc.  And make sure you aim for the head when you have to kill them!  Supposedly Atlanta is a safe haven for survivors, so that’s where Rick hopes Lori and Carl have gone.  Morgan and Duane have yet to go there themselves because Morgan’s wife was recently turned into a zombie.  On cue, a car alarm goes off outside, everyone peers out to investigate, and there’s Zombie Mrs. Jones staggering around with the other zombies.

The next day, Rick prepares to go to Atlanta.  He takes Morgan and Duane to the police station and loads them up with all the weapons they can carry.  For some reason Morgan and Duane won’t be joining Rick, so here they part ways.  Back at his hideout, Morgan decides to have some target practice with his new weapons, so he props a sniper rifle on the upstairs window sill and starts blasting away.  But he can’t blow away his zombie wife because it’s too emotional.  Rick, meanwhile, goes back to that spot where the half-zombie girl was, so he can put her out of her misery.  Clearly he hasn’t been around zombies too long, because no outbreak survivor would let compassion get in the way and waste time with one zombie like this.  Wuss.

On the way to Atlanta, Rick sends out radio distress signals from his squad car and gets a faint response.  Turns out it’s Shane, though radio static prevents Rick and Shane from realizing who’s on either end of the radio.  Shane has camped out in the woods with a few other survivors including, hey, Rick’s wife and kid!  The radio signals have brought up an ongoing dispute between Shane and Lori–Lori wants to set up signs on the highway warning people not to go to Atlanta because it’s been recently overrun with the zombies, but Shane believes it’s too dangerous to risk it.  Lori storms off to pout, Shane follows after her, and, hey again, they make out.  That’s the ultimate cock block, isn’t it?  Your best friend goes into a coma, you figure everyone’s forgotten about him because of the zombie apocalypse, and you swoop in on his wife?  Dick.  Meanwhile, Rick, having run out of gas again, explores an abandoned farmhouse and eventually finds a horse, which he rides the rest of the way to Hotlanta.

Rick arrives on the outskirts of the city and it’s eerily deserted.  He makes his way into town, passing all kinds of burned out vehicles and other signs of chaos.  Suddenly Rick hears at a helicopter, so he spurs his horse toward the sound, only to discover…bum bum bum…hundreds of zombies.  They have him surrounded, yank him off the horse, (eat the horse—eew), and chase him underneath a derelict army tank.  Rick finds an open hatch on the tank’s underside and climbs in, but he’s pretty much screwed.  That is, until the tank’s radio comes to life, and a smug voice asks him, “Hey, dumbass in the tank.  Cozy in there?”

Whoa!  Now THAT is a goddamn pilot.  So much more to talk about here, so make sure you check out the full recap this week!