Author: Philip J Reed

Here we go…including “Movin’ Out,” only five more episodes remain in season two. When those are done, we’ll be at the actual midpoint of this project. And…wow. I couldn’t be happier about that.

At the same time, though, this week marks one full year that I’ve been writing ALF reviews. Season one was reviewed every week, without fail. Season two…had a few delays, but has been reviewed almost as reliably. So, I guess one year from now, we’ll be nearing the end of this whole endeavor. After that, I don’t know. I’d love to do another show, but we’ll see. For now, I shouldn’t be thinking too far ahead, because I’m about as far from shore as it’s possible to be.

“Movin’ Out” is a long overdue episode about Willie’s job as a social worker. We haven’t had one of those since “Border Song,” in which he kidnapped a Mexican day-laborer for ALF’s backyard plantation.

Because Willie’s occupation was kept an odd secret throughout the beginning of season one, and then had almost no impact on any of the episodes to follow, I’ve had a lot of fun pointing out all the times that his ostensible job looks to be incompatible with his daily behavior. But part of the reason I can do that is that ALF is written by goldfish. If it isn’t in this week’s script, they don’t remember it.

That’s why one episode can remind us that Willie is a social worker, but another will see him turning his neighbors away in their hour of need (“Someone to Watch Over Me”), sitting idly by while his daughter is sexually assaulted (“The Boy Next Door”), making fun of a guy for having a shitty job (“Hit Me With Your Best Shot”), refusing a spare bed to a homeless blind friend of the family (“We Gotta Get Out of This Place”), repeatedly insulting a disabled war veteran (“Come Fly With Me”), making fun of his wife for being an unfuckable hag (“Don’t It Make Your Brown Eyes Blue?”), and allowing the alien that lives in his laundry basket to buttfuck his children (passim).

Willie doesn’t ever act like a social worker, but, every so often, we’re reminded that he is one, either so that he can abduct a child he wouldn’t otherwise interact with, or cripple his boss in a forcible limbo competition. The rest of the time, the show doesn’t want us to remember Willie’s occupation, because, if we did, we’d have certain expectations of who he is, what he’s good at, what he cares about, and how he should be reacting to things.

Here, however, we have one hell of an odd episode: one that relies on the fact that Willie is a social worker, and also at the same time makes it clear that he can’t be one. At least, not a good one. And certainly not one that’s getting yet another promotion this season.

Which is how this episode begins: Willie announces that he’s got a shit-awesome new job as some kind of supervisor or something in San Diego. This makes everyone piss and moan about having to move, but really you’d think they’d be thrilled. This guy’s more sociopath than social worker; they should be excited to pocket that extra pay while they can, before Willie’s incompetence and nauseating disinterest in his fellow man are revealed to whomever signs his checks.

Lynn’s reason for not wanting to move is that next year is her last year of high school. We’ve already established that she’s 18, but now we also know she’s a junior. I’ve asked before, but is this possible without her having been left back a year? I’m not complaining or anything, especially since her character doesn’t seem to be much of a scholar, exactly, but I’m curious.

Also, does this mean she’ll be attending college in season four?

ALF worries that they won’t let him come along, simply because he burns down their house and kills their relatives. Kate says that she’ll consider letting him come along if he stops eating Willie’s dinner. ALF looks at the food on his fork and pauses. Kate asks for his answer, and he plagiarizes Jack Benny: “I’m thinking, I’m thinking!!”

One of the most famous jokes of all time is therefore the punchline to this entire opening sequence. With Benny, as I’m sure you know, the question was “Your money or your life.” Here, ALF rephrases Kate’s question to better suit the joke theft: “Instant gratification, or long term security.” There’s no twist or anything; it’s simply a puppet reciting somebody else’s much better material. When, exactly, did Paul Fusco become Krusty the Clown?

This episode is a bit odd even in a superficial sense, because the opening credits are in German. As you probably recall (since you bought me the fuckin’ thing) I’m watching these episodes on the uncut DVDs that seem to have been released only in Germany…but this is the first time I’ve noticed German credits. I’m 99% sure they’ve all been in English before this, and I’m 100% sure that the closing credits of this very episode are in English.

I don’t know. It’s weird. Maybe they used some off-air recorded footage for the intro for some reason? Say, the masters being damaged? But then I’d assume the dialogue would all be in German, too…ahhhh who cares. I just found it interesting. Leave me alone. Go start your own damn ALF blog.

The first proper scene is Willie’s first day of work. Google Maps puts his commute from Los Angeles to San Diego at about two hours, without traffic, but with traffic that’s clearly another story, and it wouldn’t exactly be a relaxing ride. At the very least Willie should look into train schedules.

Hey, remember when Willie liked trains? If so, you know more about him than the writers do; even though this bleeding dick of a commute becomes a major plot point, Mr. Meatloaf never even considers it.

Whatever. Brian sleepily announces he doesn’t give a shit, and I’m on his side. Willie’s never taken an interest in him, but now the kid has to get up at ungodly hours to see him off? Fuck dat.

Lynn makes some crappy joke about jazzercise, ALF tries to eat the last cinnamon roll before Willie gets it, and the whole thing makes me wonder why the hell we’re watching it.

Seriously. It’s the second scene in the episode and already “Movin’ Out” is so padded I can barely keep focus.

Yes, it’s nice that we get a “slice of life” scene. What are the Tanners like at breakfast when there’s nothing (immediately) pressing going on, anyway? Finding out could be fun. It would definitely be a chance to build character, explore dynamics, and give the actors some decent dialogue that doesn’t have to drag an ungainly plot behind it.

But, like when we got to see what ALF did all night after the family went to sleep and found out he just danced around in the shed or some shit, the writers don’t know what this family is like when they’re not lugging a plot from point A to point B. So they just kill time in what feels like the the dullest improv imaginable.

This, again, is why Gilligan’s Island served as a feasible fantasy setting for an episode earlier this season and ALF will never be able to. It’s easy to imagine what downtime is like on the uncharted desert isle. We know those characters, how they interact, the challenges they face, what motivates them, what frustrates them, and how they go about solving their individual problems. We can plug different elements into that situation and get a sense of how it would play out. (Arguably, that was the entire premise of the show.) Here, in Tannerland, we don’t have characters that interact. We have actors who recite the lines they memorized. Forget about plugging a different element into this context; the elements that are already there don’t even have a purpose.

Brian says they got Willie a present, and I really hope I’m not the only one laughing myself hoarse over the fact that it looks like he’s handing his father a bag of dogshit. They should have lit it on fire and had Willie make a wish.

Anyway, it’s some books on tape, with a Twisted Sister cassette mixed in so that they can make a joke about those kids today with their hair metal and the whatnot. The books are Crime and Punishment and Madame Bovary. Since they come on one cassette apiece I have to assume they’re read by that guy from the Micro Machines commercials.

Mr. Ochmonek comes over to wish Willie a good first day at work.

Yes. Really.

In return, Lynn makes fun of him for being fat and ugly, and Willie asks him what the fuck he’s doing up so early.

Remind me again who the bad neighbors are.

This guy paid a visit just to pass some well wishes onto some asshat who couldn’t care less whether Mr. Ochmonek lives or dies. Willie’s never taken the slightest interest in the guy. Shit, when’s the last time Willie took the slightest interest in anyone who wasn’t him? When’s the last time Willie even said “thank you”?

This is why I don’t believe Willie is a social worker. To succeed in that field, you’d either need to have a great deal of empathy, or be able to fake it very well. Instead, this is what we see: a guy who never seems to care about anybody, ever, for any reason. Usually we’re allowed to forget that Willie’s a social worker, but here it’s driving the entire plot. Would it be too much to show us a Willie who even tries to be nice so that, if only for one twenty minute chunk, we can believe he’s good at the job we keep being told he’s good at?

I don’t know. Based on what I see here, though, I can promise you that if I needed a social worker, I’d hire Mr. Ochmonek long before I went anywhere near Willie.

Anyway, Mr. Ochmonek tells Willie he’d better get his dumb ass on the road because it’s an insane commute. Then ALF pops up to eat Mr. Ochmonek’s danish and the latter doesn’t bother to investigate, because even Jack LaMotta is over this shit.

I know season two is generally held in higher regard than the other three, but ask any ALF fan when the show jumped the shark, and they’ll tell you it’s this scene, in which ALF and Kate finally give in to the long-simmer sexual tension between them. It’s not a problem with the scene itself, really (as it’s shot quite beautifully, and the expression on ALF’s face as he cums conveys genuine pathos); it’s the mere fact that it happened, and now it’s over. There’s nowhere for the show to go but down.

Willie appears in the doorway to explain that he got home late because of his long commute, in case you missed all forty-seven lines of dialogue preceding this, in which it was repeatedly explained that Willie had a long commute.

Kate, vacuuming alien gooze out of herself, suggests that Willie rent a place in San Diego during the week, which inspires ALF to explain the plot of Three’s Company for some reason.

You know, Three’s Company was one of those shows I watched as a kid without understanding a damned thing about it. I definitely got the sense that Jack was living with two hotties, but the fact that he was pretending to be gay didn’t even register with me. I think I had some vague idea of the concept of homosexuality, but I guess I didn’t see it in the humorous light the show did.

I wonder if you could even do a plot like that today. I think the gay jokes would play differently, of course, but I also think there wouldn’t be a point. Jack and his honies went through two landlords that would only allow him to stay if he was gay, and I can’t imagine that setup working at all today. If you rent an apartment, nobody cares who you’re having sex with in it. In fact, it’d be illegal to discriminate against tenants on the basis of sexual preference anyway.

That’s interesting, actually. Three’s Company was a high-concept sitcom (in the same vein as ALF). Its setup allowed the show to make very specific kinds of jokes that other shows, lacking that setup, could not make. And I was around for it, which means I once lived in a world in which a man had to pretend be gay in order to live with women lest the world collapse into a premarital orgiastic black hole of sin.

Whatever. Don Knotts was in it.

Willie says that they’re going to have to move sooner than planned, because it’s been one day and he already sees that working too hard will give him a heart attack-ack-ack-ack-ack-ack. He comes to this conclusion without consulting the rest of his family or listening to his wife’s thoughts on the matter.

SOCIAL WORK

We then see some people walking around the outside of the house, with a FOR SALE sign in plain view.

This was legitimately shocking to me, because I just assumed they shot a bunch of exteriors up front and have been using those same few establishing shots ever since.

I mean, that’s still probably true, but seeing one this late in the game that’s episode-specific…that demonstrates some very rare effort invested in the production.

That’s pretty much it, though. Kate and Lynn complain that they don’t want anyone else living here, and ALF complains that he wants food. Then the act ends.

What a strange place to break it. It wasn’t funny or compelling. It just kind of ended. I guess they used up all their effort for the week by filming that new footage of the lawn.

Then we see Willie at his new job, talking on the phone to a woman who hasn’t gotten her welfare check. He is trying to keep her calm, and he says, “Yes, I know you have five children. I can hear them from here!”

SOCIAL WORK

This scene is a great opportunity to show us that Willie, in spite of everything we’ve seen to the contrary in his personal life, is actually an awesome social worker. It wouldn’t even be much of a cheat to do so, since the few times we’ve seen him at work in the past, he wasn’t actually doing any work. We’re almost halfway through the entire run of the show, but Willie’s professional life is still a blank canvas. He just got this big promotion, so why not show us why he deserves it?

Instead, he insults a needy woman for having kids that are noisier than he would like them to be. Who the fuck does this guy think he is? And why are we supposed to be laughing with him when he makes fun of the woman who now can’t afford to buy groceries for her hungry kids?

I’ll spoil something for you: Willie doesn’t like his new job. That’s fine. He doesn’t have to. But since the central conflict of the episode is whether or not the Tanners move, this sort of undercuts all tension. Maybe instead of Willie hating the living fuck out of his new position, he could like it. And be really good at it. That way there’d be an actual difficult decision at the heart of the episode: nobody else wants to move, but Willie does. Instead, what we get is a situation in which nobody else wants to move, and Willie also does not want to move.

Well then. I’m on the edge of my seat.

Willie goes into the other room to talk to one of his employees about why the check wasn’t mailed. This guy’s supposed to be an idiot, which we know because he has his feet up on the desk, has a phone conversation not related to work, and has a face that looks like it’s growing out of somebody else’s back.

Then some woman comes over and tells Willie he still hasn’t processed payroll, she doesn’t have a parking space yet, and a whole bunch of other shit he hasn’t taken care of because he’s too busy making fun of some lady’s kids on the phone.

After she lays out all the crap Willie needs to do, he says, “No problem, Denise. I’ve got twelve hands!!”

SOCIAL WORK

What a dickbag. Seriously. This guy isn’t just a bad social worker; he’s a fuckawful human being.

If I worked somewhere, and they brought in a new supervisor from outside instead of promoting from within, and he immediately started bitching about having to do all the stuff he was explicitly hired to do, I’d go right over his head and tell whoever hired him that this guy needs to get the fuck out and let someone willing to do the work take his place.

Seriously. What the hell is Willie’s problem? He’s pissy to the idiot who doesn’t do his own work, but then he’s also pissy to the woman who tells Willie to do his own work. What the hell does he want?

Willie finds the check for that lady and fires the guy for losing it. The fake audience of dead people applauds, so that’s our cue that Willie just did something awesome. I’m glad I had the cue, because otherwise I’d have no idea.

I get that a moment like this could demonstrate that even if Willie is terrible at everything else, he at least knows how to lay down the law when his staff fails him, or whatever. Except…yeah. This isn’t really that impressive.

The guy deserved to be fired if he was gabbing on the phone all day and not doing his job, yes, but that’s not something to applaud Willie for. A firing had to happen. It’s not a brave and admirable decision; it’s right to fire a social worker who isn’t actually helping the people he’s being paid to help.

Additionally, we just heard about fifteen other things Willie’s supposed to be doing, and he hasn’t done jack shit with any of those. So, yeah, he fired someone. Great. Unless he accomplishes at least one more thing on his daily goal list, though, I’m not going to join my deceased brethren in a standing O.

Also, before this happened, Willie himself was gabbing on the phone to ALF about personal business, so why is it okay for Willie to dick around and not do his job, but this guy gets fired for it?

On the way home from work, Willie stops to have his neck surgically removed. Then he bitches to ALF about his new job, where they want him to do stuff and help people. That must be pure kryptonite to this putz.

ALF tries to cheer him up with some words of wisdom from his old Skleenball coach.

But…wait.

Okay.

So, in the first episode of this season, ALF taught Brian to play Skleenball. That’s fine. It was basically baseball played with fish. Okay.

Then, in “Oh, Pretty Woman,” ALF was trading Bouillabaseball cards with Brian. Bouillabaseball was baseball played with fish.

I was confused about why we had two names for what sounded like the exact same sport. Commenter of the week Sarah Portland had this to say in response back then:

I’m just going to guess that someone on the staff said “We should talk about that fish-baseball thing again – what was it called?” and no one wanted to bother looking up what they had called it before. However, it’s possible that they pulled a JK Rowling, and found a better name for something further down the line, simply substituting it without explanation. On the whole Bouillabaseball is infinitely funnier, and fits better.

And, you know what? That sounded entirely reasonable. Bouillabaseball is the better name, and the fact that ALF trading cards (in the real world) came with a Bouillabaseball card in every pack suggests that they decided to rechristen Skleenball.

But now, at the end of season two, we find out there is still a Skleenball, so I don’t fuckin’ know anymore.

That’s what you get, Sarah Portland, when you give ALF any credit whatsoever. Welcome to the club. :(

ALF decides to be ALF and fucks up the house so that nobody will want to buy it. Of course, before he can start springing his traps, the Tanners piss and moan to prospective buyers about what shitty neighbors the Ochmoneks are. I wonder why they didn’t provide any examples, though. Like the time they formed a neighborhood watch to protect local families. Or the time they took the Tanners on a free vacation for the hell of it. Or that morning a few days ago when Mr. O got up at the crack of dawn just to wish Willie luck at his new job. THOSE SHITS

Whatever. ALF broke everything, so stuff falls down. Over and over and over. And even though the sale of the house and Willie’s new job are related to one another, it feels like two plots at the same time: Willie adjusting to a new working environment, and ALF desperate to not move. At this point, the episode seems to switch tracks from one to the other, with the big setpiece of ALF’s destruction playing like the big finale…while also not feeling at all related to anything Willie’s ostensibly been going through this week.

It’s odd. Both plots could have led to episodes of their own, so having them crowd each other out for primacy during the waning minutes of “Movin’ Out” just makes a ramshackle episode even worse.

Once the Ineffectual Physical Comedy Follies are over, Willie confronts ALF in the master bedroom about sabotaging the sale of the house.

It would be a great way to tie the climaxes of both plots together, but it’s easier to just end the episode so we’ll do that. Willie says he doesn’t want to move anyway and it’s over.

The reason he doesn’t want to move…well, that’s a little more annoying, so forgive me for breaking it down.

See, Willie already hates his job and doesn’t want to move. We know that. But as in “Weird Science” and some other episode I’m grateful to have forgotten, ALF needs to give an inspiring speech to everyone in the audience dumb enough to have not found something else to watch by now.

He reminds Willie that social workers should be doing work “for the social good.” That’s fine, if a little obvious, but then ALF explains that Willie is no longer doing that. Instead he’s assigning parking spaces and firing people.

And, you know what? I can see a good point being made about how “work for the social good” gets undermined by bureaucracy and red tape, having meetings to schedule other meetings and so on, with good intentions manifesting themselves in such a way that they detract from quality of service.

Here, however, that’s not the case. Willie indeed, as ALF said, was assigning parking spaces and firing people. But they guy he fired needed to be fired, because he wasn’t effectively helping those who relied on him. Isn’t removing an ineffectual social worker so that somebody more helpful can take his place a gesture in service of the social good?

The parking space, too, is a necessary logistical problem. If Willie’s employees have nowhere to park, they can’t do their work. She wasn’t asking for a better parking space, or to trade with somebody else for some cockamamie reason. This lady just wanted a fucking place to park while she worked her ass off and reminded Willie of all the crap he wasn’t doing. If she quits because Willie can’t handle basic administrative duties and she has nowhere to leave her car, how would that serve the social good?

Another thing that ALF doesn’t mention — but which we heard — is that Willie was in charge of payroll. Sure, he fucked it up, but isn’t seeing to it that your social workers are paid a pretty important way to encourage them to keep doing social work? You know…the social workers that ALF just ranted about needing to serve the social good. Stop paying them and they’ll abandon the field. Rightly so, I might add.

So ALF has it backward, and the show doesn’t realize that at all. Sure, maybe Willie preferred the hands-on approach he used to have, and that’s fine. But by no means is the social good better served by one guy with a preference for hands-on work than it would be by an effective leader who can guide and support an entire staff with a gift for hands-on work.

Willie can work with one client at a time. His staff can work with dozens, and potentially hundreds. Willie whining about having to fill out paperwork and pay his fucking employees is what prevented him from serving the social good, not the fact that he was responsible for doing those things in the first place. His new role as administrator didn’t prevent it; if anything it magnified its potential.

If there’s a moral here, it’s that Willie finds it chillingly easy to convince himself that doing almost nothing is preferable to doing an awful lot, because the latter is really hard and the former is so much easier.

The moral is emphatically not what we’re told it is. This isn’t about Willie getting back down to the salt of the earth and helping people. He just had the chance to do that and decided instead to make fun of welfare mothers and be snippy toward better social workers who were actually trying to do their jobs.

So, yeah. Not that this episode was so hot before, but this is a truly botched ending. Also, is this the first episode I’ve had literally nothing nice to say about? Jesus.

Whatever. The point is, Willie decides he’d much rather be here, with the alien who just caved in the roof, than apply himself to sorting out the problems of the less fortunate.

SOCIAL WORK

Willie announces the good news to his family, and, in doing so, stops Kate from scolding ALF. Yeah, how dare that lippy bitch get angry at the creature that demolished her house and created unsafe living conditions for her children.

It’s a damned good thing that Willie — so intent on serving the social good — was there to put his uppity wife in her place.

This episode is fucking horrible.

In the short scene before the credits, some guy comes in to see the house. The couch collapses into the floor, revealing that it’s not a house at all, but the set of some shitty sitcom, and the guy leaves because he doesn’t want to live in a place full of dead people laughing all the time.

It’s a stupid gag, but I kind of like that they bothered to work the deadly puppet trenches into the show somehow. They already spent all that time and money creating them so that Paul Fusco wouldn’t have to timeshare his character with a midget, so you might as well write a joke that takes advantage of them.

On the other hand, this visual joke is really fucking dumb. So, there’s that.

Ever since Jake arrived earlier this season, I’ve been joking that Brian no longer exists. Or half-joking, anyway, because as we saw last week, the kid no longer has anything to do with his own plots. The writers have officially given up on him, which renders him stuck here, like a nail through a thumb that would do more harm to remove than to just leave where it is.

This week, we see exactly how empty the character is. While it takes them a little longer to elbow him out of yet another storyline that should feature him front and center, they know they’ve never bothered to develop him in any way so the episode has to happen around him. He’s just kind of there…and then he’s not…and then they bring him in for the final scene to pretend that he’s learned some grand lesson.

“Hit Me With Your Best Shot” plays like one of those movies in which a lead actor dies during filming, so they try to hide that by padding it out with scenes of other people talking about that guy, and reacting to things he’s done, leaving the audience — hopefully — to just assume he’s on the toilet somewhere, I guess, but is still totally like super important.

And while it’s not the worst episode of ALF (being as it does have a few very good lines), it does sink to depths that even the wonderful Anne Schedeen can’t redeem.

You’d be forgiven for not believing me, though, since we open on a great Kate scene. She walks in on ALF who has apparently been sitting under a sunlamp for five hours. He wonders openly why he isn’t getting a tan…which is a visual joke that works on its own. But then Kate touches him, and he screams. Even funnier.

What I like most about it, though? Look at Kate’s face above. (But…don’t look at her shirt.) Anne Schedeen is acting. Unlike the rest of the cast, she doesn’t just pause and react when it’s her turn to talk. She’s filtering the actions and words of others through her own character, and it often makes her the only thing on screen worth paying attention to.

If she had been in a better show, I think she’d be pretty fondly remembered. Instead she’s in ALF, where she gets nose-fucked by a puppet in her hallway and everyone’s pretty eager to forget any of this ever happened. She really was so much better than this show deserved, and that’s tragic.

She tells ALF that he’s got sunburn, and asks if he wants cold cream. He says, “Yeah, but only one scoop. I’m on a diet.”

I’m not even bothered by the “ALF I AM TALKING ABOUT COLD CREAM NOT ICE CREAM” line that explains the joke, because it feels like Kate is explaining something to the alien, rather than to the audience. There’s a big difference there, and it’s a difference that is only felt when the actor makes you feel it. The rest of these clowns deliver lines for the audience to react to. Anne Schedeen delivers lines for the characters to react to.

So, yeah. Enjoy this while you can, because before long this episode will sink far below her ability to keep it alive.

We get the credits, and then Brian comes in covered in dirt. At first I assumed this was the Halloween episode, in which the corpse of Benji Gregory rises from its shallow grave in the studio parking lot and seeks revenge on the cast…but, no, it’s just Brian. He’s been in a fight.

I love that the late-80s way of showing that a character has been in a fight is to muss up his hair and rub soil into his clothes. Did kids actually fight back then? Nobody ever seems to throw an actual punch. I guess they just rolled around with each other in the garden, like that thing I wasn’t supposed to do with my cousin. :(

Brian explains that he got in a fight with Bobby Duncan. Kate asks who the hell that is, and rightly so, since last we heard Brian’s tormentor was that kid Spencer. Remember? Willie’s illegitimate child and keeper of Dr. Potato Famine. Oh well. I guess when you have a kid like Brian, you just take it as read that every day brings another bully.

Kate washes the implied physical violence off of him with a rag, and ALF offers to eat the kid’s cat as revenge. There’s another nice moment when Kate tells him that he shouldn’t fight, and Brian says that he did it because Bobby called Kate “old, ugly, and dumb.”

Schedeen pauses, but then repeats her advice not to fight…before mumbling, “That little brat.”

It’s good. She’s being a mother, but still being a person. Her feeling are hurt, and she’s upset, but she needs to set the example for Brian…while clearly believing the kid needs a slap. And this is why I love Schedeen; she’s capable of expressing multiple things at the same time. She doesn’t flip back and forth between settings; she’s a human being with complex emotions. What a rarity here.

Speaking of rarity, we then get a good ALF line when he says, “He’s entitled to his opinion.” And that, in itself, gets punctuated by a perfect Kate glower.

Maybe I’m just clinging to stuff like this because the rest of the episode is a pretty massive pile of dickshit, but is there anyone out there who doesn’t appreciate Anne Schedeen? Anyone watching this show or following this blog that thinks she’s not worthy of the praise I give her? Maybe I’ve just been driven insane by the show. If that’s the case, please tell me. You’re my last hope for a healthy perspective on things.

Eh, who cares if I’m crazy. I fucking love her, and she’s about the only thing I can count on from week to week, so sue me.

The next day, or whenever the hell Brian changes his shirt, ALF gives him fighting lessons in the garage. He reveals that he was known as “Sugar Ray” Shumway on Melmac, because he loved shitty 90s pop.

ALF tells Brian that he can’t drop out of school to avoid bullies, because otherwise he’ll end up hanging around the house all day, eating and watching TV. CAN YOU GUESS THE PUNCHLINE AT HOME?

Of course you can. But that doesn’t stop Brian from explaining it by saying, “But I want to be like you!”

It doesn’t land, as you might expect, and it serves as a perfect illustration of my earlier point: Schedeen delivered an unnecessary explanation, but because she was acting it made sense: she was explaining something to ALF, not to us. Benji Gregory only knows how to recite half-memorized lines from a piece of paper, so he ends up delivering this particular unnecessary explanation to us.

Big difference, and one that comes down entirely to acting chops. You can speak the words somebody else wrote for you, or your character can do the talking.

I’m not trying to be too hard on Gregory; I just find him to be a good case study. Acting is difficult. Really. It is. And this is a kid without any real experience doing it, being handed shitty dialogue and being made to perform it under shittier conditions. I’ll joke about him, sure, but I don’t dislike him.

It’s not that he’s bad at what he does…it’s that he’s incompetent. I know that sounds insulting, but what I’m getting at is that he never learned what it meant to be competent. Nobody here taught him. “Good enough” was ALF‘s motto, which is why the good actors brought their talent in from the start (Anne Schedeen and Jack LaMotta), and the lousy ones never got any better (Max Wright and Benji Gregory).

Of course, we do have an exception in Andrea Elson, but I’m sure that’s because she worked of her own initiative to get better, likely learning what she could from Schedeen and the other good actors that dropped in for guest appearances. It’s not because the setting was conducive to her learning these things, and it’s definitely not because the director or anyone else bothered to coach her…if she learned anything, she learned it on her own.

ALF tries to steal Brian’s candy bar, which Benji Gregory was kind enough to hold perfectly, rigidly in frame throughout the conversation, like the script-reciting automaton that he is. He then gives ALF the candy bar, and ALF eats it so fast! lol!

Brian even gets to deliver a zinger! “You eat fast, Sugar Ray!” It’d be an embarrassing line for even the best of actors, so if you can make it through Benji Gregory slurring it out without flinching, you’re a better man than I.

In fact, he seems to channel the mushmouthed inflection of Max Wright. “Yhou EEatf-fast shuggeray.” Coupled with the extremely delayed physical reaction to ALF trying to grab the candy, it almost seems like while Andrea Elson was learning quietly from Anne Schedeen, Benji Gregory was stuck at the Max Wright Actor College.

Anyway, ALF chops a board, then he tries to chop another board, but he fails to chop the other board, so he makes a face and vibrates.

Good shit.

Willie comes in to tell Brian that he just heard what a massive wiener he is. Then he sees that ALF has injured the hand that loves him the way his wife used to, so he attempts to massage it back to functionality.

We get a pretty good line stranded amongst all the bullshit when Willie tells ALF, “If you really wanted to help, you’d teach him not to fight.” ALF replies, “He already knows how to do that.”

Good shit.

No…really this time.

Then we get some more Willie backstory. Unlike anything we learned in “Night Train,” though, this is something we probably could have guessed for ourselves: Willie used to get his nuts handed to him. His bully was named Clarence, which I think implies that even Willie’s guardian angel couldn’t resist giving him wedgies.

He tells Brian that once he decided not to fight back anymore, Clarence moved on, because it stopped being fun for him.

I’m pretty sure I’ve heard every sitcom dad in history give this same advice…but has this ever worked in real life? I can tell you for sure that the kid in my school who got picked on the most literally never raised a hand to his tormentors. Ever. And they definitely didn’t stop. Why would they? If anything they’d leave the kid who intermittently stands up for himself alone in favor of a reliable target.

I don’t know. I was never a bully. And — thanks to this other kid serving as a hell of a convenient distraction — I was never bullied, either. But from what I’ve seen, fighting back is the only hope you have. Not fighting back just cements you as a punching bag until you hang yourself in the closet.

Willie mentions that this advice came from his dad, and Brian asks if that’s the same grandfather that used to talk to corn chips. That’s an interesting bit of color. Willie’s dad must have gone through (or is going through) a period of dementia that Brian was around to see. I still don’t know if the guy’s alive or dead, but at least we know that during that ailing, helpless time of his life, the Tanners sat around making fun of him.

Whatever. Willie gets sick of talking to his son and initiates sex with the alien.

The next day, or whenever the hell everybody changes their shirts, Kate is pissed because ALF stuck all of his karate boards in the fireplace. She chews him out for wasting perfectly good lumber.

…and, sorry. But, yeah. Not even Anne Schedeen can sell that bullshit.

Of all the things Kate could have gotten mad at ALF for (leaving splinters everywhere comes to mind, or actually burning the wood but not opening the flue), she’s mad that he wasted perfectly good lumber.

Kate Tanner.

Says, out loud.

That she’s mad at him.

For “wasting perfectly good lumber.”

She tries, dear reader. She really does. But although Kate is large, and contains multitudes, she does not give a flying fuck about the Tanner supply of good lumber. And she certainly isn’t so emotionally invested in it that she’ll fly into a rage if good lumber isn’t put to appropriate use.

Good fucking lumber.

Good lumber my ass. God damn this awful show.

Brian comes home and reveals that even though he didn’t fight back, Bobby Duncan still rubbed a bunch of potting soil into his jacket.

ALF pops up through the plot window and suggests solving violence with violence, like they used to do on Melmac.

And then — you know what? — I just about forget about good lumber. Because there’s one hell of a tantalizing moment.

Willie hears this suggestion, and he pointedly asks him if he remembers what happened to Melmac.

ALF replies, “It blew up in a nuclear holocaust. Why?”

And…wow. That’s both a good joke and some nice, potential shading of ALF’s history. Willie, of course, tries to overexplain the connection to the audience, but I’m not disappointed by that. I want to know more. The fact that we don’t get a clear answer here isn’t a bad thing…if anything, it just shows what a good job the show did (accidentally, no doubt) of getting my ears to perk up.

Is the “violence with violence” approach the reason Melmac is gone? Maybe so and maybe not. The fact that ALF can’t see the connection between what he just said and the “nuclear holocaust” he remembers can mean one of two things:

1) He’s a fucking imbecile, because Melmac actually was destroyed in needless conflict and he’s learned nothing, or…

2) Willie’s wrong, and the nuclear accident that destroyed Melmac was coincidental, not caused at all by any sort of hostile act.

They both give up on the conversation, so that’s where we’re left. Maybe the show wants us to believe that it’s one of those things, specifically, and not the other, but, as far as I can tell, they’re both equally valid in the face of what little we’ve heard.

I wonder if we will get any kind of definitive answer about Melmac. I’m assuming not, but I have to admit that these little snatches of dialogue are interesting.

There’s another good line when Kate asks Brian if the bully insulted her again. Brian says, “No. Dad.” Surprised, Willie asks what Bobby said about him. Brian replies, “He said you must have been desperate to marry someone like mom.”

It’s a legitimately clever moment, and it’s not the last one in the episode. (It is the second to last one.)

That laugh dies pretty quickly, though, because ALF pops up through the plot window again to announce that he called Bobby’s father, impersonated Willie, threatened him, and invited the guy to come over and kick Willie’s teeth out.

Man, what an effortless way to advance the storyline. You’d hardly even notice how this episode was slapped together out of disparate script pages if I hadn’t pointed it out.

Damn that’s good lumber.

Bobby’s dad comes over and Willie stammers out a bunch of padded bullshit until the credits roll.

Well, not really. But that’s certainly how it feels. This Max Wright stutterlogue goes on so long that Paul Fusco starts to feel insecure, and we cut to ALF in the kitchen for no reason except to assure us that he hasn’t ceased to exist.

Anyway, Mr. Duncan starts hitting on Kate and calling Willie four-eyes, which is the single most hurtful insult in the world after all the rest of them. This makes Willie snap, and he calls Mr. Duncan “Shorty.”

The whole thing reeks of false escalation, but it leads to the best moment in the entire half hour. It gets no laugh from the audience, but I love it: Lynn steps into the tension of the living room and says, “Mom? Dad? Is it time for church yet?”

That was the best Lynn moment ever. I know she’s not the most reliable actor on the show, but when she wants to, Andrea Elson gives good lumber.

Willie physically throws the guy out of the house, and we hear the crashing of garbage cans. Though this is pretty fucking stupid even for ALF, there’s a valid sense of Willie having crossed a line.

Or maybe I’m just going easy on it because it leads to the second best Lynn moment ever when she makes this face:

The next day, or whenever the hell everybody changes into a robe, ALF is blabbing about how he called a bunch of people and threatened them on Willie’s behalf.

Remind me again why they don’t just sever ALF’s spine while he sleeps? Why the hell is he not even being threatened with eviction? He’s entering Willie in fucking Bloodsport.

Oh well. The important thing is that we’ve hijacked another Brian plot. There I was, stupidly thinking the episode about Brian getting beaten up would be about Brian getting beaten up. Little did I know it was actually about ALF siccing the city of Los Angeles on Willie’s pasty ass.

A serious sight for sore eyes, Mr. Ochmonek comes over with his wife. Funny how when the show started, it seemed like Mrs. Ochmonek was going to be the “main” neighbor, and her husband might or might not tag along. Liz Sheridan is by no means a bad actress (see Seinfeld, which made much better use of her talents), but Jack LaMotta leaves her in the dust, and I’d like to think that the writers at least appreciated what they had, and started using Mr. Ochmonek more, making his wife the optional add-on.

He congratulates Willie on knocking some sense into Mr. Duncan, because that guy’s kind of a dick. Kate asks how he knows about that, and Mrs. Ochmonek says she told everyone in town.

Tee hee, sure, but I’m only reporting that because it leads to a fucking gorgeous moment.

Mr. Ochmonek says, “Yeah. There’s three ways news can travel. Telephone, telegraph, and tell Raquel.”

On its own that’s nothing, but look at the screengrab again. Mrs. Ochmonek hears this joke — which she knows is coming, and which she must have heard a thousand times before — and turns to Kate with a huge smile as he tells it. “Isn’t he the best?” she’s asking silently.

This joke isn’t just lame, it’s extremely out of date. When was the last time anyone used the telegraph to spread news? Mr. Ochmonek is telling a joke he may well have told back when he was wooing Raquel* in high school.

And she still loves it.

She thinks her husband is hilarious. This isn’t a joke she’s sick of hearing…this is a reminder of why she fell in love with him in the first place. I can’t stress enough how lovely this moment is, and it bears repeating that I believe the Ochmoneks love each other. I do not believe that of the Tanners. These are the people I’d rather spend time with, because they’re at least recognizably human.

Then Mr. Ochmonek jokes about leaving before Willie throws him out “like yesterday’s garbage.” He even makes a little production out of carrying himself to the door by his shirt color.

Give them just a few lines and a little bit of physical business, and the Ochmoneks will show us what a difference it makes when we’re watching actual characters instead of people on a soundstage.

Mr. Duncan comes over again and Willie decides to show Brian that you don’t need to fight in order to resolve your problems. Then Mr. Duncan actually sees Brian and asks if that’s really the kid that gave Bobby a black eye, which is a twist marginally less believable than finding out Willie was formed in a lab accident.

Whatever. The guy’s being pretty nice overall, but he mentions he works as a scrap metal dealer, which for some reason causes the Tanners to make fun of him over and over again. Even Kate, with Anne Schedeen proving again that there’s only so much anyone can do with dreck like this.

The joke isn’t even that the Tanners are awful people. As far as I can tell, the joke is that this idiot works as a scrap metal dealer. What an idiot! Everyone, look at the idiot! This idiot probably wouldn’t know good lumber if it bashed his skull open, the idiot.

It actually makes me feel pretty bad for Mr. Duncan. He might be an asshole, but with no amount of self-awareness whatsoever, the writers are having the Tanners bully him, and hoping we’ll laugh along. When we last saw him, yes, he called Willie “four-eyes.” But, y’know, Willie retaliated by throwing him into a row of trash cans, so I don’t think it’s Mr. Duncan who needs a comeuppance.

He gets it anyway, though, when Kate, for some bullshit reason I don’t care about, grabs him and throws him into the garbage again because fuck you for having a crappy job the Tanners don’t approve of.

Willie then gets down on one knee and asks Brian to marry him. He also delivers this week’s moral to the audience: in spite of what we’ve just asked the folks watching at home to celebrate, violence is totally a bad thing, so don’t throw your neighbors into trash cans…but if you do, do it twice, I guess. I dunno. The episode’s over. If you don’t like it you can suck ALF’s balls.

In the short scene before the credits ALF fights one of those inflatable wobbler things that he calls “Mummy-hammad Ali.”

That’s all you need to know about that.

It ends with Lynn coming into the living room to announce that Brian and Bobby have stopped fighting. Why she’s delivering the news and not Brian himself is a question that can only be answered by the fact that Lynn is not played by Benji Gregory.

Ugh. This one was fucking lousy. And yet, there have certainly been worse. Oh well. This was the first episode on the final disc of season two. The end is in sight.

I can do this.

MELMAC FACTS: On Melmac somebody called ALF a snitch, just because ALF turned him in to the Secret Police. ALF says they used to call him Sugar Ray Shumway, but he never got far as a fighter owing to his “glass nose.” Raccy the Raccoon was a hero on Melmac who taught everyone to wash their food before they ate it. On Melmac they had no respect for good lumber.

—–
* Yes, her name is Raquel. I know I’ve only ever referred to them as Mr. and Mrs. Ochmonek, but that was because I thought it was funny to do so. Now that they’re both becoming characters, though, I may show them some proper respect by using their first names when appropriate. So, here you go. They are Raquel and Trevor.

Well, Jodie’s gone and she’s never coming back, which means it’s time to return to the weekly parade of distracting guest stars so that the writers don’t have to bother developing their main characters.

That’s not to say that “You Ain’t Nothin’ But a Hound Dog” is without merit, but it is to say that it’s much closer to a standard episode of ALF than it is to…you know. Something good.

We do open with a real surprise, though: Brian.

Yep, that’s him! On screen! Saying and doing things! Of course, it’s not a very reassuring sign that he’s taken to wearing a shirt with his name on it. I guess it helps keep his family from forgetting who he is, but it’s still kind of sad.

This is tremendously funny to me. We don’t see Max Wright wearing a WILLIE shirt, but 19 episodes into season two the writers haven’t done enough with this kid to feel secure that we’ll even recognize who he is.

Anyway, “Brian” (if his shirt is to be believed) has found a dog. ALF somehow fucked up the Tanners’ chimney, so he’s cutting hedges as punishment. At last we can add asphyxiation to the list of ways ALF has thrust this family into mortal danger.

Brian shows ALF how to play fetch with the dog, and ALF responds by lightly lobbing a stick over the fence. It travels at a speed and angle that couldn’t possibly connect with the Ochmoneks’ window, but we hear it shatter in an explosion of glass as though a fucking horse just ran through it, so what do I know about physics? Remember back in “Isn’t it Romantic?” when I hoped that, for Benji Gregory’s sake, ALF had a great foley artist? Well…now we can officially dismiss that possibility.

Willie comes running out, and Mr. Ochmonek shouts that he’s coming over. Of course, Willie yells loudly at ALF, calling him by name, telling him to run off and hide, and reminding him that he’s always taking the fall for ALF’s antics. All good points, Willie, but is this the best time to be bringing them up? So loudly? When you know your neighbor is within earshot? And when you also know he’ll be stepping into the back yard in a matter of seconds?

Sorry, but that’s stupid on a number of levels excessive even for ALF.

Willie hands Mr. Ochmonek $20, but Mr. O says that he’ll need $80 this time, because he’s putting in Plexiglass. He explains to Willie, “It’ll be cheaper for you in the long run.”

See? However many times this family of assholes smashes up Mr. Ochmonek’s property, he’s still nice to them, joking around and saving them money. Tell me again why we’re supposed to see him as the bad neighbor?

Jack LaMotta does this great little physical flourish when he comes over, flipping the stick ALF threw into the air and catching it as he walks. This is a major part of the reason I came to love Mr. Ochmonek: Jack LaMotta knows who he is. I can guarantee that almost none of Mr. O’s physical business was in the scripts; the writers, we can say conclusively, weren’t that interested in developing any of these clowns. Which means LaMotta, like Anne Schedeen before him, made these decisions for himself. He saw what was on the page, figured out what kind of character would say those things, and fleshed out the character himself.

Did the writing staff know how Mr. Ochmonek would carry himself when stepping onto Willie’s property with the stick that broke his window? I promise you they did not. But Jack LaMotta knew, and I have a massive amount of respect for that. From what I understand he didn’t enjoy working on the show any more than anyone else did, but based on his performance alone, I wouldn’t be able to find evidence of that.

Anyway, Willie says they can keep the dog, wherever the fuck it came from, the dog growls at ALF, and we get our credits. That has to be the longest opening sequence yet. In fairness, though, it managed set up a lot of things that could be explored in the rest of the episode: the broken chimney, Mr. Ochmonek’s windows, Brian enjoying his new dog, the dog hating ALF, Willie at wit’s end…

Oh, who am I kidding. None of this shit pays off in any way. The opening scene isn’t long because it’s establishing things we need to know; it’s long because it’s padded.

I miss Jodie. :(

ALF is under the table or something who cares.

He’s feeling around for a plate of raw steaks, which Kate moves out of the way. She then places her hand on the table instead, and when ALF feels it he hesitates for a moment…then stands up, shakes it, and introduces himself. It’s a cute little moment, and the sort of thing I’d like to see more often on this show.

Kate then notices that a steak is missing, and blames ALF. ALF says he didn’t do it, but…well…he was clearly going to do it, so I’m not sure we can feel too sorry that he’s being falsely accused.

She doesn’t believe him, and she tells him he’s not getting dinner as punishment. Now this seems like a good angle for the episode; the new dog misbehaves, doing all the things that ALF has done often enough in the past (eating food that isn’t his, ripping up the furniture, shitting on the rug) so that ALF keeps getting blamed, even when he’s innocent.

That sounds like a pretty good half hour to me, and it could lead to some fun, character-based comedy. But then Lynn walks in with the dog explaining that the dog ate the steak so…I guess that’s that. Why bother setting up the “ALF is wrongfully accused” angle if they’re going to dismantle it with the very next line?

There’s a very well-observed moment next, though, when Kate walks over to the dog to scold it. She kneels down, says, “Bad dog!” and then immediately starts fawning over it and apologizing.

Schedeen absolutely sells the comedy of that instant reversal, but even without her that would have probably worked as a smart gag. Dogs absolutely have the innate ability to defuse their own punishments with their big eyes and their droopy tails.

There was nothing my old dog could do wrong that I wouldn’t feel terrible about scolding her for. She could spill the trash, eat my dinner, knock something fragile over…and I’d send her to her bed, but then I’d always — always — melt when I saw her apologetic eyes staring back at me.

Usually I could hold it inside and let her stew, because that really would be the only way she’d learn, but even then I’d be dying inside. Yes, she knew what she did was wrong, and yes, she had to learn that certain behavior was not acceptable, but she is SO CUTE AND FLUFFY AND OHH COME HERE. OHHHH WHO’S A BAD DOG. OHHH YOU ARE. YESSS YOU ARE. OHHHH WHO WANTS A TUMMY RUB

ALF, understandably, thinks this is bullshit.

Kate tells ALF not to sulk. It’s just a dog, and it doesn’t know any better. ALF says, “Ignorance is no excuse.” Then Kate shoots perfect daggers directly into his soul and says, “Ignorance is your excuse all the time.”

And that, ladies and gentlemen, is probably my favorite exchange the show has had yet. Both sides have perfectly valid points, and both sides are willfully overlooking things. It’s an intelligent way to structure this conversation, boiling the entire dialogue down to two very potent lines, and in this case it only works because of Schedeen.

The scolding / apology a moment ago was a strong enough concept that even the worst actor on the show could have probably pulled it off. Here, though, it only works because of Schedeen’s commitment to it. She delivers her rejoinder perfectly, and the bemused tone of voice she adopts is spot-on, as is her body language. I cannot stress enough what an asset she is to ALF. Often, she’s its only asset.

We then get another well-observed moment of dog ownership: Lynn tells the family to watch as she issues commands. She tells the dog to speak…and it doesn’t. After a moment, though, it lies down, and the Tanners laugh and coo.

ALF, of course, doesn’t join in* but the reactions of the rest of the family are perfect. Dogs are indeed adorable when they do tricks. Dogs are exactly as adorable when they fail to do tricks, or misinterpret commands. People end up fawning over every little thing a dog does, from sneezing to snapping at a fly to twitching its little feet while it sleeps. They get so much credit for doing literally nothing more than being themselves that it’s an inherently funny thing to draw attention to.

Sadly, we find out later in the episode that that’s not what’s going on here at all. The dog’s real owner taught it, for some reason, to respond improperly to voice commands, so this well-observed moment is turned retroactively into a brainless throwaway gag. Well done, ALF.

Also, we learn that Brian named the dog Alfina, which almost seems like my wish for “We’re So Sorry, Uncle Albert,” in which Uncle Albert was instead Uncle Alfred — a human double pulling the same shit ALF pulls — might be coming true here, with a misbehaving dog in his place. Especially with the whole dog-eating-the-steak setup earlier. This would be a chance (arguably an even better one) to filter ALF’s normal behavior through an outsider, and reveal to the alien how dickawful he is.

But, no. It’s a decent little suggestion that the dog is replacing ALF…but even that doesn’t pan out. I’ll get to why shortly.

The evil mom from The Goonies comes over and says she saw one of the Lost Dog posters Brian hung up. She swears it’s hers, even though she doesn’t know its gender, doesn’t recognize it, and doesn’t know its name. (“Come here, dog,” doesn’t get a fake audience laugh, but I liked it.)

It’s a little sad to see Anne Ramsey here, especially since she’s in overtly poor health. Looking up the spelling of her name I found out that this was indeed one of her last roles, and that’s upsetting. Her walk is clearly pained and her line delivery barely this side of comprehensible. The joke is supposed to be that this is a stingy old argumentative coot, but with the state she’s in it feels a lot more like we’re supposed to be laughing at her for being at the brink of death.

I can’t express just how much this shakes me up, but I can’t blame ALF for this. It happens on great shows, too. Elaine Stritch toward the end of 30 Rock was so obviously ailing that it became uncomfortable to watch. Richard Dunn always looked like he was at death’s door during the run of Tim and Eric Awesome Show, Great Job, and even though that was offset somewhat by how thrilled he was that he found such popularity with an audience so late in his life, the fact was that he could clearly go at any time.

And then he did.

So, no, I don’t blame ALF. But this is heartbreaking to watch. Especially since we’re supposed to hate her here. (Something that admittedly wasn’t true of Stritch or Dunn.)

It’s a genuine shame we didn’t get a rewrite (or a re-casting, as much as I hate to say that) once Ramsey’s rapidly declining health was seen by the production staff, because as it plays out we end up with Willie being a raging dick toward a woman who doesn’t seem ornery so much as she seems lost in the hallucinations of a fading mind.

The dog growls at her, and Willie tells this dying old lady to go fuck herself.

Then she gives him her number in case he changes his mind and leaves, at which point we watch Willie carefully shit his pants. At least that’s the only explanation I have for what we see him do here:

I don’t know. I guess he’s flinching from her, but Max Wright forgot to do it until after she turned around and left, making it look unprovoked and like an untreated symptom of St. Vitus dance.

Brian takes Alfina for a walk, and then ALF pops up through the plot window, moping that the boy is no longer interested in “the alien they left behind.” It’s not a joke, because the fake audience of dead people doesn’t tell us it’s one, so we’re actually supposed to feel sorry for him.

I’d like to.

Really. I would. But since ALF has made literally no effort to bond with this kid ever, I don’t know what he thinks he’s bitching about. We’ve seen them watch Gilligan’s Island together. We’ve seen him put Brian to work on his backyard plantation. And he talked some rambling bullshit to the kid about how he was once Don Quixote. I might be forgetting something, but I certainly can’t be forgetting much. ALF simply has never given much of a crap about Brian. Period.

Of course, this too could be a great inroad for the plot. ALF never bothered to bond with Brian…and now Brian is bonding with something else. ALF’s jealousy could play out in several ways for comic effect, and the episode could end with ALF realizing that he is the one to blame. The problem isn’t that Brian is sick of him…the problem is that ALF himself never put forth any effort, so the kid moved on. It’d be a bit like the realization at the end of “Cat’s in the Cradle,” except instead of the kid having a father who realizes what a mess he’s made of their relationship, he has an alien who rapes him a bunch.

Whatever. The point is that there are an infinite number of ways to handle this setup…and nearly all of them would be better than what we actually got.

Very early the next morning, ALF brings Willie his paper in bed, Kate tells him to fuck fucking off, and ALF complains that dogs get treated better than aliens around here. Which would probably have been a more compelling argument in an episode that didn’t open with this alien smashing up their neighbors’ windows.

He then finds that the dog has taken his bed. Fortunately it hasn’t truly taken over ALF’s place in the family, though, because it’s just lying there and not masturbating to Lynn’s unmentionables.

The dog yawns or licks its chops or something, and those masterful foley artists lay a totally incongruous growl over top of it. Startled by the dog’s impressive display of ventriloquism, ALF shits everywhere.

The next morning Willie and Kate cook ALF his all time favorite Sunday breakfast: naked pictures of Brian.

Sorry. They make his second favorite: French toast, Jell-O, and spaghetti. They’re doing this by way of apology. You know, because they busted up some windows and blamed him for it, broke his chimney, woke him up in the middle of the night for no reason…

Oh, wait. That’s all the crap he did. Why are they apologizing to him? Because he’s jealous of the dog? Fuck you, ALF. You send Willie to Gitmo without batting an eye, but they’re supposed to drop everything and kiss your feet because a better behaved animal is getting attention more attention than you?

This happens a lot in this show. ALF fucks some shit up and / or places the family in mortal danger, then they either apologize to him or thank him. Granted, in some cases he does actually save them (“Come Fly With Me”), but that should hardly get top billing over the fact that he’s the one that endangered them in the first place.

Anyway, they ask where the dog is and ALF reveals that he murdered it with a screwdriver.

A little girl comes over with one of Brian’s posters and says it’s her dog, Francesca. I don’t know how she knows that, since there’s no picture of the dog on the flier, and in fact has nothing printed on it apart from Andrea Elson’s next lines, but, whatever. Lynn, not knowing yet that ALF has disemboweled the dog in their bathtub, invites the girl in.

Where’s Brian in this scene? Seriously, why wasn’t he the character who answered the door? We could have had a scene between two little kids who are attached to the same dog. They both want it…they both feel entitled to it…but it rightfully belongs to the girl, and Brian has to learn to let go.

I like that idea. I don’t even care if you do, because the main point is that this episode about Brian bonding with the dog, which hinged a seemingly pivotal moment on ALF’s realization that Brian was bonding with the dog, is almost completely devoid of Brian.

It’s bizarre, and it has to be a joke at this point. Right? Not only are they making a point of not integrating him into stories that don’t need him, but they’re crowding him out of the stories that do need him.

Willie and Kate go into the kitchen to fist ALF to death. He admits he gave the dog away, but defends himself on the grounds that Brian was getting too attached to it.

See? This is a Brian episode, and he’s barely in it. The only thing we’ve seen him do with the dog is take it out for a walk, and the camera stayed behind while they were gone because fuck Brian. This kid isn’t even getting invited to his own parties anymore.

The dog is currently in the home of that woman who is going to be dead in a few weeks, so Willie heads over to throw her from the train.

I have no idea how much time is meant to have passed in this episode. I thought the whole episode up until ALF tries to sleep in his bed is the first (and only) day that the family has the dog, judging by the fact that their outfits don’t change and the dog doesn’t seem to have found anywhere else to sleep. The next morning is when they try to cook ALF breakfast, but that’s also the morning on which he reveals that the dog is gone.

Fine. But there’s also some worry during that scene because Willie and Kate know that the dog “usually” comes running when they’re cooking. It’s a bit early to say that if it’s only the next day, and way too early to be worried that the “usual” routine — of, what, 15 hours? — has been interrupted. So I have no fucking clue what’s going on except that this lady has the dog and who the hell cares how quickly time does or doesn’t pass in this dumbass show.

She demands $500 for the dog, and man is it hard to watch this. Ramsey’s speech is noticeably slurred, and she’s barely mobile. Then it gets even more unintentionally heartbreaking when her ex-boyfriend starts pounding on the door. We don’t see him until later, but we hear his voice, and IMDB informs me that the ex-boyfriend is played by Logan Ramsey, her real life husband. Anne died the same year this episode aired, and Logan died in 2000, twelve years later.

The running joke that these two hideous people could be in any way attracted to each other sure is a sour swansong for their lives together. In fact, the mere suggestion that this lady has or ever had a sex life is enough to make Willie do this:

Your social worker, ladies and gentleman.

Ugh. They really, really should have changed this script once they saw how poorly Anne Ramsey was. It’s not in good fun when she spends her time between scenes making funeral arrangements.

Her ex threatens to beat the piss out of whatever guy she has in there with her, so Willie jumps out the window and this show sucks.

Back at the ranch, ALF is trying to console Brian, who might as well be in the episode again, I guess. He’s not successful at talking the kid out of his funk, but ALF does get a good line when he suggests they go shoot some hoops: “I’ll get the pea-shooter. You see if the Hoops are in their back yard.”

Yeah, yeah. Sue me. I liked it.

Brian isn’t caving, though. He’s inconsolable, which we can tell from the fact that he sits in emotionless ignorance of anything going on around him. Just like every other episode.

Willie comes home and apologizes that he couldn’t get the dog back. Brian stomps off, pissed, but why? Had Willie gotten the dog, it still wouldn’t be Brian’s. It belongs to that little girl, and Wilile was getting it back for her. I can understand the idea that he’d be upset on her behalf, but that’s not what’s happening here. He’s mad because he doesn’t have the dog anymore…but no matter how things went with Mama Fratelli, that dog wasn’t coming back to the Tanner house.

Speaking of which, why didn’t Willie just cough up the $500? Yeah, it’s a lot of money, but he pays ten times that amount monthly to keep his alien happy. He won’t set some money aside — taking it out of ALF’s damage allowance, natch — to help this little girl get her dog back?

Fuck. You. Willie.

ALF feels bad so he sneaks up to the old lady’s window dressed as Sarah Portland. I don’t know what his plan actually was, because the phone conveniently rings, she leaves the room, and he’s free to just waltz inside. We never find out who was on the phone, so I guess the writers didn’t know what the plan was, either.

While ALF is in her living room, her ex-boyfriend comes back. ALF hides, Mr. Ramsey talks about how much he wants to fuck her. Mrs. Ramsey talks about how much she wants to be fucked by him. Then they head into the other room to fuck. HAVE I MENTIONED THIS WAS AN EXCELLENT SHOW FOR FAMILIES

Then ALF starts to lead the dog out the front door. Seriously, what was his plan? If the phone didn’t ring and / or she didn’t get her hands on the treasure of One-Eyed Willie, what exactly was ALF going to do to get the dog out of there?

Whatever. ALF hears the two hideous creatures porkin’ the night away, and starts walking over with the intention of spying on them.

“No,” he says, stopping himself. “Some things are best left to the imagination.”

What a seriously perverse fucking show. And what a horrible way to cap off Ramsey’s career. I’d have been less disgusted if they just dug her up and peed on her.

In the short scene before the credits, the little girl gets her dog back. Brian doesn’t seem to give more than a quarter of a shit at most, further confusing the issue of why he was angry before. And everything else that happened in this episode, for that matter.

The little girl tells him that he can come over and play whenever he wants, and his boner at being invited to participate in anything for the first time in 44 episodes can be seen from space.

THE END

MELMAC FACTS: ALF played Camille in his high school play. One of the common expressions on Melmac was, “If you love something, set it free. If it comes back to you, it’s yours. If it gets run over by a car, you don’t want it.”

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* He does make gagging gestures in the background through, and there’s a remarkable show of restraint on the part of the editors for not cutting to an extreme closeup of ALF doing this, a rushing crescendo of fake audience appreciation carrying us through to the act break.