Ruxin seems to be a glutton for punishment this season, and this episode continued that trend as Taco tortured Ruxin by tricking him into throwing an anniversary party for his wife. But is Taco really that evil and smart? There’s no way to tell if he is just a completely oblivious of his actions or an evil genius.
My vote: evil genius. There’s room on the dark side for more than just Ruxin, and Taco’s brilliant in his simplicity. Someone get this man a white kitty to pet. (Don’t take that the wrong way.)
From the start, Taco’s in Ruxin’s business—and in his home. Ruxin comes in from work to find his wife, Sofia, with Taco. And no, not like that, even though it would be the first assumption when you find Taco with your wife, but Taco is just Ruxin’s teasing stallion.
Instead of doing the horizontal Macarena, Taco and Sofia are “girl talking” about Ruxin and Sofia’s wedding anniversary. Taco is collecting photos for a “very special gift” he’s planning and makes Ruxin look like the “anniversary grinch” for not having anything planned for the occasion.
By the end of Taco’s visit, whether by evil design or sheer luck, he’s forced Ruxin into promising a “surprise” anniversary party for Sofia with all their friends at the restaurant where he first proposed. Evil or idiot? Still can’t tell. You want to think the guy was planning this all along, but at the same time, he appears completely unaware that he is facing Ruxin’s fantasy football team that weekend—thinking he has a bye week.
Ruxin sends out the invites, immediately irritating Jenny because her birthday is the same day as the party, just as her birthday was the same day as the Ruxin wedding. Her birthday always gets passed over for subsequent wedding anniversaries, and she’s fed up with it. But this party won’t ruin her weekend. She’s not the type. Sofia’s the one who would slowly poison someone over a period of months without an ounce of remorse…Ruxin should really hire an official tester…
When the league gathers for lunch the next day for one of their many trash-talking gatherings, usually kept to the bar, Ruxin explains how sensitive his palate is. So maybe he can handle his own poison detection. He’s too snooty for the grub the rest of the gang is inhaling since his palate is much more refined than his league mates’ mere mortal taste. He’d rather hit up the gastropub for some “edamame foam.”
Andre’s rocking a bedazzled Kardashian of a Bluetooth in his ear. There are few ways to make a Bluetooth earpiece more ugly than most of them already are. I, myself, have tried and failed to find one that would work for me. I really only end up using them for conference calls because I don’t want to be that guy that roams around with a Bluetooth in his ear at all times, constantly challenging anyone around him to decide whether he is A) crazy B) talking to someone else or C) talking to the person right in front of him.
Come to find out, this Bluetooth is just one stage in a long line of boyfriend chameleoning for Andre. ANOTHER WORD FOR THE LEXICON. Let it be defined:
“Boyfriend chameleon” — A male so desperate for shared interests that he basically just adopts the hobbies of the woman he is dating
The blinged out ear accessory is his chameleon way of connecting with his new girlfriend, a techie deep Googler you’ll soon love to hate—or will you hate to love her?
Ruxin announces to the group that Meegan will be at the part-ay…WITH a plus one. Oh snap! Pete bout to get all mad up in this motha…wait, no?
He’s not mad. He’s fine with it. It’s like he’s a bigger man…but we know that isn’t the case.
Pete rushed back to the office to his up the bathroom, but at the threshold to the poop room, Pete is stuck debating what to do with his leftover sandwich from lunch: A) leave it outside the bathroom or B) take it inside, where poop particles are just waiting to jump on that baby and give him dysentery. Believe me, the potty mouth disease is a complete buzzkill, and unlike Oregon Trail, you don’t get to write a witty one-liner on a tombstone. You just have to tough it out.
Not wanting to lose his sandwich, Pete opts to bring it into the danger zone, and he pays the price. A burly fellow office worker hits the stall before Pete can dive on the grenade for his sandwich and get out of there, ruining the bathroom-tainted food forever.
Side note here: What exactly does Pete…do? I didn’t think he had an office. He always seems to be working from home. Is his job fantasy football? Is he…my hero? The office is the first thing to suggest otherwise.
At the anniversary party, we find Ruxin and Sofia greeting all the guests at the door. Jenny’s still pissed that the party is on her birthday, and she takes a few stabs at Sofia for still focusing on their anniversary rather than wishing Jenny “Happy birthday.”
Somehow both ladies come out without wrestling in oil or Jell-O. We all lose. But there’s always next time.
Pete shows up with an ice cream sandwich. Yes, it’s that random. But he does explain: “When do you ever see an ice cream truck anymore? I had to go for it.”
When the ice cream truck appears, it must be taken advantage of. The same rule applies to open bars and impressionable foreign supermodels.
But we’ve ignored the really important oddity in Pete’s other hand. Pete has invented a “bathroom cubby,” a cubby to store food outside of the bathroom until you emerge, clean and free of poop particles, to retrieve it.
I wondered when we’d advance as a culture beyond Everyone Poops. THIS is that day (and THIS is funny).
Ruxin, being the sophisticated gent that he is, loves the bathroom cubby: “I won’t even chew gum and go into the bathroom because I’ll end up chewing whatever it is I smell in there.” And so, Pete immediately installs it at the party.
Meegan arrives with her plus one, and it’s an old dude. Is this the 15-year gap they talk about in L.A.? Did they make in time for him to get his senior discount? ZING!
But this old guy, Ted, is actually a baller. He thanks Pete for letting him have his chance at Meegan (must be a fan of that finger trick) and upstages Pete’s bathroom cubby with a gift for Ruxin and Sofia, a Nepalese Dream Box from Nepal.
Everyone immediately falls in love with Ted’s George Clooney-like, grey-haired charm. But Pete is determined to embarrass Ted in front of all of Meegan’s friends, especially when Meegan insists that Ted can hang with even the best of Pete’s breed, the heavy drinking layabouts.
Filming for his blog on the way in (Did this just get meta?), Andre introduces his deep Googling techie girlfriend, Stacy. Somehow she page five-ed every member of the league and dug up plenty of Google dirt on them in the process. THIS IS WHY YOU SHOULD STOP SEXTING AND POSTING PARTY PICS, KIDS!
On an archived Prodigy page, she found (and read) Ruxin’s poetry. It seems he was expressing some homoerotic fan fiction: “Hernando rode the gallows of his love into my heart.” Stacy also brings up Sofia’s nose job, a sore spot for the self-absorbed hottie.
As they sit down to dinner, Ruxin wants to say a few words, but his speech is soon interrupted by Kevin, who claims to be so touched by the night’s events that he has to give an emotional salute to his own wife, Jenny, and thanks her for being his wife. Jenny eats it up and turns into putty. And that, my friends, is good husbandry (of the non-farm variety).
Pete (and Meegan’s prodding) pressure Ted into ordering bacon-wrapped steak instead of salmon. Ted one-ups the fantasy football league by revealing that he’s in an actual, no pads, football in the mud league “like Favre in those Wrangler ads” (Thanks, Kevin). But not like these ads. That’s some salt of the earth, Chuck Norris stuff right there. So they move on to shots and dancing.
Meanwhile, the ladies go all Sex and the City, and Meegan tells Jenny that Ted’s some powerfully tuned, Italian muscle car in comparison to Pete’s gas-guzzling Trans Am. If only Pete had heard that; those words be real fighting words.
Ruxin bumps into Andre and explains how Andre’s techie girl’s tweets about the party are getting him in trouble—his cousin, who wasn’t invited, happens to be one of her 831 followers. But Andre has more pertinent news to share: Cedric Benson has been ruled out for tomorrow’s game. Ruxin’s got to change his lineup.
But Taco sweeps in, again through dark side brilliance or ridiculously good timing, to enforce the “no phone” policy alongside Sofia. Still can’t tell whether he’s an evil genius or an “I love lamp.”
The real kicker of the party is Taco’s movie premiere. Tacos shot behind-the-scenes footage of Ruxin and Sofia’s wedding in secret, and he debuts his creation, finally edited, for the party as his wedding/anniversary present. What’s just a few years late, right?
Highlights include Sofia prancing around in lingerie before the wedding, Pete and Meegan sneaking away to handle some bidness in the coat closet, Andre chameleoning into an African themed suit for his date, and Ruxin’s cold feet rant about how Sofia’s “conquistador” family will pillage and plunder his Jewish relatives.
Kevin calms down Ruxin by passing down a trick he’d obviously perfected and refined like some kind of relationship guru. Strangely similar to Kevin’s exact speech tonight, he instructs Ruxin on the art of emotional word porn: “Love is a [insert any noun you want, any noun you want!]”
Oh, we are all so busted.
By the end of the video, every couple is in a fight besides Andre and Stacy, who were probably live tweeting the video anyway. #GreatEvent!
Ruxin believes the only thing that can save him from Sofia’s wrath is the top of the original wedding cake, but he takes a detour when he sees Andre’s iPad in the bathroom cubby.
He takes it into the bathroom to finally change his lineup, but Andre retaliates by bringing the precious top of the cake into the bathroom as well. When Ted comes flying in, falling apart at the seams in his competition with Pete, he bumps Andre, who drops the cake onto the floor. URINAL CAKE!
Without another alternative, Ruxin does the unthinkable. He salvages the cake, takes it into the main room, and presents it to Sofia. He attempts to kill it by dropping it to the ground in front of Sofia, but Taco, in an impeccably timed flash of dexterity, saves it Spider-Man-style before it hits the ground.
Ruxin has no choice but to bite the bullet. In this case, the bullet is a dirty bathroom floor cake. So Ruxin has a gutter palate after all.
Ruxin, still crying a little, gets hoisted into the air on a chair along with Sofia, but the competition has started to wear Ted down. His old Brett Favre-ian body can’t take this abuse. He eventually suffers a heart attack, falling to the floor and causing a domino effect that takes Sofia and Ruxin out as well. #Hardfall!
At the end of the night, we end as we began with Kevin and Jenny.
Kevin apologizes for gaming the system with his love speech, but by now, Jenny is over it. She actually enjoyed the “train wreck” excitement of the party’s complete collapse.
I felt the same way, Jenny. The same way.
The one-liners you know and love from Episode 6
KEVIN: “You look like gay Iron Man.”
KEVIN: “You’re being selfishly selfless.” PETE: “I prefer the term altruistically self-serving”
RUXIN: “You look like a Russian figure skater.”
PETE: “Thanks for being emotionally above board and awesome, Ted!”
STACY: “How many times do I have to poke you before you accept my friend request on
Facebook?”
SOFIA: “Shits natural, bitch!”
MEEGAN: “A 30-year-old sloth is far less useful to me than a 60-year-old, finely tuned machine.”
ANDRE: “That’s what you get when you live your life on the net.” RUXIN: “You know, your life on the Net is even sadder than your life on Earth.”
KEVIN: “You look great, Dr. Huxtable”
ANDRE: “Hashtag #Hardfall!”
TACO: “Meegan, is your dad okay?”
Looking to the next episode: I hope we get to find out whether Taco’s smart or not. Someday. But really, I hope there’s more fantasy football talk. Isn’t it time for somebody to trade? Or trade rape?
