1. Thesis
Finally! Episodes which stand on their own merits. The Big House and The Road Worrier represent a real step forward in quality relative to what we've so far, something much more representative of the overall quality of the show. But there's something else that differentiates these episodes, and that is the relative absence of <cue Ms. Li voice> Lawndale High. In fact, unlike every other episode so far, neither episode this week has even a single scene set inside a classroom. In fact, The Road Worrier never even shows the school. And it occurred to me that a similar dynamic holds with a lot of "high school" stories: all the action takes place elsewhere. Ferris Bueller's Day Off, Can't Hardly Wait, Dazed And Confused: all of these are about being away from high school. Why do those movies, and these episodes of Daria, achieve their greatest success only by abandoning their ostensible subject? As you might guess, I have a theory. Read on.
2. Recap
Short: When Daria and Quinn come home late, Helen comes up with a set of ground rules, which includes a strict curfew.
Long: Daria and Quinn both arrive home late and are caught by their parents. The next morning, Helen announces a new set of family rules, which Quinn immediately evades by rebranding her date as a "study group." The next morning Jake realizes that Quinn backdated her sign-in the previous night, resulting in a session of Family Court. As Daria relates these events to Jane at school, Jodie offers tickets to a roller hockey game between the faculty and local DJs, which nearly killed Mr. DeMartino the previous year. In Family Court, where Jake is the judge and Helen is the prosecutor, Quinn and (for some reason) Daria are grounded for a month. The next day at Lawndale, Daria reveals that she is grounded, surprising everyone and baffling Kevin. The first night of grounding passes slowly; Quinn monopolizes the phone. Kevin and Brittany continue to misunderstand what is going on. Daria takes up the harmonica. The ripple effects of Kevin's confusion cause Jodie and Jane to visit during a game of Monopoly, inspiring her to plan an escape to see the roller hockey game, which turns out to be simpler than she'd expected, though her parents do discover her absence. The next day, Daria convinces Helen that grounding makes everyone unhappy, and agrees to "parole," during which she finally convinces Kevin that she is all right.
The Road Worrier
Short: Jane volunteers gas money if Trent and Jesse will take them to the upcoming Alternapalooza concert.
Long: At Jane's, Daria watches SSW while Jane works on an art project, which is interrupted by an extremely loud rehearsal for Trent's band, Mystik Spiral. Knowing Daria's crush on Trent, Jane drags her to go complain about the noise, Daria struggles to act normal and suppress her dislike for the band. Trent mentions that they're going to Alternapalooza and need gas money, Jane volunteers to chip in in exchange for a ride. At Cashman's, the Fashion Club is also planning a trip to Alternapalooza; Quinn gets a temporary tattoo to get in the spirit, leading to a discussion of music festivals at dinner that night (Jake went to Altamont). Upstairs, Daria sees Quinn's "alternative" outfit and reveals that she is also going. The next morning, Jesse and Trent arrive in their van, which only has two seats, so Daria and Jane sit on a box in the back, though only after Daria bumps her head getting in. The J's arrive for Quinn. In the van, Trent and Jesse discuss artistic integrity, to the disgust of both Daria and Jane. Daria feels ill, then falls onto an old sandwich when Trent hits a bump. We see that Kevin and Brittany are also going, along with Jodie and Mack. Daria gets stung by a bee. Meanwhile, back home, Helen and Jake are, well, they're having sex is what they're doing. The van stops at a diner (complete with stereotypically sassy waitress) where Daria laments her day, and as soon as they get back on the road they become stuck in traffic. Daria has to pee, and goes behind some bushes, then is surprised not to be made fun of. The rest of the Lawndale students stop in the same diner as the gang plays games to pass the time, but Trent hits another bump, causing Daria's glasses to get broken, just before the engine breaks down. Jane goes off with Jesse to find a phone, as Brittany and Sandy hijack the other two cars to go outlet shopping. Daria and Trent have a fairly normal conversation while they wait, Jane and Jesse couldn't find help but Jane fixes the engine with a glue gun, though not before the concert ends. As they drive home, Daria smiles.
3. Recapitulation
So, up in part one, you may well have thought of any number of counterexamples, high school movies that do stay in the school. And you are correct! The first to jump to my mind were The Breakfast Club and Mean Girls, and there are plenty of others. But what I suddenly realized about those movies and others like them is this: they are really about middle school.
(Note: there is another reasonably large category: high school stories that are adaptations of other works, such as Clueless, The Perks of Being a Wallflower, 10 Things I Hate About You, etc. I'm leaving them out of this discussion.)
While I was instantly convinced of the truth of my observation, it took me a bit longer to determine what exactly it was I was observing. What did I mean, really? What distinguished these stories as "middle school" in particular? The conclusion I reached was this: "middle school" drama is clique-based. Conflicts are almost always about a.) Who is or is not part of a given clique, and/or b.) Competition between cliques.
High school, however, isn't really like that. Certainly cliques exist, and are taken seriously, but the wider scope of high school gives each of them enough security that conflicts are generally within the clique, and even then, they rarely threaten anyone's membership. By high school, people tend to have more conflicts with their elders than their peers. Middle schoolers seek acceptance, high schoolers seek independence.
With that distinction in mind, Daria is pretty clearly a high school drama. Friendships are rarely threatened (even in the People's Front of Judea that is the Fashion Club), and Daria tends to clash with family and teachers more frequently than with her fellow students. But, like much else in this first season, that distinction is coming more from instinct than design. The show is (and will continue to be) enamored with the idea that it presents a conflict between "brains" and "popular people" (as personified by Daria and Quinn). And the general cartoonishness of the Morgendorffers' fellow Lawndale students would hardly look out of place next to Regina George or Ally Sheedy or, for that matter, Minkus.
But these two episodes (mostly) leave all that nonsense behind. In retrospect, "The Big House" is an ironic title, because it's an episode that actually sets Daria free. In TBH, Daria directly confronts her parents, and over the most fundamental conflict of adolescence: her right to independence. Not only that, but she wins, and that against a woman in Helen who is not accustomed to losing. Then, in TRW, Daria confronts the fear that has been haunting her (like all of us) since puberty: the fear, not just of being rejected by a boy she likes, but of disgusting him. And to her amazement, she finds that said boy (i.e., Trent) enjoys her company just fine! A full day of pain and embarrassment is made worthwhile by this single moment of realization. And it's a realization that, in middle school, Daria would have been incapable of making.
4. Closeup
So, let's talk a bit about Helen and Jake. We learn a bit more about them in these two episodes, particularly TBH. We've known since the first scene of the series that Helen is the dominant partner in the relationship, but this episode provides an inside look at their relationship, and gives us a more nuanced look at how it works. Helen's dominance is still clear: not only was Jake not consulted in the new family rules, he didn't even think that Daria and Quinn had misbehaved in the first place. What's interesting is the balance that he strikes: he certainly supports Helen and in general, and it would take a lot for him to contradict her, especially in front of the children. But he also clearly has his own independent point of view, and knows it. He is generally of the "if it ain't broke, don't fix it" persuasion, and he (correctly) feels that his kids are essentially good, well-behaved children. But when Helen summons him to hold court, he unhesitatingly accepts.
Part of this is the admittedly patronizing way that Helen manipulates him, giving him the empty position of "judge" when both of them know that Helen will always be, to coin a phrase, the decider. And there is an element to their relationship that is almost distasteful; Helen really does treat Jake like a child, and he really does play into it, completely falling for her cynical attempt to co-opt him through what is essentially a game of dress up. His self-satisfied "I hear that judge is pretty tough" line more or less epitomizes this.
And yet, ultimately their relationship is pretty healthy. Part of this again comes from the voice work. The fact is that every time Jake expresses his own opinion, he sounds self-assured, even as everybody knows he's about to get shouted down by Helen. His own artlessness is his salvation, counted on by Helen just as much as everyone. As she would probably be the first to admit, she doesn't really want Jake to submit to her will. She feels that she is virtually always right, and she is glad to have found somebody, in Jake, feels the same. But the key is that he really does believe that. He's not just going along with Helen not to get yelled at, and the proof of this is his constant willingness to get yelled at for speaking his mind. If he was really broken, he would never let Daria know that he had also been unaware of her curfew. He may always be happy to run things, but it is a choice he is continually, freely, and actively making, and that is ultimately the salvation of their relationship, and their family.
5. Bullet points!
-Just a couple episodes ago, Helen made "put the spice back in my marriage" her number one priority. When she sets out to do something, it gets done.
-In case you think MTV half-assed their DVD release: disk 2's menu has a light BLUE background, where disk 1's menu was light YELLOW. So clearly, they went all out.
-Also, my handmade DVD set matches up disk breaks to season breaks. Unlike certain other DVD sets I could mention.
-As always, I enjoyed the Daria Day intro for TRW, amusing because it acknowledges that this was episode was really the most unpleasant in the series for Daria's character. She certainly has various humiliations ahead, but none so focused as in this episode.
-One of the signs of improvement in these episodes is the Thomas Jefferson runner in TBH. The first usage is great (Jake's delivery of "Well, it can't be Jefferson..." is a highlight), but it also manages to keep the joke running the whole episode, which is a good sign for the quality of future episodes, joke-wise.
-On that same note, Helen's claim that "Bureaucracy is the price we pay for impartiality" is a quote from Stalin is dubious. I've tried to look it up online, and there certainly are some places that attribute that quote to Stalin. But I can't find any quotes that I can be confident predate this episode, so I suspect that all of them are taking Helen's word here as authoritative. But if anybody knows otherwise, please let me know.
-Honestly, I don't think Mystik Spiral is that bad.
-Did Alternapalooza really only draw 10,000 audience members? Seems a bit low.
-OK, listen everybody, once and for all: the Trojan Horse DOES NOT APPEAR IN THE ILIAD! This drives me nuts, because thanks to Daria (among others) I had always assumed that it did, and so I read that whole entire book waiting for it to show up, and was very disappointed. The fact is that the Trojan Horse is the Clone Wars of Homer; it takes place after The Iliad, but before The Odyssey. So please, tell your loved ones: Homer never wrote about the Trojan Horse. Thank you.
-The Altamont joke doesn't really work, but I do like the idea that Jake went there.
-While I never attended a faculty-DJ roller hockey game, I very much did attend a wheelchair basketball game between a team of teachers and an actual wheelchair basketball team. The teachers fell out of their wheelchairs a lot.
-Daria Timestamp Watch: Car breaking down = go find a phone. Also, we see Mr. DeMartino smoking, which would be far less likely today. Jane also suggests that Trent's band might need a "fly girl," but even at the time that was an intentionally dated reference.
-There are only a couple of places where the royalty-free music for the DVD release really messes up an episode, but the Everybody Hurts parody is absolutely one of them, just embarrassing for everybody.
-That said, check out the song list for this episode, just to be reminded that, even though it's usually not so crucial, the loss of the original music is still a serious one.
-This week in people being called the wrong name: "His name is Cliff. Oop, no wait, it's Clint. I'm not positive, but I can find out at school."
-See you next week as we close out season 1!
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