Dear Tina,
This is now the second time this season you have managed to bring together all of Liz Lemon’s former flames for my viewing pleasure. I’m starting to agree with Alec Baldwin who accused you on The Late Show With David Letterman of having “banged everyone in the Screen Actors Guild” via the boyfriends you hire for yourself on 30 Rock. His words! Personally, I commend you. Jon Hamm, Michael Sheen, next week Matt Damon? It’s like the who’s who of lovely. You get Jeremy Renner on in his bomb suit and I may spend the rest of my life closed up in my room living vicariously through a character I already fear I share too much common ground with.
On tonight’s episode, titled “Emmanuelle Goes to Dinosaur Land” after Jenna’s Cinemax soft core film of the same name, Liz is on a desperate search for a date for Floyd’s wedding. After the advice she received from the moms last week, Liz is convinced that she has met all the types of men that exist in the world and there is no reason to believe someone better than any of her former flames is out there waiting for her. So now it’s time to revisit her past and decide who she can most tolerate calling her other half. When she stops by Dr. Drew Baird’s apartment, she is immediately drawn back in to his near perfect exterior. The jawline, the build, the hooks. The hooks?! Oh that’s right. It appears that Drew got a little wave-happy while deboarding a helicopter in Zimbabwe and lost his right hand to the rotor. Then, when celebrating his return from Africa, he and his cousin bought some fireworks, and well, he lost the left. Leaving him with two hooks in place of his hands. Liz abandons Drew as an option, not because he’s disabled: “I’ve been dumped by four different guys in wheelchairs”, but because he may be the dumbest person she’s ever met. Which says a lot if you remember…Dennis.
Liz meets Dennis at his workplace, which turns out to be a public park where he is constructing a contraption to send up in the sky with a boy inside of it. “You’re going to balloon boy him?” Oh yes he is. The one mistake, he notes, the people in Denver made was not actually putting the kid inside the balloon. When his little guy jumps out of his balloon “or whatever” he’ll have the attention of the whole world. Needless to say, Liz walks away from their meeting still dateless.
Finally, at Cerie’s rehearsal dinner (a wedding Liz was content attending solo as the love her life was not the one getting married), Cerie introduces her to the man she’ll be sitting next to at tomorrow’s ceremony. Lo and behold the man who, despite her best efforts, she just can’t escape…Wesley. As it turns out, if it’s true that Liz has already dated every potential male type, Wesley may just be her best bet. “The only thing wrong with me is that you hate me.” Touche. Not nearly as convinced as Wesley that they are in fact soulmates, Liz takes one last shot at a guest of Floyd’s wedding. Handsome, a lawyer and as she finds out moments after she asks him to be her date, a plushie. Someone who dresses up in mascot costumes and has orgies in hotel rooms and state parks. So there you have it. Wesley and all of his terribly annoying qualities add up to one soulmate for Liz Lemon and she proposes marriage. Season 5 wedding special for the 100th episode?? I think so!
Jack is having no better luck in love. Avery comes to his office and tells him she will be spending some time alone this weekend thinking about “us” and hopes Jack will do the same. No sooner does she get in the elevator to leave, then Nancy Donovan arrives in the adjacent elevator to take Jack on a romantic weekend of shark boat rides and Indian food. Right as Jack is about to write Nancy off as a burdened housewife who lacks any passion, Nancy appears in the doorway wearing nothing but red lingerie. “You would think it would clash with her hair! But it didn’t.” What Jack was not anticipating postcoital was how Nancy and her Catholic guilt would handle just one night in bed. Turns out, Jack is the only other man besides her husband Nancy has ever been with and what Jack viewed as a step above fling, was Nancy’s idea of commitment. Oy. The whole experience has made it easier for Jack to choose a permanent lady friend than he thought: “Avery is cool, collected, descended from Swedish valley people. Nancy is a fiery Irish nut job descended from bog people.” Or has it? Jack tells Nancy at Floyd’s Catholic wedding that he is in love with two people. Unable to leave a mass before its conclusion, Nancy tells Jack as soon as the ceremony is over she is on the first train back to Boston, never to see him again. Jack sends Liz a text message during her reading of the First Corinthians (and why not read a text message mid-reading at a couple’s most cherished day) asking her to stall the ceremony as long as possible. And…TO BE CONTINUED! Way to rock the cliffhanger 30 Rock. You have me more on the edge of my seat than all of those nonsense Lost fans combined.
Meanwhile, Tracy is being pressured by Dot Com and Kenneth to pursue more dramatic film roles this summer while TGS is on hiatus. Dot Com hands him a script whose story mirrors Tracy’s own upbringing in the projects. Tracy argues that he can’t relate to any of that material because he has blocked out all memories that occurred from 1975-1982. Dot Com and Kenneth are persistent in their efforts, reminding Tracy that if he has any chance of achieving the “O” in his EGOT, he’ll need to find more challenging roles than those he played in Who Dat Ninja? or Fat Bitch, to name a few. When Dot Com and Kenneth take Tracy back to his old neighborhood and suddenly all of the traumatic events Tracy witnessed as a kid come flooding back. In tonight’s Tracy Said it Best segement, the list of said events as spouted off throughout the episode:
- I slept on an old dog bed stuffed with wigs!
- I watched a prostitute stab a clown!
- Our basketball hoop was a rib cage. A rib cage!
- Some guy with dreds electrocuted my fish!
- A crackhead breast feeding a rat!
- A homeless man cooking a hot pocket on the third rail of the G train!
- I seen a blind guy bite a police horse!
- A puppy committed suicide after he saw our bathroom!
- I once bit into a burrito and there was a child’s shoe in it!
- I seen a hooker eat a tire!
- A pack of wild dogs took over and successfully ran a Wendy’s!
- The sewer people stole my skateboard!
- The projects I lived in was named after Zachary Taylor generally considered to be one of the worst presidents of all time!
- I once saw a baby give another baby a tattoo. They were very drunk!
Next week is the season finale! Wah! But with this week’s “To Be Continued…” title card at the end of the episode (the first time 30 Rock has done this I believe –nice restraint), it should prove to be a masterpiece of love triangles. Who will Jack pick? Will Liz settle for Wesley? Will Floyd pull a Ross and say Liz’s name at the altar? Can we find a permanent spot for Dean Winters on 30 Rock? All that and more coming to you LIVE next week.
No, it’s not a live episode. I was just channeling Seacrest.
30 Rock Quote of the Day:
Tracy: I know which movie I’m doing this summer.
Dot Com: Garfield 3: Feline Groovie?
Tracy: It’s a pun. Because cat paws have grooves.
Dear Tina 