Bunheads - Season 1 Episode 5 - Recap and Review - Money For Nothing
On tonight's episode of Bunheads, Sutton Foster gets a setpiece scene, giving a rallying speech in the dance school to an assembly of students and parents, concerning how everyone has to start paying for lessons. This is brought about by Michelle's discovery that only nine of the roughly seventy-five students attending the school actually pay for their lessons. As she fields phone calls from outraged parents after her speech, she comes to realize the various compromises Fanny makes to populate her school, such as waiving the fee for a family in dire financial straits regarding their mortgage, providing us with the thesis for the episode: having money and managing it is nearly as hard as not having money and working to earn it. A lot of “Money For Nothing” directly addresses the economy, as Boo does when she explains how the economy is in the toilet, leading her not to question her tyrannical supervisor, “senior manager” Jeff, when he takes advantage of her naivety and monetary woes to get her to compact all the trash in the dumpster out back. The economy has everyone doing things they'd rather not be doing, and though Boo reeks something fierce when she gets to dance rehearsal, she understands that it's the price we all have to pay in a depression.
Boo's new job at The Oyster Bar puts her in close proximity with a strangely Jared Padalecki-esque bartender who comes from the Taylor Lautner School of Perpetual Shirtlessness, which sends Sasha, Melanie, and Ginny into a proper frenzy, with each girl decking herself out to the nines just to catch his eye. His name is Godot, of all things, which leads to the requisite Samuel Beckett joke that got a solid laugh out of the English grad in me. Of course, Boo ultimately succeeds where her friends fail, in that she gets Godot to acknowledge her - and without even trying to get noticed. Godot, a surfer who's seen the shores of Costa Rica, lets her in on the fact that there is no such position as “senior manager,” and relieves her from trash duty with a wave of his hand, even offering her his shirt, which smells of coconut snickerdoodles, in an oddly specific touch. He even burns her a CD to go with the free shirt, sending the girls into a haze of stunned jealousy. It's weird how, from week-to-week, the show divines new reasons for us to feel bad for, even protective of, Boo while also giving us more reasons to like her, as she seems the most down-to-Earth amongst the girls. Oh, and apparently “Boo” is short for Bettina. Who'd have guessed? Moreover, who'd have guessed this Josh whom Ginny has been seeing has actually been her boyfriend since the second grade?
Among other developments, I found myself finally feeling more sorry for Truly than annoyed by her, as she's getting the exhaustive daughter-in-law treatment from Fanny but without the presence of a husband she loves to make enduring Fanny worth it. Though Truly has always shown respect, fondness, even reverence for Fanny, the elder's ridiculous organizational system for receipts, bills, and other items of finance, which each go into a different network of boxes, is nearly as confounding as...well, just about any of the other numerous quirks we know about Fanny. Thus, Truly's frustration is clearly understandable. Yet as quirky as Fanny can tend to be, the people she knows are arguably even stranger. A man named Sal comes by looking for payment from Fanny, as her absurd organizational system means his bill is filed into the “Might Get Paid” box which, in Fanny speak, means he isn't going to be getting paid at all. This leads to a pretty amusing dissection of dancers' “tushes,” as Sal goes into detail as to how he can tell different kinds of dancers apart simply from looking at their tushes. Michelle, apparently, has a multi-tush, which means she's a dancer of all trades. This serves as foreshadowing for later, when Fanny tries to convince Michelle to teach at the ballet school. It's a development I've been expecting since the series began, and I'm somewhat surprised that it's taken so long in getting there, given that the opening credits seem to imply that our “bunheads” are really Michelle's prodigies more than Fanny's.
However, Michelle staunchly refuses to teach when offered the position by Fanny, with the show implying that Michelle equates teaching with the end of her dancing career. Upon falling in love with the school's pretty cool recital piece, “Paper or Plastic,” in which the tyranny of supermarket bagging is rendered in full dance, Michelle appears to soften her stance, especially coming on the heels of Fanny's insistence that “Just because you're teaching doesn't mean it's over.” Hopefully, this means Michelle will finally accept a position at the school, and we can start getting back to more of what we saw in the pilot, with Michelle bonding with the girls. Tonight featured a lovely, though brief, scene of Michelle and the girls at The Oyster Bar, and I'd definitely like to see more along that line. It's far past time for Michelle to branch out into the depths of this ensemble. Great as Kelly Bishop is, Sutton Foster could use a more diverse array of scene partners. That said, that lack of variety didn't really detract from the episode. This was plainly the best hour this show has produced since the pilot. For a show as surprisingly strong as this, that's actually saying something.
