Post by affrosponge88 on Dec 31, 2012 0:39:15 GMT -6
Freaks and Geeks: "Tricks and Treats" Review
by HectortheWellEndowed
“Actions are sometimes performed in a masterly and most cunning way, while the direction of actions is deranged and dependent on various morbid impressions - it’s like a dream.”
-Fyodor Dostoevsky, Crime and Punishment.
Ok, this was the closest thing I could find to a relevant quote in Crime and Punishment to this episode of Freaks and Geeks, Tricks and Treats. And it kind of works, in that the two most important factors to the outcome of this episode are (1) a deranged action and (2) Fyodor Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment. While the performances of the cast are wonderful and believable the real star of this episode is the fantastic script by Paul Feig. While moving along the plots of Lindsay striving to be accepted in her new social clique and Sam and his geek friends trying to adapt to high school, this episode is a wonderful dissection of the changing family dynamics of the Weir household. WIth three separate storylines focusing on Jean Weir, the mother, Lindsay, the daughter, and Sam, the son, this episode shows how everyone’s actions, no matter how well intentioned, have direct and ultimately unhappy consequences for the other members of the family. With the exception of the wonderfully aloof Harold, of course.
The parents part of the story is really about how the little things change around you without you even realising it. Mrs. Weir’s questioning of Sam’s choice to go to the movie’s instead of Trick or Treating in the first scene leads him to his almost inevitable humiliation later. While the awesomeness that is Harold completely gets their sons position that he’s in high school now and is too old for that sort of tomfoolery, Mrs. Weir still see’s her son as her baby boy. In a later scene she says “No, but I wrote my son’s the cutest boy in the whole world on the front of it” bringing the point home that she doesn’t realise that he’s growing up. I can’t say too many bad things about Mrs. Weir’s enthusiasm and excitement as it is pretty contagious. Her singing “Monster Mash” and Harold’s face as she does it, are two of the best moments of this episode. With Lindsay, her position is a bit more understandable. She didn’t force Lindsay at any point to hand out the candy to the children with her. Lindsay promises in the first scene that she would simply because it’s something they've always done together. Lindsay running out the door just before any Trick or Treating begins in earnest was pretty horrendous to watch, you could see Jean Weir’s heartbreaking as it happens. But it did give us Harold in a Sexy-Dracula costume, so there is a silver lining to some of the clouds in this episode.
Her characters enthusiasm dampens pretty quickly when Lindsay leaves though, and is only made worse when Harold scares a bunch of children off with his Sexy-Dracula-ness, only for both of the Weir’s to be lectured by a cantankerous mother who informs Jean that the cookies she had been baking all day to give to the kids aren’t suitable as the may contain razor blades and pins. The suggestion seems to sends Mrs. Weir into the lowest moment she has in the episode, so of course Harold propositions her at this point. What a man. It isn’t until Jean is told that the cookies are being thrown on her front lawn and are being devoured by ants that she really gives up, telling Harold to go to the store and buy store made candy. Her enthusiasm dampened completely she sits on the couch eating candy and not answering the door as the episode comes towards its climax.
Lindsay’s story is one that takes a while to get going if I’m being honest. Her typical teenage Grrr Argh-ness at having to hand out candy with her Mom seems to be tempered with a nice “It’ll make her happy” sort of vibe. However, as Lindsay is a teenager, pressures both real and imaginary force her to ditch that plan within the first ten minutes to go on a double date with Nick, Daniel and Kim. Oh, and Ken because his plans fell through. The imagined social pressure comes from the fact that Millie has gone and gotten herself a “secret love” which in Lindsay, and most teenagers lives, means that Millie is now one step up the social ladder than Lindsay. Nick had already asked her to accompany him on the “double date” and although Lindsay eventually agrees, it’s this moment that pushes Lindsay to blow off her Mom and hang with the Freaks. The real social pressure comes from Kim being, well, Kim and criticising pretty much everything poor Lindsay does. Knowing that she won’t be handing out the candy with her Mom, Lindsay spends the next night/day, or ten minutes of the episode, feeling guilty that she won’t be around and hesitates to tell her Mom until she is literally walking out the door on Halloween night. This action is definitely the harshest and coldest Lindsay has been to her parents at this point in the shows run and again shows the growing selfishness thats consuming Lindsay.
As Ken is present, the double date doesn’t exactly go to Nick’s plan of finally wooing Lindsay. After her suggestion that they should go to the Haunted House is shot down by Kim she jsut starts running with whatever the others have planned. Which apparently involves going to raise hell. Nick destroys the pumpkin on Mr. Rosso’s porch, after which he takes out an exact duplicate like the legend he is, before Lindsay attempts to do the same to some other poor unsuspecting pumpkin. She eventually does, although it takes more effort than you would think. Next is the traditional mailbox beating with a baseball bat. True rebels, one and all. All this makes Lindsay more bold than we’ve seen her before. When Ken takes out a carton of eggs, Lindsay and Kim are the first volunteers. Without seeing who she was throwing the eggs at, Lindsay inadvertently hits her brother. Realising how bad this situation is, she gets Daniel to turn the car around and offer Sam a ride home. When he refuses she tells Daniel to take her home despite Nick’s protest.
Sam’s story obviously ends with him being egged, but his is a story about growing up, or trying not to as the case may be. Despite being firm with his mother at the start of the episode, Sam’s most pivotal scene is one in which he doesn’t really speak. Sam, Neal and Bill are in Mrs. Whitman’s class being told their book reports were “embarrassing”, which I personally don’t understand given the subject for Bills (Al Jaffee’s Snappy Answers to Stupid Questions), Sams (the novelisation of Star Wars) and Neals(Yes I Can: The Autobiography of Sammy Davis Jr.) reports. So Mrs Whitman assigns them Crime and Punishment, detailing what it is about and telling the class that it must be half read by Monday, to groans. She mutters the theme of the episode at the end,“It’s time to grow up people!” But Sam refuses convincing Bill and eal to go Trick or Treating one last time, one last foray into childhood. Despite Harold’s protestations at the dinner table, we are thankfully treated to a great getting ready montage as Gort(Sam), Groucho Marx(Neal) and Jaime Sommers: The Bionic Woman(Bill), as well as the ever popular Man with Knife in his Head(the ever popular Harris Trinsky).
And lo, the Trick or Treating begins.The looks the boys receive make for a growing self consciousness amongst the group. It doesn’t really help that every house they go to seems to be exactly the type of people that Harris had warned them about putting heroine, razor blades and fun-sized poops into the candy. Neal finally loses it with Sam after the Hot Dog on a Stick girl sees the boys in costume. Before he can convince Sam and the others to abandon the Trick or Treating quest, Alan arrives with his cronies out for revenge and looking for the boys candy. After ripping it from their hands and leaving, the group starts to fight amongst themselves. Neal blames Sam and refuses to keep going on with “the Plan.” Its at this point that Sam gets egged by Kim and Lindsay. Neal leaves, with Bill and Harris swiftly following when the car starts to reverse and they think they’re coming back to finish them off. Sam refuses to get in the car and walks home to his parents, covered in egg.
The last five minutes is spectacularly great. Sam protects Lindsay from his parents wrath by saying a bunch of Freaks egged him and then reacts angrily when his mother tries to comfort him by saying “Oh, my baby.” Harold and Jean look devastated by the events of the evening. “The world is such a different place than the one I grew up in.. Everyone just seems so much meaner these days.” That one line sums up the main theme of this episode beautifully. Lindsays reconciliation with her mother comes at the price of having to swallow her pride and dress as a Prince (looked more like a squire to me, but whatever). Lindsay and Sam’s relationship however is not healed. The end of the episode is kind of heartbreaking in that way. Whilst Lindsay helps her mom hand out candy and both beam with happiness, Sam sits alone in his room on Halloween night, reading Crime and Punishment. He’s a grown up now. And it is the most depressing end to an episode that I can remember.
I’ll end this with a confession. I’m Sam Weir. And not in an “I’m Spartacus!” type way. I dressed up and went trick or treating until I was 12. I remember the last time vividly. It was 1997 and me and a group of five friends, the oldest 13 the youngest 11, got to about 4 houses before we realised how ridiculous this was. We sat on a patch of grass watching the kids walk by and joked and laughed the night away. It was a wonderful and comforting way to let that last obvious visage of childhood go. So when I say this is my favourite episode of Freaks and Geeks, that comes from a realisation I had. I am Sam Weir, but I got to let go of my innocence by eating candy and laughing with friends. Sam Weirs innocence was taken by Fyodor Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment.
Stray Observations:
- Phrasing!
- "Hey, if it isn't the Amelia Earhart of McKinley High.
What does that mean
Well, you head to class abut you never seem to get there"
- "Maybe you are, but when I hit 13 I became a man.
It's only in your temple Neal, not in the real world."
- I love the conversation between Nick and Daniel about Santana.
- "No! These are not bionic. They're all me."
- I fraking love Harold
- "I'm not really a vampire! I own a sporting goods store"
- "Jean, I don't think there's bearded ladies running around throwing eggs at kids.
He means Hippies."
-"Last time I had this much fun I was pinned down in a foxhole by the North Koreans"
- I was dressed as Ash from Pokémon, in case you wanted to know.
- Thanks for reading! As you were.
by HectortheWellEndowed
“Actions are sometimes performed in a masterly and most cunning way, while the direction of actions is deranged and dependent on various morbid impressions - it’s like a dream.”
-Fyodor Dostoevsky, Crime and Punishment.
Ok, this was the closest thing I could find to a relevant quote in Crime and Punishment to this episode of Freaks and Geeks, Tricks and Treats. And it kind of works, in that the two most important factors to the outcome of this episode are (1) a deranged action and (2) Fyodor Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment. While the performances of the cast are wonderful and believable the real star of this episode is the fantastic script by Paul Feig. While moving along the plots of Lindsay striving to be accepted in her new social clique and Sam and his geek friends trying to adapt to high school, this episode is a wonderful dissection of the changing family dynamics of the Weir household. WIth three separate storylines focusing on Jean Weir, the mother, Lindsay, the daughter, and Sam, the son, this episode shows how everyone’s actions, no matter how well intentioned, have direct and ultimately unhappy consequences for the other members of the family. With the exception of the wonderfully aloof Harold, of course.
The parents part of the story is really about how the little things change around you without you even realising it. Mrs. Weir’s questioning of Sam’s choice to go to the movie’s instead of Trick or Treating in the first scene leads him to his almost inevitable humiliation later. While the awesomeness that is Harold completely gets their sons position that he’s in high school now and is too old for that sort of tomfoolery, Mrs. Weir still see’s her son as her baby boy. In a later scene she says “No, but I wrote my son’s the cutest boy in the whole world on the front of it” bringing the point home that she doesn’t realise that he’s growing up. I can’t say too many bad things about Mrs. Weir’s enthusiasm and excitement as it is pretty contagious. Her singing “Monster Mash” and Harold’s face as she does it, are two of the best moments of this episode. With Lindsay, her position is a bit more understandable. She didn’t force Lindsay at any point to hand out the candy to the children with her. Lindsay promises in the first scene that she would simply because it’s something they've always done together. Lindsay running out the door just before any Trick or Treating begins in earnest was pretty horrendous to watch, you could see Jean Weir’s heartbreaking as it happens. But it did give us Harold in a Sexy-Dracula costume, so there is a silver lining to some of the clouds in this episode.
Her characters enthusiasm dampens pretty quickly when Lindsay leaves though, and is only made worse when Harold scares a bunch of children off with his Sexy-Dracula-ness, only for both of the Weir’s to be lectured by a cantankerous mother who informs Jean that the cookies she had been baking all day to give to the kids aren’t suitable as the may contain razor blades and pins. The suggestion seems to sends Mrs. Weir into the lowest moment she has in the episode, so of course Harold propositions her at this point. What a man. It isn’t until Jean is told that the cookies are being thrown on her front lawn and are being devoured by ants that she really gives up, telling Harold to go to the store and buy store made candy. Her enthusiasm dampened completely she sits on the couch eating candy and not answering the door as the episode comes towards its climax.
Lindsay’s story is one that takes a while to get going if I’m being honest. Her typical teenage Grrr Argh-ness at having to hand out candy with her Mom seems to be tempered with a nice “It’ll make her happy” sort of vibe. However, as Lindsay is a teenager, pressures both real and imaginary force her to ditch that plan within the first ten minutes to go on a double date with Nick, Daniel and Kim. Oh, and Ken because his plans fell through. The imagined social pressure comes from the fact that Millie has gone and gotten herself a “secret love” which in Lindsay, and most teenagers lives, means that Millie is now one step up the social ladder than Lindsay. Nick had already asked her to accompany him on the “double date” and although Lindsay eventually agrees, it’s this moment that pushes Lindsay to blow off her Mom and hang with the Freaks. The real social pressure comes from Kim being, well, Kim and criticising pretty much everything poor Lindsay does. Knowing that she won’t be handing out the candy with her Mom, Lindsay spends the next night/day, or ten minutes of the episode, feeling guilty that she won’t be around and hesitates to tell her Mom until she is literally walking out the door on Halloween night. This action is definitely the harshest and coldest Lindsay has been to her parents at this point in the shows run and again shows the growing selfishness thats consuming Lindsay.
As Ken is present, the double date doesn’t exactly go to Nick’s plan of finally wooing Lindsay. After her suggestion that they should go to the Haunted House is shot down by Kim she jsut starts running with whatever the others have planned. Which apparently involves going to raise hell. Nick destroys the pumpkin on Mr. Rosso’s porch, after which he takes out an exact duplicate like the legend he is, before Lindsay attempts to do the same to some other poor unsuspecting pumpkin. She eventually does, although it takes more effort than you would think. Next is the traditional mailbox beating with a baseball bat. True rebels, one and all. All this makes Lindsay more bold than we’ve seen her before. When Ken takes out a carton of eggs, Lindsay and Kim are the first volunteers. Without seeing who she was throwing the eggs at, Lindsay inadvertently hits her brother. Realising how bad this situation is, she gets Daniel to turn the car around and offer Sam a ride home. When he refuses she tells Daniel to take her home despite Nick’s protest.
Sam’s story obviously ends with him being egged, but his is a story about growing up, or trying not to as the case may be. Despite being firm with his mother at the start of the episode, Sam’s most pivotal scene is one in which he doesn’t really speak. Sam, Neal and Bill are in Mrs. Whitman’s class being told their book reports were “embarrassing”, which I personally don’t understand given the subject for Bills (Al Jaffee’s Snappy Answers to Stupid Questions), Sams (the novelisation of Star Wars) and Neals(Yes I Can: The Autobiography of Sammy Davis Jr.) reports. So Mrs Whitman assigns them Crime and Punishment, detailing what it is about and telling the class that it must be half read by Monday, to groans. She mutters the theme of the episode at the end,“It’s time to grow up people!” But Sam refuses convincing Bill and eal to go Trick or Treating one last time, one last foray into childhood. Despite Harold’s protestations at the dinner table, we are thankfully treated to a great getting ready montage as Gort(Sam), Groucho Marx(Neal) and Jaime Sommers: The Bionic Woman(Bill), as well as the ever popular Man with Knife in his Head(the ever popular Harris Trinsky).
And lo, the Trick or Treating begins.The looks the boys receive make for a growing self consciousness amongst the group. It doesn’t really help that every house they go to seems to be exactly the type of people that Harris had warned them about putting heroine, razor blades and fun-sized poops into the candy. Neal finally loses it with Sam after the Hot Dog on a Stick girl sees the boys in costume. Before he can convince Sam and the others to abandon the Trick or Treating quest, Alan arrives with his cronies out for revenge and looking for the boys candy. After ripping it from their hands and leaving, the group starts to fight amongst themselves. Neal blames Sam and refuses to keep going on with “the Plan.” Its at this point that Sam gets egged by Kim and Lindsay. Neal leaves, with Bill and Harris swiftly following when the car starts to reverse and they think they’re coming back to finish them off. Sam refuses to get in the car and walks home to his parents, covered in egg.
The last five minutes is spectacularly great. Sam protects Lindsay from his parents wrath by saying a bunch of Freaks egged him and then reacts angrily when his mother tries to comfort him by saying “Oh, my baby.” Harold and Jean look devastated by the events of the evening. “The world is such a different place than the one I grew up in.. Everyone just seems so much meaner these days.” That one line sums up the main theme of this episode beautifully. Lindsays reconciliation with her mother comes at the price of having to swallow her pride and dress as a Prince (looked more like a squire to me, but whatever). Lindsay and Sam’s relationship however is not healed. The end of the episode is kind of heartbreaking in that way. Whilst Lindsay helps her mom hand out candy and both beam with happiness, Sam sits alone in his room on Halloween night, reading Crime and Punishment. He’s a grown up now. And it is the most depressing end to an episode that I can remember.
I’ll end this with a confession. I’m Sam Weir. And not in an “I’m Spartacus!” type way. I dressed up and went trick or treating until I was 12. I remember the last time vividly. It was 1997 and me and a group of five friends, the oldest 13 the youngest 11, got to about 4 houses before we realised how ridiculous this was. We sat on a patch of grass watching the kids walk by and joked and laughed the night away. It was a wonderful and comforting way to let that last obvious visage of childhood go. So when I say this is my favourite episode of Freaks and Geeks, that comes from a realisation I had. I am Sam Weir, but I got to let go of my innocence by eating candy and laughing with friends. Sam Weirs innocence was taken by Fyodor Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment.
Stray Observations:
- Phrasing!
- "Hey, if it isn't the Amelia Earhart of McKinley High.
What does that mean
Well, you head to class abut you never seem to get there"
- "Maybe you are, but when I hit 13 I became a man.
It's only in your temple Neal, not in the real world."
- I love the conversation between Nick and Daniel about Santana.
- "No! These are not bionic. They're all me."
- I fraking love Harold
- "I'm not really a vampire! I own a sporting goods store"
- "Jean, I don't think there's bearded ladies running around throwing eggs at kids.
He means Hippies."
-"Last time I had this much fun I was pinned down in a foxhole by the North Koreans"
- I was dressed as Ash from Pokémon, in case you wanted to know.
- Thanks for reading! As you were.
