My Selfish Gene

I swear to you, I'm going to put other stuff on here too.

Sugar Rush Episode 1x03 - "Chemical Warfare"

Episode grade: B+


Previously: Stella's screwing the decorator, Nathan's clueless, Kim's gay for Sugar and her magnificent tits.

So, the first couple of episodes were OK, and the quality of this one is, in itself, no great step up from those, but nonetheless, this one is the one that proved to me that this show was really worth my time. Because, up to to now, Kim's pretty much been a completely sympathetic character, but, per KimVo: "It's amazing the things you do when you're a fucked up teenager", and the show is not going to shy away from that to make sure there are likeable characters. Not that I'm saying there aren't, they're just likeable characters who, on occasion, do morally reprihensible shit, because it's amazing what you do when you're a fucked up teenager (or adult, or kid. Examples of each in here). First up, Stella; receiving a phonecall from Dale when Nathan walks in with a breakfast tray, calling "Happy anniversary!" Stella quickly says "bye" and hides the phone in her lap (not like that) (I think).

Kim's walking to school, and oh good, it's Tom the butt monkey, doing buttmonkey crap to prove KimVo's point that "adolescents are hormonally insane". Kim now arrives at school, and some bitch is spitting on her from the top of the stairs. Sugar is wearing an very short skirt and bends down to get something from her bag (or maybe put something in it), and Kim is thoroughly enjoying the combination of these facts. Then Sugar's removing her knickers, and we've been mystically transported to the bathroom, and she throws them in the bin because there's chewing gum on them. Sugar leaves, and Kim stares at the discarded underwear, then hurriedly turns to a mirror and pretends to have been sorting out her hair when a couple of other girls walk in, one discussing how "Jason's sister's cousin's boyfriend's mate" told her how some girl was date raped. The other girl is dismissive, proclaiming the supposed date rape victim a slag. Kim freaks them both out by asking "date rape?" in a most amazingly funny excited tone.

Tacky seaside amusement park, Sugar's soiled knickers are in Kim's bag, Sugar's trampolining without having changed, so still wearing the short skirt and, presumably, no underwear, though the camera is very careful not to prove things either way. Not that I was checking closely or anything. Kim is, once again, very appreciative, at least until she notices some guys with camera phones doing the same.

Cut to Kim raiding the medicine cupboard, KimVo assuring us "I may be desparate, but I'm not a freak" because she plans to commit date rape with prescription drugs, not Rohypnol. Uh huh. And also, that Sugar is hardly innocent, she'd already admitted that she'd always been too drunk to remember sex. That is an absolutely airtight case, KimVo. Stella comes in, telling Dale over the phone she'll be with him in half an hour, then interrupts Kim rooting through the medicine and asks what she's doing. Apparently "..." is a good enough answer for Stella, as she changes the subject, asking "How was school?" Kim responds "Dire." Stella lights a cigarette and tries for friendly again, calling her 'Kimmy' and offering bollocksy platitudes. "I know things haven't been easy..." Kim just rolls her eyes and leaves. Nathan enters as Kim is heading upstairs, she gives him a quick wave, with some difficulty since she's trying to hide a fistful of drugs. Stella claims to have a headache, but tells Nathan their anniverasy dinner plans will still go ahead, then, in an extremely conspicuous tone, "I have the hairdressers in half an hour." Seriously, she sounds like she's talking in code. The cat has left the basket, repeat, the cat has left the basket. Well, she is talking in code, obviously, but... you'd think she'd do a better job of hiding it. Nathan, of course, doesn't notice anyway, and offers to drive her there. Stella smiles weakly.

Nathan goes up to Matt's room, where everything is blue. Da ba dee, da ba di. Nathan tells Matt he bought the blue paint Matt wanted. Matt reaches out a hand from his little blue makeshift tent to receive it. Nathan clearly wants to say something, but decides against it and leaves. Matt squeezes the paint into a bucket, and paints a doll blue. Creepy music theramins in the background. Matt looks around for something else to turn blue. I hate watching this scene. Matt sees his hamster. I hate watching this scene. Camera pans across some more creepy blue dolls. I HATE watching this scene. Matt pushes the hamster into the paint bucket until it's completely submerged, and, thankfully, the scene ends. Brrr.

Nathan is dropping Stella off for her "hair appointment". Do you have a cousin named Sven? No, but I once had a barber named Dominique. In spite of pouring rain, Stella has convinced Nathan to not actually take her all the way there, as she needs the fresh air to clear her head. Nathan, did you know they took gullible out of the dictionary?

Stella is, KimVo reports (in a fairly disturbingly raunchy voice), "going for the tassled look". Stella decides that midway through receiving oral sex is an excellent time to start discussing such topics as Kim's drug hoarding and Nathan's vasectomy. For some absurd reason, Dale disagrees. Stella tells him it's her wedding anniversary. He congratulates her as sincerely as possible, considering. It's all pretty damn funny. Stella continues to babble about her family. Dale frustratedly asks "Look, are we going to fuck again? Because I've got half an hour left of my lunch break, and a boner the size of Britain that is killing me." He's such a charmer. Poor word choice at the end there, however, sets Stella off into panic that Kim is planning to commit suicide by overdose, and she hurries out, leaving Dale having to settle for watching "Chitty Chitty Gang Bang".

Kim is walking down the street, and happens upon butt-monkey Tom and his butt-monkey dog. KimVo: "Oh God." I hear ya, babe. Kim angrily tells Tom that he's following her. "No... We just live on the same street", he replies, shockingly without tripping over his words and/or the pavement, or his trousers falling down or anything. And, considering Kim walked into him, he kind of has a point. Kim rolls her eyes and continues on, and NOW he's following you, Kim. And back to the stuttering too. Entire civilisations rise and are destroyed in the time it takes him to ask her out to a movie, which he suffixes again with "I'm not queer!" and it's extremely tiresome. Kim does not care, and tells him so. His fucking butt-monkey dog furthers the butt-monkey antics. Can I go back to the hamster drowning scene?

Kim's room. Kim is cheerfully stashing her hoarded drugs in a little glitter covered box, and... huh? She got the drugs from the ForniKitchen earlier, we saw her go upstairs straight after that, so why the hell has she not already done this if she was outside just now? Anyway, Stella comes in and asks "Can we talk?", three words which fill Kim with dread. KimVo takes us through a couple of examples of why this is; 1) Stella explains to a young girl who doesn't look remotely like a younger Kim "how Snowy the bunny turned brown overnight", WHILST HOLDING THE DEAD RABBIT BEHIND HER BACK. Man. 2) "The inevitable, excruciating 'now you're a grown-up' talk. This younger Kim, we only see from the back because she's both too old for a random non-lookalike child actress and too young for Olivia Hallinan to look even slightly plausible. Back to present day, Stella asking "can we talk?" again, and KimVo tells us "those three words, and you were ready for anything." Kim Fantasy Theatre gives us examples, again, and they're all pretty funny. 1) "Dale and I are emigrating." 2) "I've kicked your father out, Dale's moving in and your room's becoming the showroom for our new decorating business!" or even 3) "Dale and I are related... He's your brother, Kim." Sara Stewart gives awesome delivery on those, especially the last.

But, of course, what Stella is really there for, Kim wasn't, in fact, prepared for; it's about the drugs, there's at least five packets of tablets missing. Yet more awesome KFT in reply to Stella's "Do you want to tell me what's happening?". Kim, without taking a breath, says "OK, there's this girl, Sugar, who I like, I really like, I suppose you could say I'm obsessed, and basically if I don't shag her soon, I'm going to explode, so I thought heavy narcotics might ease things along a little bit." and, even awesomer, Stella smiles and gives a blasé "Right" in response.

Back to the 'real world' (using the term loosely), Kim tries to claim that she's hoarding the drugs for a school project on domestic dangers. Come on, that is a completely ridiculous story. Especially with the halting way she tells it that quite clearly says "I am making this up." Not even Nathan would buy that. Speak of the devil. Stella and Nathan's cab is here. Kim and Stella do the usual assuring Nathan everything is fine routine, and Stella says she'll be down in a second. Kim's ludicrous story has thrown her off a bit, I don't think she's really buying it, but she seems reasonably assured that Kim won't "do anything stupid" anyway, and says so. "Stupid?" Kim repeats. Well, she's not denying it. Stella leaves, telling Kim to look after Matt. Kim realises what Stella thought she was doing with the drugs.

The Creepy Music of Animal Cruelty starts up again as Kim leaves her room, hands full of drugs, to find Matt, who has now painted himself completely blue, standing there. He tells her he's hungry, she tells him to get something for himself as she's busy, and the camera significantly stays on him for a ridiculously long time to make sure viewers with weak hearts don't die of shock from the impending plot twist.

KimVo assures us/herself that she isn't really going to go through with the whole date rape thing, "it's too much like a bad film". As she's saying this, there's yet more KFT showing Kim spiking Sugar's drink and giving a hilarious Quagmire "awwwwwl-right!" face as Sugar passes out on her shoulder. Doorbell rings, Kim dumps her drugs on the dining table and answers it. It's Sugar, with a bottle of wine and a pizza. "Fuck me," she says, "I need a drink."

Nathan and Stella walking home from the restaurant, Nathan saying how "nice" everything was. Service must have been incredible because he goes as far as "great" for that. Don't get too excited there, Nathan. Then, awesomely, he says "Oh go, I'm a terrible husband, aren't I? I haven't even mentioned your hair! It's lovely." That is an excellent touch. He thinks their move to Brighton is going to work. Stella's being unresponsive and not looking too happy, so some doubt starts to creep in, but she assures him they're fine. They enter the house to find Kim crouching over something on the floor. They look horrified. The camera's so horrified it can't even look. We are, presumably, supposed to think it's Sugar.

Kim's looking out to sea from Brighton Pier. Sugar approaches, definite uncomfortable air between them. "Quite a night," Sugar says. The writers really hate linear storytelling, don't they? "My head hurts just thinkin' about it."

Flashback to Sugar appearing at the door. She hands Kim the pizza and walks in. Kim puts the pizza on the table, on top of the drugs. Sugar bends down to take off her shoes, because she stepped in some dog crap outside, Kim stands behind her drooling more than ever and blames the "rat-like thing" next door. Sugar picks up the pizza, finds the drugs and says "Bloody hell, Kizza, there was me thinkin' we were gonna have a quiet night in... Bender it is." which is sort of funny.

Flashforward to the pier, Sugar says "It's not right, you know. It's twisted." KimVo says "I hadn't really meant to drug Sugar." Which seems a pretty implausable thing for her to say at this point, considering what actually happened. "Planned" or "intended", maybe, but "meant" doesn't sound right to me. It would have worked much better if they didn't try so hard to convince us Kim actually had drugged Sugar.

Flashback. Kim, having gone outside to deal with Sugar's shoes, comes back in to find the drugs no longer on the table, and Sugar lying unconciously on the couch. Kim is all "Oh my god!", and goes to perform CPR.

Flashforward. Stop doing that so much! Especially when it's basically a repeat of the last one! KimVo: "I hadn't meant to drug anyone."

Flashback. Kim panics some more. But, turns out, Sugar is not, in fact, unconcious, she's just smoking a joint. She asks, quite reasonably, if Kim is on something, and, given the negative reply, why her hands are on Sugar's tits. Kim tries unsuccessfully to come up with an answer, but noticably doesn't remove her hands, but fortunately for her closeted status, there's handy distracting crashing sounds coming from the hallway. Kim rushes to investigate and finds Matt lying, actually unconcious. How shocking. And that's when Stella and Nathan walk through the door. KimVo helpfully says "I guess the dose was pretty high for an eight year old." I was going to complain that that seems far to young for what I've seen of his second season characterisation to be plausible, but then I found out that season two starts 18 months after the end of season one, so it actually works out fine. So, Matt's eight. OK.

Flashforward. Now that it won't be a spoiler, Sugar asks "How is he?" There's no permanent damage, apparently. Well, physical, anyway. Kim is fine with letting everyone else believe her eight year old brother is suicidal, when actually he thought the pills were "space food". How she knows this when no one else does is a mystery. And, thanks to her duplicity, Kim gets to be held close by Sugar.

Stella and Nathan in the hallway, totally surprised by Matt's apparent suicide attempt, because "Kim's always been the worry". Kim walks past and gives a cheery "goodnight", but, despite showing no outwards signs of it, KimVo says she feels terrible, and that I have no idea how much considering date rape, finding out your mother thinks you're suicidal and almost murdering your brother, all in the course of one evening, takes it out of you. Well, fair point. I tend to spread these things out over a few weeks.

Nathan's saying he's been so stupid thinking the move has been going well. Stella gets her shit together enough to actually do a half-decent job reassuring him, and they decide to take Matt to see a therapist with them.

They tell the therapist some crap about "breakdown in communications" and "an inability to understand each others needs" while Matt just sits there, and the therapist throws them off by asking "How would you describe the state of your relationship?", but they claim it's fine.

Stella and Kim walking down the pier laughing, KimVo says "So I nearly killed my brother, but fuck, he killed his hamster, how twisted is that?" Whatever helps you sleep at night, KimVo. And, silver lining, Kim gets to stay the night in Paradise, in Sugar's bed, with Sugar. Yeah, she's really full of regret. There's quiet for a while, then Sugar says "My mum tried to kill herself. When dad pissed off. What was your brother thinking? I mean, he's just a fucking kid." Kim actually looks seriously guilty now, and doesn't know what to say, but Sugar angst never lasts long, and soon they're laughing and mock-insulting each other. Sugar grabs a bottle from her bedside table and takes a couple of pills from it, telling Kim "Sleeping pills, can't crash without 'em. Knock you out, dead." Punchline! That's great.