REVIEW: Desperate Housewives “Watch While I Revise the World”

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After a strong kickoff to the season the creative team at Desperate Housewives took a week off and instead we got an old discarded script from season 4 with some names changed. Where do the writers get the titles for these episodes anyway? Revise the world? Really? Revision would indicate that our beloved housewives have grown and are not making the same idiotic mistakes they’ve always made. Revision would mean that Susan would have been upfront with Mike about needing to support Carlos through some unnamed crisis instead of sneaking out for moonlit walks and initimate chats in the park. Revision would mean that Lynette would not be acting like a Real Housewife of Fairview and sabotaging her sister’s first stable relationship. A more appropriate title would have been “Watch While The Same Shit Happens Again This Week”.

In all fairness there were some vital pieces of the plot that needed a nudge forward this week. A gentle nudge would have sufficed. Instead they drop kicked the story into foul territory. Bree and Gabby ran around in public acting like crazy people so Bree could dump her cop boyfriend and now Bree has a psycho ex-boyfriend to deal with. I’m getting ahead of myself, so let me backtrack a bit.

Susan (Teri Hatcher) and Carlos (Ricardo Antonio Chavira) are still not dealing with their guilt very well and have taken to moonlight rendesvous that are not at all ill advised given how suspicious Mike (James Denton) already is of his wife’s odd behavior. Their chat in the park was touching and I am glad that they have finally connected over something after eight years of living down the street from each other but the sudden attraction and sneaking around was just silly. After Carlos gets punched by a very angry plumber he and Susan decide to come clean about the dead body in the woods and Mike is none too pleased. I doubt his issue has anything to do with the actual murder and more to do with Susan hiding it from him. Weren’t they cooing and moaning to each other post-coitous about not having secrets not long ago?

Next door Lynette (Felicity Huffman) is preparing for a visit from her train wreck of a sister Lydia (Sarah Paulson) whom she expects will arrive on a wave of hysteria and sorrow over some lost love. Instead she’s dressed like an extra from an Edie Brickell video and is happily in love with a hippie named Rashi (Christopher Gartin). Deliriously happy to be exact, and Lynette spits fire and poison with jealousy almost immediately. Lynette picks and pokes at Lydia until her old insecure jealous self explodes out and ruins her relationship with the hippie who then uninvites her from their retreat at a yurt. Only then does Lynette realize she’s being a bitch and tracks down the hippie so she can make things right, which she does after loudly singing some Ethel Merman tunes. I’ll give Lynette some slack for…well, being Lynette this time because she is mid-separation from Tom and only now realizing just what a nightmare she can be. I am holding out hope that Miss Scavo will have a glorious epiphany later this year involving rainbows and singing choirs. Fingers crossed. She did get out one good zinger before she calmed down though.

“You can’t marry that sunflower seed.”

Wasting away at the end of the lane we find Renee (Vanessa Williams) getting a massage from a Nordic God. Gay Lee (Kevin Rahm) arrives wrapped in his Cloak of Ridiculousness wanting Renee’s help explaining to his daughter Jenny about those evil boobies she’s growing. Renee agrees and before long she’s buddy buddy with the kid and playing mommy which makes Gay Lee a little jealous. This leads to a meltdown concerning whether or not Jenny should have a woman in her life. The whole thing felt a bit heavy handed to me but I suppose it was inevitable they would take on this issue eventually. Seems like showing Jenny as well-adjusted and not wanting for anything would have been a better solution, and Renee dismissing her desire for a mother figure as the frivolous ramblings of a pre-teen was not cool.

Now back to Bree (Marcia Cross). As the Chairman of the Dead Guy Committee she has done a good job of keeping her wits about her but after finding the Mary-Alice esque note and then discovering Chuck (Jonathan Cake) might be the culprit her common sense has gone out the window. Gabby (Eva Longoria) convinces her to snoop and whattayaknow she finds a creepy picture of her hand and a mysterious envelope hidden in Chuck’s briefcase. Now I immediately made the connection that Chuck was merely using the tools his trade affords him to determine Bree’s ring size so he can propose. But Bree and Gabby do not reach this obvious conclusion. Instead the launch into an elaborate explanation that involves Chuck finding a palm print on a tree at the crime scene and immediately deducing that Bree must be the murderer because murder is so like Bree, right? When she does finally put the pieces together at dinner right before Chuck proposes she dumps him instead and Chuck turns into a crazy person, telling Bree she has made a terrible mistake. Now Bree has done it. She’s worse off than she was before.

It was too much to hope that this final season would be 22 episodes of perfection so I can forgive a rotten episode or two. They had better get this train back on the tracks soon though. Next week Lynette finds out Tom has a girlfriend. I suspect any progress she made this week will go out the window.