The SmarK Rant for Joey – Season 2, Episode 1
“Joey And The Big Break”
“Yeah, I’m pretty good at getting Joey laid.”
– Joey pretty much sums up his life in one line.
So after a recap of last season’s finale, Joey wakes up to find a note from Alex on the bed…and Alex trying to sneak away and failing in spectacular fashion. Apparently they both regret the one-night stand, even if it sounded like a bobcat attacking a seal all night.
As if things couldn’t get worse for our hero, he learns that Gina is now working for Bobbi as an assistant, and things are awkward with Alex. So Joey’s solution is to do all the romancing after the fact.
So we meet Jason, Bobbi’s other assistant, who’s no help to Gina and pretty much exists to be the token gay guy on the show. Luckily Joey survived the voting gimmick on “Deep Powder,” but unluckily he has Bobbi for an agent, as she immediately demands a huge raise for the supposed star of the show. Thus, his next scene is his death scene, via an axe to the head. Well, at least he’s not the severed head, who doesn’t even have a line. Amazingly, they don’t think “I can’t feel my legs!” is a good choice for the character.
Bobbi is apologetic (“Why did I demand that on-site scientology tent?”) and tries to call in one last favor for Joey, but Severed Head Guy offers instead to hook him up with Kevin Smith personally. His name is just Zack, and he’s in the opening credits so I guess he’s Joey’s new best friend.
So Joey and Alex have their big date, in Joey’s room, which goes about as well as you’d expect. I mean, beer, “You look beautiful”, “Let’s get naked”, what more could the guy have done?
Michael’s subplot of the week involves pretending to be Joey, giving us the opening quote, although it actually ends up impacting Joey more when Michael’s self-doubt and the little voice in his head take residence in Joey’s head and ruin his big audition. Turns out that “exploring the space” is a spectacularly bad idea.
So since typing isn’t Gina’s strong point, Bobbi makes her a “hatchet man” instead, which begins a running gag of letting Joey down easy, so he tries Zack’s method of getting an audition instead. Meanwhile Alex demands a lot of her dates, it seems. Joey’s response (“That’s a lot of homework for a test I nailed two days ago.”) was the runner-up quote this week.
Zack takes Joey to meet Kevin Smith, although apparently his “connection” is kidnapping the guy’s dog and being a big fan of Ben Affleck’s work. The scheme of course fails miserably, but Kevin takes pity on them and gives Joey another audition. Sadly, the voices are back, and one of them is doing French accents now to screw with him. Now THAT’S the kind of out-of-nowhere oddball humor that the show has been lacking up until now.
But with everyone ganging up on him, he finally realizes that the voices in his head are his attempts to keep everyone happy, and it’s too much for his brain. Well, it doesn’t take much to overload THAT circuit anyway. So Gina gives him a peptalk, and he marches right back to the studio and auditions for the wrong movie in completely inappropriate fashion. But he gets the part anyway, the lead in a big Jerry Bruckheimer summer blockbuster. That’s exactly the direction they needed to go with the character from the start — the outsider interacting with Hollywood and succeeding despite himself.
And of course with the chips down, Joey pulls through and pulls off the big romance with Alex…but he’s so good at it, she’s left wanting more. So I guess that’s where they’re going now.
