“My Name Is Earl”: Midnight Bun

With Frank on the loose, Randy and Earl have to recapture him without getting the police involved and creating a public scene. They ask Frank’s friend Paco where he thinks Frank might be headed, and Paco reveals that they stashed some cash in the trailer where Joy and Darnell now live, and that’s probably where they’ll find Frank. Randy gets a prison K-9 search dog and he and Earl head to the trailer park.

Meanwhile, very pregnant Joy is at the clinic demanding to be induced by a doctor, pronto. (But Dr. Pronto is unavailable.) Joy is admitted to a very sweet birthing suite with all sorts of relaxing amenities that Liberty and Ray-Ray are paying for. (It’s like Joy died and went to Chili’s.) Liberty and Ray-Ray show up for the birth and insist that Joy do one of those underwater deliveries in a pool. Joy really doesn’t care — she wants to get the kid out ASAP. But when the doctor shows up to give Joy the injection to induce labor, Liberty freaks out. She grabs the doctor, picks him up on her shoulders (remember that Liberty was a member of B.L.O.W.: Black Ladies of Wrestling), spins him around and hurls him to the ground. But on the way down, the doctor sticks Crab Man with the syringe, and Darnell gets a nice dose of very strong female hormones.

Waiting in the car at the trailer park, Earl wants Randy to take the handcuffs off, but Randy decides he’s going to follow procedure and leave them on. Earl’s mad and gets out of the car, and Randy shoots him with a bean-bag gun, which has little effect on Earl. (Seriously, do those things have an effect on anyone?) Having fired his bean bag, Randy loads a beverage can into the gun and fires it. The can misses Earl, but hits some poor guy in a wheelchair instead.

Randy’s upset over his incompetence, and Earl explains that although Randy might never be a leader of men, he might still be a good leader of toys, or maybe animals. Wait, forget the leader of animals — Randy’s K-9 ran away.

Frank shows up at the trailer and Randy and Earl confront him. Turns out that Frank also had a pistol stashed in the trailer, and Earl and Randy are now Frank’s hostages. Then Joy and Darnell show up to the trailer, quickly followed by Liberty and Ray-Ray, who claim Joy stole their child. So now everyone is Frank’s hostage. With Earl and Randy handcuffed to the refrigerator, Frank makes Joy help him pull the oven out so he can grab the cash hidden behind it. But moving the oven causes Joy’s water to break right over Frank’s shoes. Eww. Joy goes into labor, and Crab Man immediately goes into action, using a towel, coupon scissors and a chip clip to successfully deliver the baby in what appears to be the quickest, cleanest birth of a human being in recorded history.

Disturbed that he has “placentas all over his feet,” Frank runs out of the trailer, but he’s quickly tackled by the K-9. Randy and Earl rip the door off the refrigerator and run out to nab their fugitive, who’s brought back to prison without incident, riding in the back of the El Camino with the K-9.

In a very un-Joy-like moment, Joy gives Liberty and Ray-Ray the $1,000 that Frank stashed in the trailer, so that someday baby Ray-Ray Ray-Ann can go to college or get a boob job.

Oh yeah, there’s some small sub-subplot with Catalina babysitting Joy’s boys. The best part of it is that she doesn’t know their names and just refers to them as “Black One” and “White One.”

What We Learned:

Without elicit sex, shame is just shame.

If Pro-Lifers knew what they were doing, they would just get people great insurance.

People don’t realize that hostage situations are stressful on both sides of the gun.

Clearly, the point is “mute,” because “moot” just doesn’t make any sense. Moot? What’s moot?

Wisdom From Randy: Perhaps the greatest wisdom might be the ability to decide when to use brute strength instead of wit and guile, as Randy does when he rips the freezer door off the refrigerator so he and Earl can chase down Frank.

Crab Man Chronicles: Space baby — that’s tight. Some good Crab Man in this episode. He contributed to science by revealing the effects of Oxytocin on the male gender, giving birth to “pooptuplets.”

About Ryan Berenz 2166 Articles
Member of the Television Critics Association. Charter member of the Ancient and Mystic Society of No Homers. Squire of the Ancient & Benevolent Order of the Lynx, Lodge 49, Long Beach, Calif. Costco Wholesale Gold Star Member since 2011.