30 Rock Recap: ‘Everything Sunny All The Time Always’

This week’s 30 Rock was all about being in control, or at least trying to be. Liz decides that she’s got to take control of her personal life, Jack needs to use his connections to get Avery out of North Korea, and Tracy tries to recreate the exact situation that created an inside joke so that he won’t be left out anymore. Liz and Jack’s goals were relatively legitimate, at least by 30 Rock’s standards, and Tracy’s was batshit insane. So naturally, he’s the only one who managed to pull it off.

Avery has been traveling throughout Asia for work as part of MSNBC’s new campaign that sends hot blondes into crazy situations, and Jack tells her to go ahead and extend the trip, as he and the nanny have been handling caring for Liddy just fine without her. This leads to Avery being captured by Kim Jong-Il, played by an amazingly over-the-top Margaret Cho. The whole Jong-Il character was pretty perfect; the short clip they showed of the “movie” that Tracy made with him made me want to see the entire thing. And hell, based on how this episode ended, Margaret Cho’s Kim Jong-Il may become a recurring character.

Jack tries to use all of his connections to get her out, including ex-girlfriend Condi Rice, following the same advice he gave Liz. Despite apologizing to her for breaking up with her via text (“Me + U = :(“), in the end he’s left powerless, and Kim Jong-Un marries Avery. OK! I guess that is something that can happen! There are few shows that can get away with something as completely nuts as this and have it be justifiable, but 30 Rock is one of them. It’ll be interesting to see where this storyline goes from here. I do know that the Avery Jessup/Kim Jong-Un wedding was the most entertaining state wedding to be shown on TV in the last 24 hours.

Meanwhile, Liz’s quest to dedicate the same amount of energy to her personal life as she does to her professional life gets pretty much immediately derailed by a plastic bag in a tree. A plastic bag that represents mortality and things she cannot control, as it helpfully tells her. Even when she’s finally victorious, after getting tazed and run down by a delivery man she ends up sending a whole slew of bags back up there. Leaving her with a personal life still not under control and like ten times as many reminders of her unavoidable, eventual demise fluttering in the breeze outside her window.

And then there was Tracy, who returns to TGS only to discover that Kenneth, Grizz and Dot Com have a new inside joke — Smooth Move, Ferguson! — that he doesn’t get. So he does everything in his power to recreate the original conditions of the joke’s genesis: rain, a delivery man, Grizz with a cold and Jenna with horse-semen-lengthened hair. And while the resulting joke doesn’t have the same effect on everyone else as it did the first time, Tracy thinks it’s hilarious, making him the sole victor in this episode about trying to bend the world to your will. Well, I guess Kim Jong-Il got his way too, but I’m not sure that counts.

30 Rock Recap: ‘Everything Sunny All The Time Always’