Everything’s coming babies on Happy Endings this week! Alex realizes that teenage girls are buying and wearing the infant onesies she’s been selling in her store, Jane becomes obsessed with finding the child produced by her college-age egg donation and Max…well, what kind of baby would run a German sex hostel out of his roommate’s room when he’s out of town? Oh yes, an awesome one!
Alex and Penny are, at first, perturbed by the high school girls buying the tiny tees (complete with crotch snaps), though the store is doing crazy business. “My Samantha is getting good,” Penny says, patting herself on the back after a truly spot-on SATC zing delivery. However, soon they both fall under the sway of the beautiful blond high schoolers that have been flocking to the shop, so much so that it’s not until a kegger breaks out in the middle of the day that Alex realizes they’ve gone too far. When asked to chose between 1) going with the girls for mall-time fun and a chance to reconnect with her former high school crush, now a hot jet-setting businessman (“I love Paris business!” she gasps) and 2) helping Alex repair her beer-soaked store, Penny of course goes with the mature option and sticks by her oldest friend. Just kidding, she rides that popularity train all the way to the food court and back. “I brought you a Sbarro to say I’m Sborry,” Penny says meekly. Sometimes that’s all a person needs to hear.
Meanwhile Max is in a dilly of a pickle with Dave, seeing as how he has no money to pay rent after the bubble burst (“The Beanie Baby bubble was real,” he hisses). However, most of Max’s get-slighty-less-destitute-quick schemes haven’t paid off. “Scottie Pippen is not in a financial situation to hire a sassy butler,” Dave barks. Max eventually weasels his way into a short but spectacularly unsuccessful stint on Dave’s food truck, during which he manages to confuse “manos” with “cojones” pretty much every time he has to handle the food. By the end of the episode the fact that Max blows the last of his Beanie Baby money on a “bitching 80s limo” seems like the only natural conclusion, as his raising enough for rent money by shuttling illegal fares to and from Shabbat. Truly, unlike the creative failure that was Tony Danza’s talk show, Max is the boss.
In addition to giving us the slowest, gentlest, most lovely sperm bank joke I’ve heard in a long time, Jane’s egg donation crisis lets Eliza Coupe break out of her role as the Monica to reveal the deeper compassion running underneath, and then underneath that, the miles and miles of stone-cold crazy. As a side-note, she and Damon Wayans Jr. are my favorite couple on TV right now. After Brad accidentally sparks her interest in finding her biological daughter, Jane tricks him into accompanying her on a stake-out of the recipient family’s home. “This seems like a weird place for a silk boxers outlet factory,” he muses. Jane spots her would-be daughter Dora-Julia, who is, of course, wearing one of Alex’s baby tees. Afraid of being spotted, Jane accidentally crashes their car into some garbage cans, this necessitating her to drive her father’s old creepy van to spy on an 11-year-old girl in order to warn her not to become a midriff-exposing harlot…well, you see where this is going. After the proper authorities have been alerted (“I’m not a perpetrator, a friendly stranger with advice from the future!,” chirps Jane), Julia and/or Dora’s mom informs Jane that they didn’t use her egg in the first place as her donor video made her seem crazy. Not funny crazy. More like, return-after-11-years-to-stalk-our-child-crazy. You know the kind they mean.
