We open on Blossom and Six having a sleepover together. There’s not much of an introduction, and we don’t get Blossom’s video diary, which is still the focus of the opening credits. I wonder if we ever actually see it again before the last episode.
The girls are in their jammies, and Blossom remarks that she can’t believe how much homework she has. Six says she could pay someone to do it, or not, which is supposed to be funny, and then jokes that Blossom could change schools.
Blossom says she almost forgot that she changed schools, even though we're about to find out it was like a whole thing. Six says Blossom's switching schools was a nightmare, and Blossom says Six has no idea how true that is, which is weird because Six was present through the whole story.
Pop Culture References: School Daze (title)
Before Blossom even finishes her sentence we’re whisked into a sitcom flashback, complete with a fuzzy special effect fade.
In the flashback, Blossom sits in class.
Suddenly the teacher walks in, and she’s either Gates McFadden from Star Trek: The Next Generation, or someone who looks just like her, and she’s dressed in S&M gear. The fuck?
Mrs. Dominatrix threatens the students, and Blossom in particular, and obviously it’s a dream sequence.
The dream is supposed to establish Blossom’s desire to transfer out of Crestridge, the all-girls private school she goes to, but none of the elements in the dream correspond to Blossom's reasons for wanting to leave. In the dream, the teacher threatens her and her classmates turn into zombies, but later in the episode we'll find out Blossom wants to transfer out almost exclusively because she wants to be around boys. Expressing a character's dramatic desires is pretty much the easiest thing you can do in fiction, and they've already failed. That's a good sign.
Blossom wakes up and asks the audience why she can’t just have sex dreams like everyone else. She must have forgotten the S&M outfit.
After waking up, Blossom goes down to the kitchen, where we get our first official appearance of Anthony.
Anthony picks pepperoni slices off a discarded delivery pizza, and it was someone’s job to establish this, because believe it or not, this will be important later.
Anthony picks up a newspaper and tells an unfunny story he read in there, delivering the supposed punchline like it was his own dialogue. Blossom laughs and so does the audience. I’m beginning to wonder if Anthony wasn’t actually as cool as I thought he was when I was a kid.
Blossom and Anthony rap about how she wants to change schools. They talk about how public school starts on Monday, but it’s a bad time to ask Nick for anything, because he’s got a lot of stress these days, what with just talking to Maddy’s divorce lawyer, losing a film scoring gig, and with Joey’s summer school grades coming in. Joey’s summer school grades will be very important in how confusing this episode is later on.
As Blossom gets ready to start her day, Anthony says good night and heads to sleep, which is actually kind of funny.
Enter Ted Wass as Nick Russo! I never realized how young Ted Wass looked on this show, probably because his age of 40 or so was impossibly ancient when I was watching these as a kid.
Anyway he’s back home from an all-night recording session. Blossom tests the waters about wanting to transfer by telling him she thinks playing the trumpet might be her life, the way Nick’s is the piano, and they’ve got, like, the best music class ever at Tyler High.
This is the point where the entire story falls apart. I’m honestly not sure if Blossom is supposed to be bullshitting Nick here. She says the trumpet is her life, but we literally never see her play the trumpet, or even have one in her room. She will by the end of the episode take a music class, but we never actually see it, and most musicians tend to practice their instrument outside of their lessons at some point.
Nick points out that if she wants to study the trumpet, he’s a successful session musician who knows LA’s best local talent, and can set up lessons. Blossom was naïve not to realize this.
She replies that Tyler High wouldn’t cost Nick anything. And that’s about the dumbest thing to say, since money doesn’t seem to be an issue considering Nick was able to keep the house, pay his divorce attorney, support three kids who keep the lights on all night, and send Blossom to Crestridge in the first place.
The scene goes on and on after this, and we're not even finished with the exposition part of Blossom's whole conflict for this episode yet.
Pop Culture References: Night of the Living Dead, Father Knows Best
At some later point, Blossom tutors Joey, who is no longer named Donny, because when Joey Lawrence was being mentored by Tony Danza, he took every lesson seriously.
Blossom uses the time Nick is paying her for to talk about her own stupid problems. She’ll never have any kind of social life if she doesn’t go to public school and join the band there, she tells Joey.
Joey makes a crack about bands playing the Orange Bowl halftime show, saying that these musicians get their big shot while everyone’s peeing. I guess during the retool, Blossom’s penchant for observational humor was equally distributed through all of the characters, even Joey, who will be established even in this first episode as basically having brain damage.
Pop Culture References: Orange Bowl
For fuck’s sake, we get another Joey and Blossom scene right after that. While Blossom is doing some Acting 101 exercises like putting laundry away, Joey reveals his plan to cheat on the history test they’ve been studying for, which strangely Blossom has no moral opposition to.
Joey’s plan is to write all of the relevant facts on his arm, but do it backwards, with a mirror on his other arm for a decoder. This story is so unbelievably unfunny that I’m not going to cover it until its resolution at the end of the episode. Thankfully Blossom calls him an idiot after he leaves the room.
Blossom bites the bullet, telling Nick she wants to leave Crestridge and go to Tyler High. Which I thought she covered already, but I guess Nick can’t read context clues, like why he can’t figure out who’s been eating his pepperoni slices when there are only three other people in the house. It’s one of the kids, Nick. The one who tends to be awake late nights. It's not that difficult.
Nick gets all hardass and says no, and Blossom mutters that her mom would have let her go.
Nick replies that he’s not interested in her mother’s opinions on childrearing, because his is better. “Little Richard’s is better,” he adds, and even the studio audience doesn’t laugh at it. You’d think they’d at least cut that line out in editing, or do a second take when the audience was telling them they didn’t need a joke there because it's supposed to be a serious demonstration of Nick's authority.
Pop Culture References: Little Richard
So naturally Blossom undermines that authority and goes to Tyler High anyway, or at least a single hallway in it. I’m not sure if the set, music and nerd/Valley girl/jock extras are supposed to be an homage to Saved By The Bell.
This is where the episode falls into a pit of no return, and not just because the staging has Mayim Bialik's back to the "A" camera for the entire scene. (Seriously, look at these screen caps.)
So, it’s the first day of school, and Blossom decides the wear the ugliest dress she could find, because teenage girls don’t care what they wear, and she didn’t consult Six for some reason. I guess dramatically it demonstrates Blossom’s individuality and loneliness, but from a character perspective it seems like she probably would have told Six so they could go to school together. At the very least Six could have told her not to wear that dress.
Naturally within five seconds of being there, Blossom and Six run into each other, and Six has no other friends around because it’ll cut down on the production budget. Again, we’re to believe this is the first day of school.
Neither Blossom nor anyone else give any indication whatsoever that they have to memorize schedules, figure out which classroom they’re supposed to be in, et cetera. Which might be fine, but since the rest of this story is going to hinge on Blossom doing as much school work as possible for the first two weeks of the semester, they could have spared one line of dialogue to establish it.
Blossom says sneaking into public school will be like 21 Jump Street, except she wears less makeup than Johnny Depp, which is way too funny a joke to be on this show.
Six sort of congratulates her for pulling the whole escapade off, but asks Blossom what will happen when she runs into Joey, and of course that happens two seconds later. I’m all for comedic timing, but it’s hard not to see the cheapness of this, especially when we actually won’t see more of Tyler High after this one scene in this one hallway.
Joey naturally has some blonde under his arm, his arm being inside his football jacket.
Wait, what?
I’ll buy that the football players already know each other and Joey’s already got arm candy, but if it’s only the first day of school, why has Blossom been tutoring him? They flimsily established Joey was in summer school and Blossom was tutoring him, but the tutoring story goes from several days before the first day of school through the end of the episode, which takes place two weeks later. Joey takes the make-up exam two weeks into the school year?
And it's established that the exam decides whether he passes the tenth grade, too. So I guess Tyler High has a system where a student's grade level and schedule can be changed at any time.
And don’t think to yourself that I’m overanalyzing this, because this story jumps through about six hoops to arrange a scenario where Blossom can spend two weeks at Tyler High without the stakes of automatically shutting herself out of Crestridge by result.
Also, if this is two weeks before the private school’s semester, it’s got to be late August. Aren’t Joey and the other football players hot in wool jackets?
Anyway, Joey wisely doesn't care about any of this and wanders off. Blossom wraps up the scene by telling Six she thinks she’s doing the right thing, when another football player says hi to her.
Pop Culture References: I Love Lucy, Laverne & Shirley, 21 Jump Street, Johnny Depp
Nick walks into the kitchen, only to find Anthony stripping another pizza of its pepperoni slices, thus solving the lamest mystery of the 1990s.
Nick asks Anthony for advice, after getting all angry at Blossom before, and Ted Wass looks seriously overpowered by Michael Stoyanov for the rest of the scene. Is this intentional? Is this oedipal? Does it recur throughout the rest of the series?
Nick says he’s stuck, and he doesn’t know how to get unstuck. Anthony says that whenever he’s stuck, he remembers some chick named Stacy Fertelli. Nick thinks for a second and suddenly they’re on the same page. I'm not one hundred perecent sure what it is, but I think this is supposed to be incredibly filthy. So filthy, in fact, they weren't allowed to use the joke unless it was completely inferred.
Even Nick is horrified, but he thanks his son for the advice, as if the scene that opened with solving one of the lamest mysteries on record isn’t about to end with the creepiest thing ever.
Pop Culture References: Frank Sinatra
So Blossom talks to Six again and we’re in the bedroom. So, are we officially in an entire episode that’s a flashback? That’s weird.
Anyway they take turns expositioning that Blossom is doing tons of work at Tyler High, since we won’t see a single classroom scene in this episode. Six notes that it’s only been two weeks and she’s done more than Six did all last year, plus summer school. So has the two weeks gone by already?
There's no mention of the Halloween party Six is going to dressed like a gypsy, but Blossom says her plan is to get letters from all her teachers saying how good she is, and present them to Nick at dinner. Because that’s really what teachers love to do, especially only two weeks into the school year. Did she explain the extenuating circumstances, and that she needed the letters because she was committing fraud?
Six asks what Blossom will do if it doesn’t work, and Blossom says she’ll have to leave Crestridge by any means necessary.
Blossom goes to Crestridge to meet with someone named Mrs. Whiting, who’s played with such cartoonishness I’m not sure if the actress is bad or if we’re in another dream sequence. They wouldn’t do a second dream sequence, would they?
Blossom tells Mrs. Whiting she wants to leave Crestridge, and the WASPy adminsistrator warns her not to go to public school with as soft a dialogue as they can get away with without exposing the actual disadvantage Blossom would have by leaving a prestigious private school in real life.
Blossom anticipated this would happen, so she proceeds to use the oldest tricks in the book to make her seem like an unruly student. She lights a cigarette using Mrs. Whiting’s desk, throws the lit cigarette in a trash can, puts her feet up, offers to bribe the old lady to keep her quiet, et al. Okay, it’s obviously a dream sequence now, but this would have been a much better story if she really did it.
Blossom wakes up. For those keeping score at home, we’re now in an episode told in a long flashback, with two separate dream sequences within. I got Inception, yet I had to watch this episode of Blossom three times to understand what was going on.
And this is the second time Blossom has woken up in a fully-lit bedroom. Maybe that's why she's having so many fucking nightmares.
Blossom and Nick go out and finish their meal.
Blossom, who was apparently wearing her pocketbook during the entirety of dinner, takes out the teachers' letters and is about to hand them to Nick. Suddenly a man approaches Nick and says hello.
While the eye is being distracted by the interaction between Nick and a guest star we haven’t met yet, Blossom freaks out, pulls her hat over her head, and hides under the table. The audience laughs at this even though we have no idea why she’s doing this.
It turns out he’s a musician friend of Nick’s, who coincidentally has been Blossom’s band teacher at Tyler High. This might have been funny if we had seen him before this. He tells Nick that Blossom is one of his best students and whatever, and Nick is not about it.
The guy leaves and Blossom resurfaces, coming clean to Nick. He’s rightfully pissed, especially when Blossom tells him she got into Tyler by forging his signature.
Nick and Anthony talk by Nick’s music equipment in the living room. Anthony plays with the synthesizer while Nick tries to tell him that he doesn’t know what to do because even though Blossom pulled a big one over on him, the letters from the teachers are actually glowing. Blossom has even been trying to start a chess club, because why not add something else to the list of achievements we are told Blossom makes and never see?
Anthony recites a Dear Abby article and tells Nick to figure out the lesson from there, and apparently they’ve already run out of things for Anthony to do after the three scenes we’ve ever seen him in. He drifts off somewhere.
Joey bursts in to tell Nick that his summer school grades came in, and he passed! Why are the grades determining whether he passes the tenth coming in two weeks into the school year? And if it’s two weeks in already and whether Blossom goes back to Crestridge on Monday is still in the air, doesn’t this make it Sunday?
Blossom comes downstairs and asks Joey if he cheated or not. Of course he did, he said, but he cheated by hiding the answers in his head so no one would see the writing. That’s actually kind of funny, though about ten years later it was used for a thirty-second bit on The Simpsons.
To celebrate passing tenth grade, Joey asks Nick if he can go to Las Vegas with his friends. As much as I can’t stand this character, I sort of feel bad for him here because even his dad can’t treat him with anything besides utter contempt.
Blossom and Nick talk, which starts off with Nick congratulating Blossom for helping Joey out there. Blossom admits it was a complete accident, but Nick gives her credit for it anyway, forgetting that he also fucking paid Blossom to do it, too.
On the topic of Tyler High, Nick says what Blossom did was amazing, but the way she did it was pretty dishonest. Nick tells her how scared he’s getting now that Blossom is becoming an adult, and he wants her to stay at Crestridge away from boys and drugs.
Blossom asks if he’s afraid she’ll become a nymphomaniac, which in my opinion should pretty much discredit her whole plan. Even if the trumpet thing wasn’t a ruse, her plan was only to be around boys, and she really only did two weeks of work. Now she’s breaking the social contract and saying a word like nymphomaniac in front of her dad, when out of respect she should have kept sexual extremes out of sight and out of mind, since masking her emerging sexuality with schoolwork was her fucking plan in the first place.
But since he’s been getting parenting and masturbation tips from Anthony, we’re well aware Nick is a chump, and he decides to let her go to Tyler High anyway!
No compromise of “Do well at Crestridge for another year and I’ll reconsider” or anything like it. Rather it's, “Well, honey, as a fourteen year old, you obviously know what’s best for yourself better than I, your fucking parent, does.”
Then he asks if since she’ll be going to school with boys if she has any questions, and Blossom reiterates that she’s in total control of Nick by saying he’s been through enough today. Nick sighs, “Thank God!”
Pop Culture References: Dear Abby
We come back to the opening scene with Blossom and Six’ slumber party to finish the multilayered flashback. Even though this is months later, Six has the exact same hairstyle she had the first day of school.
The writers self-congratulate themselves by having Blossom and Six recap and laugh about the things we just saw happen, but they also recap Joey’s B-Story, which is really weird, like saying “Remember when I had to go get my driver’s license, and the shirt my cousin wore that day?”
Six says it’s a good thing Blossom went through this process and they could see it firsthand, because now they will know what it’s like when their own daughters do the same thing. When do we get the origin story of when Six started talking like a 50-year-old?
Pop Culture Reference Tally: 11
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