The Surreal Life 5 - Episode 3 Summary

'Put It On, Put It All On!' By Estee

And once again, welcome back to VH1's new hit show, It's All About Janice. For thirty minutes, the Earth will cease revolving around the sun and fall into an orbit around something much more massive and at least a thousand times more dense: Janice's ego. (I can't say 'hotter' because at this point, no one involved with the show wants to associate 'hot' and 'Janice' ever again.) How will Janice dominate the show this week? Will fake-quitting be involved? Could she actually do a real-quit on something, with 'breathing' at the top of the viewer wish list? Will her primary six foes, also known as 'the housemates', finally give in to their destiny and the glory that is Janice by killing themselves, thus freeing up all possible camera time to her? And will VH1 ever figure out that the four people watching the show every week consist of me, The Devil In Miss Dickinson, and her two hair and makeup assistants, both of whom stand ready to escape the moment they figure out how to get their souls back?

Who cares?

No, really. Who? Do you care? Do I care? VH1 certainly doesn't care or they'd pull this thing off the air forever, or at least have the sense to bring MC Hammer back. At this point, I don't know why they're still putting the episodes up for all to see unless they too have had their share of Janice, which cannot exceed one part per six billion or poisoning starts to set in, and are showing her antics to whatever they think passes for the public (me, her, and the slaves) in the hopes of getting her publicly discredited, fired, and off the air forever. And if that's what they were after, they could have just passed out a few copies to booking agencies, the UPN staff, Tyra Banks, given Toccara Janice's home address so she could drop by and share a few words in person...

...what's that?

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Janice was fired from America's Next Top Model? Cool! That means they can cancel the series now! They've achieved their goal! No more Janice on a weekly basis in the fall! It's over! We're free! We can burn down the Surreal Estate with her in it! We can fill this timeslot with the first-ever airplay of I Love The Aughts! We can --

-- what do you mean, 'roll opening credits'? Look, just because you paid for the film doesn't mean you have to use it! Ask FOX! Ask CBS! Ask me before I have to get the really big weapons out! Just put the videotape down and walk away before it's --

-- look, just because you, as a network, sold a portion of your collective soul doesn't mean I have any obligation to report on this misery after it's already done what it was created for --

-- and you promise you'll edit her out of the ANTM reruns?

Last week on The Thousand Reasons Social Services Will Be Pulling The Kids From Her Custody, it was once again all about Janice. It was supposed to be about a book signing for Jose and a bowling match involving the entire cast, but the book signing mostly turned into a chance for Janice to eye Jose and muse about how she was going to bash him over the head with a club and drag him back to her liar, in part because she may have lined up someone to ghost-write a summary for her and that's the only kind of bashing she knows how to do, but mostly because she wants to have her way with him, which is code for something that should guarantee your hot water bill goes up by three hundred percent: not only will you have no need for cold water for a week, but it'll take at least fifteen showers before you start to feel clean again. And the bowling match against a league team was supposed to be about raising money to help the developmentally disabled, but it almost fell apart when Janice did her second fake-quit of the season, walking out on captaining the opposition because she just couldn't take the responsibility of leading people who were both smarter and more mature than her. This was followed by her pulling out the terms 'retard' and 'Rain Man' to describe a member of the opposition, because to Janice, being kind and understanding is what people do when they sign their afterlives over to her. And finally, Janice spent the night with the only person who understood her, was willing to accompany her everywhere, and could stand to be with her after the lights went out without the help of major drugs and high-test ropes, not to mention that club: Mr. Vibrator.

And what has our little disqualificatee from the human race (removed for shoving) done to justify our throwing stones at her this week? Well, like the network said -- roll opening credits.

You may recall that at the end of our last episode, the rest of the household went to bed early, figuring to get up and use the bathrooms before Janice's soul slaves arrived to layer more flayed human skin onto her decayed bones. Or you might have been one of the twenty thousand people on the board who've been avoiding this show, and I can't blame you in the least. Regardless, you couldn't possibly believe that Janice wouldn't be ready for a trick like that, because here it is 6:30 in the morning on Day Three and she's up at an hour she usually only greets from the nighttime approach end, letting her 'little lesbians' into the Estate so they can begin the four-hour ritual that allows her to go outside without attracting every Van Helsing descendant in a three-generation radius.

'Make it kind of sloppy,' Janice instructs her hair slave. 'That 'just had sex' look,' which must be making Mr. Vibrator so proud. This genteel, cultured, and above all, loud conversation awakens Voldemort, who manages to get past Janice's stooges and find a tiny section of unused bathroom counterspace. Voldy has her own beauty treatments that help keep her snake eyes from developing bags, so she begins work on her own morning routine -- the start of which sends Janice recoiling from the counter, her feet kicking out of the Beauty Chair and into the counter, nearly sending her falling backwards to crack her skull open on the cold tile, producing a not-early-enough, painful, and well-earned death. Unfortunately, I said 'nearly'.

What caused all that commotion? Foaming hair mousse. Voldemort sprayed a little into her hands, and the sound of the foam escaping the can startled Janice. This is probably because she's never heard it before. All of her hair products have a more -- organic -- point of origin. Some of them have been known to whimper and that she's used to, but foaming? Never heard of it. The only foaming Janice knows how to do is at the mouth. 'It sounded like a missile!' Janice declares, and then shoots off one of her own notorious middle finger rockets as a somewhat tired, vaguely bemused Voldemort abandons the bathroom. Janice didn't see the can, y'know. Janice thought Voldemort was producing the sound from another distinctly organic point. In fact, Janice thought the sound was, in her own words, 'a big old poopy fart'. And Janice is an expert. When you're lying in a puddle of your own vomit after another three-day bender or one night with Warren Beatty, whichever would produce more nausea with less effort, you're quite accustomed to hearing your body express its opinion of the half-brain it's being forced to carry around. You could almost feel sorry for Janice's body. She considers it to be one of her foes, which is why there's so little of it left.

'I'm so tired of this crazy psycho #####,' Voldemort wearily confessional-tells, 'that I just wanted to smack her and say 'Snap out of it! Snap out of your crazy supermodel haze!'' It's a nice thought, Voldy -- and yes, I know what I just said and who I said it to, remember what this season's sub-theme is? -- but it's not going to work. Janice's crazy supermodel haze is self-sustaining, and until you destroy her Horcruxes, it will continue indefinitely. There's one for every career she's killed, so you have to find -- eight thousand, two hundred and forty-seven of them. Her hair and makeup slaves contain the first two, so any time you're ready to start...

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