Here we go! Carol’s getting ready to apply for college, and she’s super pumped to go to Columbia. But both her parents are Boston College alumni and they just assume she’s dying to go there too. Carol feels pressured to be interested in the same school as her parents, perhaps because they cannot stop gushing about how she’s going to love it in a way that makes it sort of feel like she has no other option. I’d expect that kind of overbearing parenting from Maggie, but not Jason. Anyway, Carol chickens out on telling her parents where she really wants to go, and in the meantime mails off her application to buy her some time before she has to drop the proverbial bomb on her parents.
Sadly, she only buys herself a week. It turns out a college recruiter for Boston College just happens to be in Long Island and wants to squeeze in an interview that night. How is Carol going to get herself out of that pickle?
*Sidenote from the main plot: during the call from the college recruiter, which Ben actually takes, Carol and Ben have an exchange in which Carol claims “Sandy is not my boyfriend. He’s just the only guy I date.” But just in the last episode, Carol was busted for sneaking out on a date with a new guy in her class. Am I the only one who notices these inconsistencies? I realize the answer to that is yes.
Anyway, Carol swears Ben to secrecy about the interview and then finds out her parents are going to be out that night. Score! This opens the door for scheming! Carol quickly makes her way to Mike to help her out with her plan to make Boston College wish they’d never received her application. She’s going to intentionally blow the interview so she’ll have no choice but to go to Columbia. She just needs Mike to find people to play her parents because, for reasons I don’t understand, the college recruiter would want to meet her parents.
It should be totally easy to find replacement parents on several hours’ notice, right?
Armed with twenty bucks, Mike accepts his mission and returns with substitute Maggie and Jason, who turn out to be a homeless couple he plucked off the street. I don’t see a choice but to ignore this obviously insensitive move right now. The bottom line is Mike’s paid these two—Fred and Wilma—to play the part of Maggie and Jason and he needs to get them cleaned up, whereas Carol needs to put on her best bad-girl outfit.
When the college recruiter shows up, Carol and Fred do their damage. Here’s just a smattering of how:
- Carol apologizes for her attire (which honestly isn’t that bad at all), claiming she has to work later. Wait, what? Is Carol joking about being a prostitute? I’m no expert, but I’m guessing you don’t have to go that far to put off a college recruiter.
- Fred dives into the sherry
- Carol claims to have spent six months in reform school over “a little misunderstanding involving a knife”.
- Fred calls Carol a ‘little slut’ and Ben a ‘scumbum’
Perhaps not surprisingly, this is all it takes for the recruiter to run for the door.
Just when Carol and Mike think they’ve gotten away with everything, Maggie and Jason come home early! How will Carol and Mike explain Fred? Simple! They tell Maggie and Jason that Fred is the college recruiter. Problem solved. Except Fred is really only equipped to play the part of a marginally offensive parental figure, not to be a poised college recruiter from a prestigious school.
It takes mere minutes for Maggie and Jason to suspect there’s something fishy going on. Between Fred asking for more sherry, calling Maggie ‘Micky’, calling Jason a proctologist and getting the school name wrong, I can’t imagine why. But really it isn’t until the actual college recruiter comes back to retrieve his pop-up map of the campus (yes, you read that right! a pop-up campus map!) that the jig is up.
Carol’s busted, but finally gets to tell her parents that she wants to go to Columbia. Maggie and Jason learn a really important lesson about letting your kids choose the school they want to go to. But no one learns the lesson that it’s not appropriate to make fun of the homeless.