(Or: Lucy Steals More Than Your Heart)
**More WTFacts are at this week’s Episode Watch Party.**
Welcome back, Ballers! I hope you’ve had a wonderful week. Shall we?
We open on Lucy flipping pancakes, and y’all, she has mastered it. Girl can crash my brunch any day.
But in this life, even pancakes have to turn to poop eventually, and soon Ethel comes in to ruin everything by bringing Lucy a holy buttload of cash for their club’s bazaar.
Lucy is the bazaar chairman, but she hasn’t told Ricky. He doesn’t want her to do any more club affairs because that might give her a reason to leave the house or be happy.
Turns out last year she threw roman candles in the fireplace and burned Ricky’s eyebrows. And his burnt eyebrows apparently deserve a scorched earth response.
Anyway, she’s hiding everything for the bazaar in the closet. Not the first time this couple has dealt with closeted information…
Lucy enjoys flipping pancakes for the same reason prisoners in solitary enjoy talking to spiders.
Ricky comes in and complains his hot cakes are cold cakes. Ugh, Lucy, you had ONE JOB. Make him breakfast from scratch and read his mind on the exact second he’ll enter the room.
Wait…You had two jobs, and the second one is fucking impossible.
Ricky finds the money and freaks out. He assumes she’s bought another bathtub or donkey, and he has a good point. Lucy should never carry more than two arcade tokens and a Canadian quarter.
Suspecting something serious, he hides out and sees Lucy dragging in stuff for the bazaar, and that’s when he realizes she’s got a Catch Me If You Can situation going on.
That urn could hold the Duggar family.
Ethel says she’ll tell Ricky it was her money if Lucy will auction off Fred’s cuckoo clock without asking him. Lucy agrees. So now we have a cuckoo and a bazaar and neither word refers to Lucy.
In the next scene, Fred is downstairs fixing his couch when Ricky comes in.
Ricky: I’ve got an awful problem on my hands.
Fred: You should have thought about that before you married her.
Lucy comes in, and the guys hide behind the couch while she goes all Winona Ryder on the place. She hides the clock under her coat and takes some fruit. Even thieves can recognize the value of a plant-based diet.
Every married person should let their partner keep one ugly thing around, like this cuckoo clock. But Ethel’s already done that because she kept Fred.
Fred tells Ricky, look, if Lucy’s a kleptomaniac, she can’t help it. She needs therapy. She’s sick.
I’m really happy to hear him say something so genuinely forward-thinking. But why stop at Lucy? The four of them could get a LOT out of group therapy. Hell, at this point, they could go on Jerry Springer and leave more self-aware.
The men approach Lucy back in her living room. She’s hiding the clock in her coat, and when it cuckoos, she pretends to be learning bird calls. For example: the South African yellow-bellied sapsucker.
Fred’s like, funny, that’s what I call my secret boyfriend.
You guys are so suspicious of Lucy, but you’re the ones who were on the floor together behind the couch.
Ricky decides to bring in a psychiatrist… for a surprise secret visit. Come on, Ricky. Donald Draper was better at getting his wife a shrink.
Per tradition, I consulted an actual psychiatrist about this method. He says it’s well outside the standard of care.
Lucy is horrified to find out Ricky doesn’t trust her.
Lucy: Sure, I’ve been taking things, but he thinks I’ve been TAKING things!
So she decides to get even. When the psychiatrist comes by, he starts to notice someone has hidden jewels and robbery tools around the apartment. And he finds the blueprints to the 72nd Street branch of the Chase Manhattan Bank.
“Would you care for a cigarette, doctor?” “Sure! Cigarettes are as healthy as surprise psychiatric treatment!”
Lucy and Ethel come in, firing guns yet again in the apartment building. It’s a freaking Michael Moore documentary in that brownstone, I swear.
Lucy pats down the doctor, and Ethel tries to intimidate him with brass knuckles. They’re basically the TSA. They confess they didn’t rob the bank, but they did “knock over a gas station on the way home.”
I love how robbers always have white bags with dollar signs on them. Where does one even get those? At the hardened criminal surplus store?
Fred shakes Ethel and gold falls out, so Lucy pretends Ethel’s been holding out on her and pulls out a tommy gun.
“This is for all those times you said my pancakes were too cold, mothahfuckahssss!”
The psychiatrist, who is a complete moron, suddenly starts hypnotizing Lucy to “love everybody.” Lucy fakes the hypnosis and pretends to be a child. She talks about all the stuff she’s stolen throughout her life – including a little boy.
And meanwhile the neighbors are probably like, “Meh. It’s the Ricardos. I’m sure everything’s fine.”
Lucy ends the medical malpractice therapy session by announcing she’s achieved the kleptomaniac’s dream:
She brings in a baby elephant, which I can’t be clearer on: we’re talking about an ACTUAL ELEPHANT. A woman in the audience starts shrieking. That entire night, they’ve had an elephant back stage. And they’ve been shooting blanks at the walls, which of course animals love. And they drag this poor little guy in by the ear.
This elephant is so totally over it.
You know, there’s a slight chance Ricky gave the wrong diagnosis.
Watching Lucy and Ethel pretend to rob a gas station, threaten to shoot their loved ones with a machine gun, and drag an elephant around the house like a used mop, I’m not really sure they’re kleptomaniacs. I think maybe they’re just assholes.
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“If you even THINK ABOUT winning an Emmy before I do…”
I googled this episode just to see if anyone else was appalled by the pulling the elephant by the ear thing. Not cool.
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I totally agree…I’d never seen this episode before, or if I did, I didn’t pay attention. I paused the TV so that I could try to get my head around what I’d just seen. It didn’t please me one bit. I was quite disappointed. There should have been NO elephant, let alone a baby one on the Lucy show.
I felt terrible for that little guy. Very disappointed!!
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