Original Air Date: October 27, 1952

We open on Lucy sitting at the table dreaming of a better life, or at least a better apron.

She’s going through a deep existential crisis: she’s bored with her predictable routine. In fact, she tells Ethel, she can predict everything Ricky will do every morning. It’s “tragic,” she calls it.

Gay people and interracial couples in the 1950s are like LOL yeah must be the worst.

Lucy does an impression of Ricky yawning, and I can’t help but yawn. It’s like we’re connected across the decades! Although I yawned again while typing this. Maybe I’m just not getting enough sleep…

Ethel knows what Lucy’s going through. Fred ALWAYS forgets his glasses are on his head, and always says, “If they’d have been a snake, they’d have bit me.”

How Ethel hasn’t poisoned his oatmeal by now is totally incomprehensible.

Ethel: Ricky and Fred are cut out of the same mold.
Lucy: And they’re getting moldier all the time.

Lucy and Ethel call a family meeting to discuss how gross their middle class, Upper East Side lives are:

Lucy: Do you all realize we’re in a terrible rut? We have become stuffy, moldy, and musty. We are knee-deep in a pool of stagnation. Now what are we gonna do about it?
Fred: Well I dunno about the rest of ya, but I’m gonna go take a shower.

Ricky is not concerned.

Ricky: When you’ve been married 11 years, you’re supposed to know each other like a book.
Fred: It’s the same after 25 years, (looking at Ethel) only the cover gets more dog-eared.

I’m not surprised Fred is a dick. I’m surprised Lucy and Ricky have been married 11 years. They usually look like middle schoolers still figuring out how to hold hands.

For a solution, Lucy pulls out a marriage book (because that worked SO WELL last time). It recommends they take a vacation from marriage for a week — so Lucy will move in with Ethel, and Fred will move in with Ricky. They say their goodbyes, all four of them WAY too sure of their sexual prowess.

Cut to: Fred and Ethel’s bedroom, where suddenly everything make sense.

Their beds are light years away from each other. When Ethel wants to get to Fred’s bed she has to leave the shire, cross Middle-Earth, and journey all the way to Mount Doom.

Turns out, being single is lame as fuck. But there’s about 3 billion dating apps that could’ve told them that.

To make the boys jealous, the girls dress up like they just left their local mall’s Glamour Shots. Men love that.

Lucy: If they’re as bored as we are, WE’LL even look good to them.

They tell the guys they’re going to a club called 21, which I can only assume is how old they actually think they are at this moment. This show is powered on cigarettes and delusion.

But they don’t really have dates at all, unless you count their vibrators.

In total jealousy and fear, the guys come to spy on the girls, and the girls go to spy on the boys, and long story short Lucy and Ethel get locked on the roof.

It’s cold up there, and they nearly freeze, DiCaprio-style. But also like DiCaprio, they know freezing alone won’t win you any awards, so they cry. A few more minutes with the camera rolling and they’d probably eat a bison liver.

Lucy recommends Ethel jump off the building and get everyone’s attention so they’ll save Lucy. PUT HER ON A BUZZFEED LIST. 

Lucy throws a rock and breaks a neighbor’s window, but doesn’t reach the neighbor. Then she lays down a board, and tries to convince Ethel to walk across and go get help from the next building. Because Lucy already did the hard work by thinking it up. But Ethel’s not a total moron.

Lucy is a moron, though! She’s actually an instructor of bad ideas at Dumbass University. So she does it, and then rather than go get help, she tries to convince Ethel to cross for absolutely no reason. PUT HER ON ANOTHER BUZZFEED LIST. 

Much later, after Lucy and Ethel have spent the cold night on the roof, Ricky and Fred find them. And they do what any grown men who love their shivering wives would do: they spray them with a hose.

Oddly enough, they decide they want to get back together after all this.

Lucy: I wanna be in a rut with you!

And they kiss.

You know, technically a “rut” is the mating season of animals such as deer, sheep, camel, goats, pronghorn and Asian and African antelope.

So things could still get pretty interesting…

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