Alzheimer's That Ends Well

"Alzheimer's That Ends Well"

"Alzheimer's That Ends Well" is the twenty-first episode of the Drawn Together series.

Storyline

Template:Spoiler The story begins with Clara depressed that her Octopussoir keeps interfering with her life, sprouting out and making people vomit. She then is told that she can get an Extreme Vaginal Makeover, under the care of the esteemed Dr. Wooldoor Sockbat. It goes fairly well, but Clara soon becomes obsessed with what she perceives as flaws in the vagina, which she keeps demanding be fixed. After it reaches the point where more plastic surgery is impossible, she is shocked to find it looks like Joan Rivers (and talks like her too). The only possibility to get rid of her "vajoana" (that won't make it resemble Kevin Spacey's vagina) is to reinstall the Octopussoir. However, when she goes to find the Octopussoir again, she discovers he is happy now, having completed college, become a realtor, and married a 38-year-old Jewish woman (who will marry anything). He explains to Clara that the reason her plastic surgery went wrong was because she, unlike him, used it too much.

Meanwhile, Toot is depressed that the housemates have forgotten her birthday. After they discover her trying to kill herself, they throw her a party. When she acts surprised, they begin to wonder if her mind is all there, and realizing that she is from the 1920s, hastily conclude that she is elderly and has developed Alzheimer's disease. They decide that she is a terrible burden on the household, and put her in a retirement home. At first, Toot is horrified when she sees all the old people acting like insane mental patients, and insists she doesn't belong there. However, when the attendants are gone, the seniors let her in on a secret: there is no such disease as Alzheimer's. Old people simply fake the disease to get into luxurious nursing homes where they are waited on hand and foot. Toot decides she likes this life, and eagerly plays along. Unfortunately, while she is talking to Xandir on the phone one day, she accidentally reveals the secret, causing the old timers to decide she must die. They give her a new walker that has faulty brakes, causing Toot to fall off the balcony with a fiery explosion. She survives, however, so the seniors gang up on her in a fight. She survives this, too, and finally manages to flee the scene and escape back to the Drawn Together house. The seniors send for bounty hunter Boba Fett to track her down. Unfortunately, once she makes it back to the house, the housemates bring her right back to the home. The old people capture Toot, and force her to walk the plank into the most fearsome and deadly place possible- the nursing home's pool.

Meanwhile, the housemates find the scooter Toot escaped home in. Spanky hops on to ride it, but ends up being blown to bits; Boba Fett, thinking that Spanky was the "fat pig" the seniors were after, rigged it up as a booby trap. The housemates finally realize Toot is in trouble. They pile into the Foxxy 5 van and break into the pool area where the seniors are holding Toot. Unfortunately, the van, with all atop it, is in the pool soon, sinking. While this is going on, Clara decides that she can take the Vajoana no more, and has come to the home to put it out to pasture. She walks by the pool area and sees the commotion going on. Realizing that there is only one thing to do, she pulls up her dress and lets Joan go to work, telling old jokes from her stand-up comedy act, jokes which make the old people laugh so hard, it kills them all one by one. The threat eliminated, Captain Hero takes them all flying home. As they are flying, Clara decides that just as she came to accept her Octopussoir, she can accept the Vajoana too- she just wishes she had a way to make it shut up when she needs. When Foxxy hands her a tampon, Clara is delighted, but when she asks how to know when you're supposed to take it out, Foxxy has no idea what she's talking about.

Musical Number: "You'll Really Love Being Abandoned Here", a happy song about retirement home life sung by Toot and the seniors.

Trivia

• For the first time since Clara's Dirty Little Secret, Clara's Octopussoir is mentioned.

• The title parodies the phrase, "all's well that ends well."

• This is the fourth episode in which Ling-Ling does not speak.

• The shot of a depressed Clara walking by the pool was originally used in Dirty Pranking No. 2.

• The show Extreme Vaginal Makeover is a parody of the controversial plastic surgery show Extreme Makeover.

• When Extreme Makeover host Ty Pennington shows up, the Octopussoir exclaims, "It's that douchebag Ty Pennington," just like Clara exclaimed, "It's that asshole Jeff Probst!" when Probst showed up in The One Wherein There Is a Big Twist- Part II.

• The picture that Toot identifies as a vase, and Captain Hero identifies as two people, is a well-known optical illusion known as the Rubin vase; the image that a person sees is said to contain insights into the way the person thinks.

• The scene where Clara's Octopussoir attacks the doctors is a reference to the scene in Spider-Man 2 where Dr. Octavius's tentacles kill the doctors attempting to operate on him.

• Clara's obsession with her vagina represents the plastic surgery trend people tend to have over any part of their body (many of her complaints, like pimples or crows' feet, are usually related to the face). The maximum amount of plastic surgery possible turns it into Joan Rivers's face, a crack at her many surgeries.

• Clara's vagina is, interestingly, male. It is also revealed that Clara has had the Octopussoir since she was a baby, indicating that Clara's mother must have died very soon after she was born, since she already had a stepmother by the time the curse was placed on her.

• When we first see Clara's new Vajoana, it keeps asking, "Who are you wearing? Who are you wearing?", the question Joan Rivers always asks of celebrities walking the red carpet at the Academy Awards.

• The retirement home is called the Golden Sheets, a reference to the many contexts in which the word "golden" is used as a euphemism for old or elderly: i.e. golden years (old age), golden anniversary (50th anniversary), the sitcom The Golden Girls (about four elderly women).

• Boba Fett, the famous bounty hunter from the Star Wars franchise, makes an appearance; he is hired to kill Toot, but kills Spanky instead.

• NBC public service announcements are parodied again, this time in a segment called "The More You Don't Know When To".

• The scene where the Foxxy 5 van crashes through the wall of the retirement home is a parody of The Dukes of Hazzard. When the van floats in the pool, it is shown to have a Confederate flag on top, just as the Dukes' car, the General Lee did.
  • This is odd, if one takes into account that Foxxy-- and the other members of the Foxxy 5, for that matter-- are all African-American, as the Confederate flag is viewed by many as a racist symbol due to the American South's history of racism against blacks.

• When Toot is shocked out of the bathtub at the beginning of the episode, she is shown to have a donkey tail and hoofs, which can be heard as she runs out of the room.
  • Though she has been seen with a donkey tail before, it is most likely just a visual gag similar to the various gags questioning her gender.

• Toot's shoes are the source of a continuity error in this episode. when the seniors are forcing Toot to walk the plank into the retirement home pool, her right shoe comes off and sinks ominously into the muck. Moments later, both shoes are back on her feet.

• The woman Clara's Octopussoir marries looks exactly like Unusually Flexible Girl from Captain Hero's Marriage Pact, though it's extremely doubtful it's supposed to be the same character.

• After Vajoana makes a joke about Joan Collins, one of the seniors states that he loves jokes about dead celebrities no one cares about anymore, even though Collins is not dead.

• This episode calls into question Toot's actual age. While the housemates certainly jump to conclusions, her age is somewhat debatable.
  • In the episode, Toot describes herself as old twice ("...old and fat...", "...old broad like me.") However, the former self-description can be attributed to exaggeration due to her state of suicidal depression; the latter was spoken in a patronizing manner. In the old folk's home, she throws away her tampons, meaning she has not yet gone through menopause (which happens to a woman between the ages of 45 and 55). Also in this episode, Toot is unaffected - unlike the senior citizens - by Vajoana's comedy routine.
  • Throughout the entire first season, Toot was designated as being 22 years old; older than Clara (20), but younger than Foxxy (23). There are numerous allusions to her age in various episodes. For example: in A Tale of Two Cows, Toot is invited to a ten year reunion at her fat camp; in the flashback, she is depicted as being a teenager or adolescent (making her anywhere from 20 to 30).
  • If there is indeed some continuity to character age on the show, a most likely solution to the age problem in the Drawn Together universe is two separate concepts of age: physical and chronological. Toot is chronologically the oldest character, but she is not elderly. She is physically in her 20s (just being overweight and out of shape). Spanky is chronologically the youngest character (being a webtoon), but he is designated as physically being the oldest (31). The characters may all have existed for the duration of their chronological lifespan, but the speed at which they age is independent of that fact.

• The song sung at the retirement home is a parody of I Think I'm Gonna Like It Here from Annie. It was previously parodied in the Family Guy episode, Peter Peter Caviar Eater.