By Amy Van Veen (Staff Writer) – Email
The Pawnee Harvest Festival has come to life thanks to the Parks & Recreation department and it can only really be described with “I want to go to there,” but a little more won’t hurt. Lil Sebastian is the famous mini-horse, not a pony, in Pawnee that causes Ron to giggle and Ben to scratch his head in confusion. The festival is to be held on a famous Indian battleground and when Leslie tells Ken, the Wamapoke tribal leader, that there’s no way to move it, he resorts to working off of stereotypes: “white people love Matchbox 20 and are terrified of curses.” When the press get a sneak peek, Joan Callamezzo cannot seem to find a scandal, yet. When April says, “I love you” Andy replies with a, “dude, shut up, that is awesomesauce,” leaving Andy clueless as to what’s bothering her. The curse begins to descend during Joan’s tour, first with the mention of a curse, and then Tom loses Lil’ Sebastian and blames it on Jerry, and then the power goes out. Meanwhile, in the first aid tent, Donna offers her wise words when Ann is given the opportunity to “use him, abuse him, and lose him” when the only Jersey Shore wannabe in all of Pawnee hits on her. Wiser words are spoken by Leslie: “crap on a spatula.” Ron, the father of the P&R department, sets everyone straight when they’re stuck and feuding on the Ferris wheel after the generator goes and from their vantage point they find Lil Sebastian in the middle of the corn maze. Leslie is forced to borrow a generator from the Wamapoke Casino and makes a deal with Ken to act out a fake curse-rebuking dance that means nothing, complete with subtitles such as “doobee doobee do.” Jerry gets stuck in the maze. Ben and Leslie are reunited. And Ron Swanson is a train engineer while Tom is the caboose guy.
Thursday also offered a new episode of 30 Rock, I mean Queen of Jordan. No wait, it was 30 Rock pretending to be Queen of Jordan. While Tracy’s off in Africa, Angie has to make her own way and wants Liz and Jack to help her celebrate because, as she says, “my single ‘My Single is Dropping’ is dropping.” Jack doesn’t do well with reality footage, first a trip, then some misconstrued Princeton football and baseball terms, then some passing of gas that he blames on the sofa. He goes from buffoon to “Tracy’s Gay Boss” to a clumsy, gay flatulent. Jenna tries to manipulate the cameras for her benefit in order to promote her new website, Jennas-side.com, which is a domain she can’t seem to hear properly. When she takes on the role of alcoholic in order to get Pete to stage an intervention, she doesn’t realize she has to follow through with the intervention by heading to a Minnesota rehab clinic. Frank turns out to be the kid who had the affair with his teacher, Lynn Onkman who is described by Queen of Jordan producers as “Educator/Sex Offender” and who is played by none other than Susan Sarandon. Jack is getting Liz to plan the Angie’s music party, not because of her love of bands like…Amy Grant, but because he’s hoping she can get Angie to bring Tracy back from “Africa”. D’Fwan is not just a gay hairdresser, but also a homosexual party planner and Angie’s friend Randi is just odd. There’s a guy with blurry face syndrome and Angie dressed as Amy Grant from her music video for “Baby, Baby” and Kenneth is gloriously described as “Kenneth, Elderly Page.” The greatest subplot of all, though, is when Ken finds a lost glove, then realizes it’s his glove, and looks for the other glove only to end up with three. Beauty. The entire episode was a beauty.
Outsourced has actually gotten a little better, though they seem to have stolen a successful idea from their NBC neighbour Community. The episode starts with Todd entering Charlie’s version of the colour spreading holiday Holi, only with paintball guns. At Mid America Novelties, the air conditioning is out and Gupta’s obvious solution is to stuff cold drinks between his over shirt and under shirt. Rajiv doesn’t realize all of his proposal plans are terribly clichéd. He also holds in his sweat, more commonly known as “urine of the pores”. When the computer system goes from hourglass to frowny face, Todd calls tech support, who happen to be the snobby call guys upstairs, and also happen to be the jerks hogging the air conditioning. Todd enlists Manmeet and Charlie to break into the system and Manmeet has to crawl through the ducts to redirect the air, eventually getting lost and fondled by a rat. The upstairs employees enact revenge by putting an inappropriate elf virus on all of Mid-America’s computers and the downstairs employees react the only way they know how: with as little subtlety as possible. Charlie and the gang show up in the Globocom offices with paintball guns in full celebration of Holi just in time for an important client to visit the call centre, including Manmeet dropping from the ceiling vents. Rajiv tries his best to surprise Vimy with a proposal by first being a jerk and cancelling on her favourite holiday and then showing up with a sitar, white horse and fresh white suit, but thanks to some unforeseen circumstances surrounding the Holi celebrations, Rajiv ends up in front of her house in his underwear covered in colourful powders singing Captain & Tennille’s “Love Will Keep Us Together”. Not only is it adorable, but also incredibly spontaneous.
Next week has some exciting events including the Hecks avoiding spring cleaning and having the cops show up assuming a B&E and The Office may have a proposal in the midst of a garage sale as the time edges closer to a Carell-less Dunder Mifflin. As that certain office crew moves closer to a bitter goodbye, the greatest thing to do is enjoy a little P&R love when Leslie takes her crew camping. For now, though, it’s best to enjoy Liz Lemon’s musical love, “Baby, Baby,” for old time’s sake after the jump.
