Today’s theme seems to be business and eternal to-do list
and Delores giving George a massively repetitive task which she thinks is
soothing and zen. Delores can find a bright happy side to everything ensuring
that, if I knew her, I would have to kill her. George seems to agree with me on
that score. Increasing the chances of murder, George also works enough hours to
qualify for their health and pension benefits – which means lots of deductions
so she takes home less money
Ok, this seems like a very odd system
This means she only orders toast at the Waffle House and
is most unhappy. Unlike Roxy who comes in with balloons and good will for all.
She must be ill. She even wants to buy George breakfast she feels so blissed
out; Rube gives her 2 days off. See, I’m not the only one who thinks she’s ill.
Daisy complains, of course, because she’s Daisy and someone needs to axe murder
her. She also succeeds in ruining Roxy’s mood.
Daisy goes to reap a snobby racist woman surrounded by
her rich fellows who gets set on fire by the flambé, not helped by her friends
trying to put her out by throwing alcohol on her. Unfortunately for Daisy, rich
snobby dead lady isn’t co-operative (but she has manners enough to get Daisy to
tip the bus boy who tried to put her out).
So what does Daisy do? She takes the ghost to see Georgia
at work – even calling her real name rather than the one she uses (Millie) at
work. She has a plan to use her very rich ghost to get money –oodles of it.
George is tempted but it’s just wrong to use dead people to make money. Very moral
but it has to be said that both Mason and Betty regularly stole from dead
people. This moral quandary lasts a few minutes before George decides to fake a
dead relative to get time off. And Delores is such a happy dappy person she
even helps George abuse the rules to get more time off.
They take their scheme – and ghost – to see Mason and she
looks around a very nice house and asks if it’s a slum (she thought George’s
work place was a sweat shop). She wants to communicate with her son. And for
Daisy’s plan to work she needs Mason out of his house – which requires negotiation
based on Mason’s creepy attraction to her resolving at 15% of the money and him
getting to see her breasts. Mason, invest in porn and get your creepiness off
Daisy, you can see breasts there and easily negotiate and extra 5%
To the funeral with her doting son and her very very very
amusingly spiteful friends. And the deceased woman, Mary Kate, judges the crowd
on its quantity and quality. And Gorge pretends to be a relative in order to
pass on a message to her son about financial paperwork. No emotional dramatic
goodbye, but where the trust documents are. She claims she was at a séance as
an excuse.
Of course this leads to the man wanting a séance which they set up in Mason’s house – with Mason providing cheesy scary sound effects. Mary Kate has little patience for the whole charade but she does give information Daisy needs to make the séance seem authentic even if Daisy has to heavily edit Mary Kate’s less than sympathetic outlook, mocking him for his weakness and how he’ll never stand up to the board. She guides Daisy to tell her son what he needs to do at the next Board Meeting but half way through Daisy feigns pain and says she can’t continue – and he starts offering her money – escalating amounts of money when he returns the next night. Mary Kate isn’t amused but needs to guide her son on keeping hold of the company
Daisy laces into Mason for his silly parlour tricks and
George babysits Mary Kate.
To the Waffle House where Rube notes George’s absence and
Daisy and Mason are terrible at covering. But they pass and go to the next séance
for Mary Kate to give out her instructions and disdain her son for sleeping
with his housekeeper “who doesn’t even speak English”.
But before she can collect her money police arrive to
arrest her for grand larceny. Realising he’s being cheated (which is unfair, he’s
actually receiving exactly what he wanted) he grows a backbone, much to Mary
Kate’s happiness. Daisy does manage to pass on one last message of Mary Kate
actually loving her son.
Outside the police detective is shot twice – Mary Kate’s
son runs with the money – while the detective tries to fire back. When the son
is gone Rube arrives and the detective removes the bullets – he’s dead too as
are the two officers. They have time because they’re plague division (Rube
& co are accidents) and don’t have as much to do. And Mary Kate’s white
light arrives.
Rube goes in to talk to Daisy – apparently this is the
same stunt she pulled in New York which got her transferred the first time. He
makes it very clear he has no time for Daisy’s shenanigans and won’t tolerate
it again
Roxy continues to be disturbingly odd, even tearing up a
parking ticket she’d written out. She meets up with Rube in the Waffle House,
doing her nails and talking about bunt cakes. Rube cuts to the core of it –
Roxy is mourning and trying to cover it; she doesn’t want to go over the past
again and Rube offers to be there when she’s ready.
She goes to his house the with bunt cake. She’s been dead 21 years and she thought she’d be able to let it go by now. They sit in front of a roaring fire with a big box she’s labelled “life stuff” that Rube urges her to throw into the fire. We get a flashback to Roxy’s life – she was a dancer, good at it. And she invented leg warmers (aha, so she died when the fashion police hunted her down and killed her, before trying to remove every other mention of the 80s?) and was making more and more money selling them. Until she was murdered by her jealous friend before she had chance to patent her idea (possibly as karma for inflicting leg warmers on the world).
George returns to work and Delores has knitted her a
pencil sharpener cosy because… she’s Delores. And Roxy decides to start randomly
dancing during her work day. And George learns to sail – as Mary Kate suggested
and as one of the things that were added to her to-do list.
It was a fun episode – I love seeing Daisy get her
comeuppance and, above that, I really liked seeing some more about Roxy,
especially since we’d already had past stories of the others
Other than that, I don’t really have a lot to say – Dead Like
Me seems to be racking up these nice, fun, decent episodes. They have some
snark, but aren’t hilarious all the time. They have some decent messages but
they’re not that deep and there’s no real meta plot. It’s just fun with shining
moments but generally basically good.
