My Name Is Earl: 3.13 ‘Bad Earl’ Recap
Original Air Date: January 10, 2008
EARL’s finally out of prison, but he’s still suffering from some of the consequences of prolonged incarceration. For example, at his Welcome Home party, he elbows RANDY in the knee for no good reason, or maybe it was just JOY’s special eggnog — a margarita with a raw egg in it — that got to him.
Seriously out of whack now that he’s free, Earl feels even more confused when Randy returns his list. Karma seems impossible to figure out: doing good things, such as helping Joy and trying to help the other inmates, got him jailed and sent to solitary confinement. On the other hand, it was only when he was doing something bad that he was finally released from prison.
Earl hopes he’ll feel better if he moves back into his old room at the motel. It’s taken, however, because the mayor has a new scam: hide the homeless for the holidays. Earl and company not only end up sleeping on the floor in the motel’s laundry room, but the only job he can get in town as an ex-convict is as a delivery person at Camden Foreign Foods.
At work one day, Earl delivers food to a house where the one and only RALPH (Giovani Ribisi), posing as Stanley Johansen, opens the door. After jumping the prison wall six months ago, Ralph was on the lam in his tighty whities, until he came across Meals on Wheels delivering food to a suburban house. When he began to steal the food, an elderly widow named Doris opened the door and offered him her dead husband’s old clothes. Unfortunately, she mistook Ralph for her spouse when the escaped convict put on the clothes and her husband’s thick glasses, prompting Ralph to begin a new life as Stanley.
To cheer Earl up, Randy suggests he do something good and Christmassy on the list, like tackle the time he ruined mistletoe at Club Chubby. It turns out MISTLETOE is a stripper at the club who fell on her back and knocked her spine out of whack when Earl aimed a laser pointer that Randy stole at her and disoriented her. She now has to wear a back brace for two more years, and she strips with it on. Earl apologizes halfheartedly and accepts Mistletoe’s chosen punishment — to feel the pain of being laughed at onstage when he strips in an ill-fitting denim shorts outfit, complete with red nipple tassels.
On break outside the club, Earl sees Ralph drive by with two hot chicks in Stanley’s old car. Observing an escaped convict having such a good life while stealing from an old lady is the last straw for Earl. He throws his list on the ground and walks away in the middle of making reparations for something on it, convinced that Karma doesn’t exist, especially since he has nothing to show for two years of trying to do good. Further proof that he’s wasting his time is the fact that he got the idea for the list from Last Call with Carson Daly, a talk show that comes on after two other talk shows.
Now that Earl has given up on his list, he reverts to hanging out with dudes like Ralph and acting like a jerk. He, Randy, and Ralph pick up some of CATALINA’s female friends at Club Chubby one night and proceed to Joy and Crab Man’s trailer home (they’re out of town with the kids visiting her parents), which they promptly knock on its side by running up against the far wall.
When Earl and Randy take Ralph home, he refuses to let Earl inside, even to take a shower. Angered even more, Earl sneaks inside and puts on Stanley’s clothes while Ralph is showering. Of course, Doris then thinks that Earl is her dead husband, and Earl reclaims his role as the boss bad man by kicking Ralph, dressed in just his tighty whities, to the curb.
Although this happens on Christmas Eve, Earl tells Randy he has to wait a couple of days before he can stay in Doris’ house. So, Randy and Ralph sleep in the pickup truck overnight. The next morning, Earl goes into the living room to find Randy and the rest of the gang ready to hold an intervention because they liked him better when he was nice. All except Ralph, that is, who’s there because he misunderstood and thought they were all going to kick Earl’s ass.
Not even Randy’s pleas to go back to finishing the list because he doesn’t like the feeling in his stomach now that Earl’s bad again helps. Earl insists karma doesn’t exist since the only thing good that happens is to other people, and he leaves to get away from them all. Outside, the list he threw away earlier wafts into the air and starts following him as he walks down the street. When Earl stops to pick the paper up, it’s just a cheeseburger wrapper, though, not the list.
Convinced more than ever that there’s no karma, Earl stands in the middle of the street, shouting to the heavens that he was right, and gets hit by a car. When the driver of the car runs over to help him, Earl realizes that it’s BILLIE (Alyssa Milano), the woman he met in prison who was also trying to change her life.
Earl passes out thinking that Karma has finally brought him his good thing, and if he’s lucky, the two of them will be side by side forever. But, when Billie rushes to get help, she’s hit by another car. The one upside is that she lands right next to Earl, the two of them side by side in the middle of the street.
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