My Name Is Earl: 4.04 ‘Stole an RV’ Recap
October 3, 2008 by Chandra
Original Air Date: October 2, 2008
An interesting factoid we learn about Randy in this episode of My Name Is Earl is that whenever he finds a hat, which happens from time to time, he invariably gets lice and a brand-new personality to go along with it. Hence the amount of time he spends during this installment speaking what he thinks is British English, complete with cultural references and unique vocabulary.
While Randy’s busy with that act, Joy, and eventually Darnell, devotes her efforts to capturing Pigsquatch, a supposedly mythical, giant prehistoric pig that she sees in the flesh one day. Her plan is to get rich quick by putting the animal on display for tourists.
Unfortunately, she overdoses it with medication meant for humans and kills it, thus destroying any possibility of working her scam on any unsuspecting victims. Worse, since the pig didn’t die of natural causes, she and Darnell have to remove it from the trailer park lot themselves (the county won’t help), and this thing is the size of about ten of them put together.
The early stages of the pig incident get Earl to thinking about the time social services took Joy’s kids, prompting him, her, and Randy to go on a vacation while the children were away. Penniless, they improvised by stealing Jerry Burns’ (Jerry Van Dyke) RV, which promptly exploded when Randy “turned off” the gas stove by blowing out the flame … but not turning the gas off properly with the knob. Duh!
After Earl and Randy find Jerry alone in his wheelless shell of a home on the same lot, eagerly waiting to die while doing absolutely nothing, Earl comes up with the idea of making amends by somehow replacing everything in the RV that perished in the explosion. First up is a jar since Jerry likes jar music, followed by Joy’s plastic blow-up mannequin to stand in for Jerry’s dead wife.
Eventually, the brothers get Jerry out of the house to visit Joe (Good Times’ John Amos), an old war buddy, whom they learn too late deserted Jerry behind enemy lines in the war fifty years ago, but not before Jerry sliced off his ear in anger. Set on revenge, Jerry almost succeeds in slicing off Joe’s other ear, until he begins having a heart attack and Joe saves Jerry’s life by giving him his last heart pill.
The two men are even then, the animosity ends, and Earl gets to scratch another wronged person off his Karma list. “Stole an RV” is a nice, not great, episode made better by the two guest stars, both old-timers in the TV-comedy field whose performances probably satisfy viewers familiar with their earlier work even more.
