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We open this week with something rarely seen
on this show – a crime scene
that's being worked by pretty much everybody in the cast.

And by everybody,
I mean everybody. Because even Dewey is there.

Dewey, you may
remember, had taken time off to go to Harvard Law
School, after he took a
bunch of super-strength tanning pills to earn himself a minorities-only
scholarship. (Yes, yes, it's taken me three seasons to get to making Soul Man jokes. But we all knew it had
to happen sometime, so it's happening now. Deal with it, people! And be on the
lookout for upcoming "Ponyboy" jokes, which I'm saving for a slow week.)

The truth is that
Dewey is now fresh out of rehab. And like they say … you can take the alcohol
out of the asshat, but you can't take the asshat out of the Dewey. Because he's
as wonderfully, hilariously as crude and awful as ever.

For example, at
this crime scene they're working, he actually announces that it's a blessing
some vato kid got gunned down, since
it will save them the trouble of coming back to arrest him in a few years.

Lydia is justifiably horrified by this remark. But
when she calls him on it, he tells her to chill, calling her "babygirl." Big
mistake. Nobody calls Lydia
babygirl. And if they do make the mistake of calling her babygirl, then they'd
better go on ahead and put babygirl in a corner. Because babygirl is going to
go ahead and kick their asses.

Which is what Lydia
proceeds to do, and as she and Dewey come to blows, the picture freezes.

Foreboding Announcer Guy: "Food fight!"

13 Hours Earlier …

You know, many of
the greatest couples in fiction find their relationships tested by separation.
It might be due to War … or Illness … or a Sexy New Downstairs Neighbor With
Boundary Issues.

For Cuddlybear and Rookieboy, the devastating agent of separation is … Dewey.

Because the precinct
sarge decides that Cuddlybear will have to partner up with him instead of
Rookieboy. The reason being that he wants Dewey — a notorious screw-up —
under the watchful eye of his best cop. Which is certainly very flattering for
Cuddlybear. It's also totally f**ked — his big reward for being good is being punished.
Which is pretty much the story of my life, but that's a discussion best left
for my shrink.

So Cuddlybear
spends the episode with Dewey,while
Rookieboy gets foisted off on Chickie "I
Am The Cop!" McBlondie.

I'm sorry to say
that Cuddlybear's interactions with Dewey lack any of the titillating ho-yay
dialogue and comradely groping that we typically enjoy when he's paired with
Rookieboy. Because Cuddlybear has decent taste in men. And also because he's
not insane.

Look, it's not all bad being with Dewey. The day does have some amusing moments for
them both. Like there's this bit where Cuddlybear and Dewey pull over this car.
And out come about 47 mariachi players, clown car style, only more hilarious. Their
leader claims that they're on their way to an important gig, but they're down a
vehicle so had to cram in one car.

Cuddlybear has no
patience for this. But Dewey is totally into these guys and asks if they know
how to play "Cielto Lindo." Which is
a typically stupid question from him. I mean of course they know how to play "Cielto Lindo"! They're a freaking
mariachi band! Based on my extensive experience eating in Mexican restaurants
and riding the subway, it's obvious to me that the only two mariachi songs that
even exist are "Cielto Lindo" and "La Cucaracha."

Then Dewey gets
all chummy with the mariachi leader, bonding over how they're both in recovery
and have shiny chips to show off. In fact, Dewey wants to give his new best
buds a ride to their gig, but Cuddlybear has had it with this nonsense and lets
out a bear-like growl.

Lest you think the show only has room for one
wacky incident like this, no worries! There's plenty more where that came from …

Because next they
get called to this sleazy motel where a maid had fled a room screaming after
she saw whatever was inside. They kick down the door and find a guy tied to a
bed, butt naked except for a towel covering his privates. Obviously this sort
of sight is nothing new to Cuddlybear (except maybe for the towel), but Dewey
seems oddly amused by the whole thing.

Naked Guy
helpfully explains that his girlfriend did this to him. Along with help from
his wife. And his other girlfriend. But his big problem now is that he's got to
pee. When the cops wonder why that should be a problem, Naked Guy gestures to
his crotch. So Cuddlybear lifts the rag with a flourish, and "Ta-Da!" – the
guy's peter has been Krazy-glued to his thigh.

This all sounds
familiar to me. It's either one of those "Ripped from the Headlines" scenarios.
Or it's one of those "Ripped from Another T.V. Show I've Seen But Can't
Remember" scenarios.

Whatever it is,
it's definitely sounding familiar to me. Also … YEEEEEEEEEEEEEESH!!! Excuse
me while I take a moment here. I'll finish recapping once my urethra stops
quaking in terror.

Cuddleyear at
least has a stronger gag reflex in his gonads for this sort of thing than I do.
Because he's able to make a recapper-worthy snark here, telling the medics, "We've
got a sticky situation here." HA!

It's nice to know Cuddlybear has time to
amuse himself like this, given
he's also slowly being driven batty by his new partner.

All episode, we
see how Dewey can't stop yammering on about his recovery. He's on and on about
all his newfound energy, and how he sees everything so clearly now, and he keeps
calling Cuddlybear "brutha," and if you squint your eyes, you basically get a
hideous hybrid of Dr. Drew and Desmond from Lost.

What the show is quite
accurately documenting here is one of the great ironies of modern life that
I've personally observed myself many times — how when certain people finally
get off of alcohol and drugs, they make everybody they come into contact with
want to start using alcohol and drugs.

And given
Cuddlybear is already well into the pills himself, it's really no wonder that
every time he hears the words "higher power" from Dewey, he wants to pummel his
head into the steering wheel. As Chickie
slyly observes, she was stuck with drunken ass Dewey for years, and now Cuddlybear
can't even hack sober Dewey for a few hours.

The final straw for Cuddlybear comes after Dewey's smackdown with babygirl Lydia.

Cuddlybear pulls
Dewey into the car, but Dewey just keeps making these horrible misogynistic
comments about Lydia
and her partner, at one point describing their car as a "tuna boat." Bleh. There
are certain phrases that gay men just can't bear to hear in any circumstances,
and that's one of them.

So Cuddlybear
takes the next opportunity he gets and ditches Dewey.

Meanwhile, Rookieboy is having a wacky day
himself. He and Chickie find
this weird guy pacing on the side of the road clutching his bloody arm to
himself. When they ask what happened, he says his girlfriend cut him.

But when they go
to his car to talk to her, naturally they find she's just a blow-up doll. (Hey,
this is sounding familiar too. Didn't I see this in a movie? Somehow it was
more charming when the nut job was Ryan
Gosling.)

When they get the
guy in the back of their car to cart him off to the loony bin (or as they tell
him, off to visit the "pretty house of soft marshmallow rooms"), the guy
rhapses poetic. "Love's a bitch, ese,"
he sagely imparts.

This hits awfully
close to home for Rookieboy, given who his new girlfriend is. That's right … the
Ann Margret sex kitten who can't
change lanes is back, and now she and Rookieboy are doing the nasty on a
regular basis.

The problem is
that the entire force knows about it. Actually, that's not the problem; the
problem is that most of them have done the nasty with her themselves. As
Chickie explains to Rookieboy, the woman has a thing for policemen. In fact,
they've nicknamed her the "den mother." Or, if you prefer, the "badge bunny."

She's also "Red-Hair
Sally," and it's a crying shame she doesn't drive a Ford, because then she'd be
"Red-Hair Mustang Sally," which would be totally awesome.

Anyway, this all
puts last week's episode in perspective since it explains why Cuddlybear was so
eager for Rookieboy to pull her over. Clearly Cuddlybear recognized her car and
wanted to throw Rookieboy a bone.

It's a credit to Cuddlybear that he now looks
amused and even pleased by
Rookieboy's constant kanoodling with Sally. I certainly hope the favor is
returned when things are reversed later this season and Cuddlybear gets his own
steady boyfriend. (BTW, his name will be Brad,
and he'll be a handsome, clean-cut kindergarten teacher who Cuddlybear meets on
"Uniform Night" at The Eagle.)

At the same time,
though, Rookieboy is exposed to the incessant teasing of his fellow officers,
who keep revealing details of their various kinky escapades with her. One colleague,
for example, talks about how she keeps a box full of Polaroids of all the cops
she's slept with.

The other guys,
curious about these on-camera interactions, ask the guy if he got a
complimentary "trip down to Brazil"
with her, and he assures them she was wearing her "winter fur coat." I have no
idea what any of that means. Okay, I do have an idea, but I'm willfully forcing
myself to play dumb about it. Right now my hands are over my ears and I'm
going, "La la la la la, can't hear you!"

Now excuse me
while I go take a scalding shower. This whole scene made me feel like I was
getting an STD through my TV screen.

So that's the frame of mind Rookieboy is in when he's at last reunited with the only man
who truly understands him.

Stopping at a Seven
Eleven for coffee, Cuddlybear – at his breaking point with Dewey – spots his
former partner, grabs him, and hightails it out of there, leaving a bemused
Chickie once again stuck with Dewey.

Happily reunited
at last – their relationship all the more secure for having been so sorely
tested – Cuddlybear and Rookieboy take a moment to share intimate personal
thoughts with each other.

Rookieboy wonders
if Dewey was always the way he is now, and Cuddlybear responds that no, in
fact, he used to be just like Rookieboy. Before Rookieboy rushes home to stick
his head in the oven at the implications of that, Cuddlybear elaborates that he
merely means that Dewey was always intensely focused and passionate.

He adds that the
job can't turn you into something you're not; it just brings out whatever is
already inside of you. In other words, if you were an asshat like Dewey before,
it just makes you even more of an asshat. In other words, being on the police
force is the equivalent of being on a reality show.

Later, they share another intimate moment when Red Hair Sally comes to pick up
Rookieboy. Seeing Cuddlybear looking all amused by this, Rookieboy asks him if
he ever had a fling with her himself, presumably in some sort of threeway with another
cop like, oh, let's say Tom Everett
Scott.

Cuddlybear says
he hasn't had the pleasure. He adds that Rookieboy is clearly a "glutton for
punishment," with perhaps just a hint of wishful thinking. Rookieboy jokes that
he and the rest of the guys are just jealous of him, and Cuddlybear sort of
jokingly but also sort of ominously replies, "You have been warned, my friend.
You have been warned."

Meanwhile, the bulk of the episode focuses on
this gang war that spirals
horrifically out of control. Ironically, this depressing, gritty storyline
kicks off with a comedy routine that's been around since the Jurassic Age.

Sammy and Nate are interrogating
a gangbanger about this dead guy they found, demanding he tell them who shot
him. The guy keeps saying, "Nobody … Nobody shot him," which enrages Sammy. He
makes this Emmy-clip-reel-worthy Big Speech, all about how dare this guy say
nobody's responsible when there's this outbreak of never-ending violence
destroying civilization.

That's when Nate
points to a graffiti tag that indicates "Nobody" is actually the gang name for
an actual person. Ha ha ha ha! I get it! Just like "Who's on first" only it's
"Nobody shot and killed a guy in cold blood."

Naturally there's
all sorts of comic confusion about this, as people struggle to get their heads
around the "Somebody" who shot "Nobody."

For my part, I
couldn't help but keep thinking about the Mr. Nobody who constantly reappears
in the world's worst, most unfunny comic strip, The Family Circus. I wondered if, just like with adorable little Dolly
and Jeffy, this L.A. street
gang all have ghostly sprites following around with names like "Nobody," "Not
Me," and "Jesus Loves Me."

From there, things quickly go from bad to
worse, as the bodies begin
to pile up. At the center of it is a Romeo and Juliet love affair between an
African American guy (Frosty the dead guy) and a Latina heartbreaker (Nobody's cousin) affiliated
with different gangs who object to their interracial coupling. It's all very West Side Story, only with gunfire and
bloodshed instead of finger snaps and jazz hands.

Everybody on the
squad has to work together to try and contain the bloodshed. This gives us an
opportunity to see how new girl on the block, Detective Josie, gets on with the others.

Lydia herself is still clearly having issues with
her new partner, even though their day starts off breezy-peesy with a simple murder-suicide.
In fact, the case practically solves itself, thanks to a convenient suicide
note and a tell-tale receipt for the loaded gun. (Sheesh, if all police work is
really this easy, I might reconsider this recapping thing for a change of
career.)

Detective Josie
is all giddy that the simple case means they'll get out of work early and
suggests a shopping spree at Nordstrom's. This suggestion horrifies Lydia and only
makes me like Josie all the more. Call me, Josie! I'll go eat tacos and shop at
sales with you anytime.

Then, when the two women get called in to
help the gang squad, Josie
butts heads with Big Sal, revealing
herself to be a gal pal of his estranged wife.

As if that wasn't
enough, she then pisses off the whole squad by announcing how when she used to
work gangs in her old division, they never needed no stinkin' extra help and
had a stellar clearance rate. You can imagine how well that goes over.

Meanwhile, out on the mean streets of
war-torn L.A.,
it's quid pro quo with the gangs, as each side keeps retaliating for murders on their side with more
murders.

Soon —
horrifically and sadly — innocent bystanders get ensnared in the misery, including
a clean-cut choir-boy type who made the mistake of borrowing a car from his
gangster buddy. The mayhem culminates in a gruesome shooting at a Quinceañera celebration, where a young mother and her
four-year-old son are killed in cold blood.

I give this show
a lot of credit not only for having such a bleak storyline about violence and
racial intolerance but for driving it home by setting it all on Martin Luther King, Jr. weekend. Plus I
appreciate a show that finds a way to have a holiday-themed episode around
something other than Halloween, Christmas, or Valentine's day. I swear all
those sugary "very special" Christmas episodes I saw last month had me vomiting
egg nog out my eye sockets.

The gang war storyline also provides
opportunity for some interesting
social commentary from the show's core of characters.

At one point,
Sammy says that even if the choir-boy guy who was shot wasn't actually a gangsta
himself, he was asking for trouble by dressing like one. Detective Josie takes
offense at this, showing a picture of her own kids similarly dressed, but then
adding that two of them are in the military, and one's at Berkeley. (I'm very
intrigued by this one son who broke ranks with his military-police family to go
to a notoriously hippy-dippy artsy school like Berkeley.)

This whole clothing
debate is lost on me, though. Because from what I see here in New York City, the only kids dressing like
gangbangers are the ones going to the most snooty private schools (it's one of
the many things Gossip Girl gets all
wrong).

Also lost on me
is the significance of the geographical differences that come up between Sammy
and Josie. She makes some crack about him making judgments from his privileged
white-boy neighborhood. But then it comes up that she lives in a more hoity
toity neighborhood than he does. Except I'm not really sure about that because
my knowledge of L.A.
geography is pathetic. I vaguely know there's something called "The Valley,"
and something called "The Hills," and somewhere out there is Disneyland,
but other than that I'm lost.

At one point, Sammy also observes that all
this gang violence, in his
opinion, can be attributed to bad parenting. On this I fully agree. But only
because I think pretty much everything
bad in the world can be pinned on bad parenting … on that and on the ascendancy
of Disney Channel pop stars.

But Sammy might
want to take pause before getting so judge-y about other people's parenting
skills. After all, he's got his own Damian-in-the-making currently baking
inside his own crazypants wife.

It turns out, though, that Sammy might be off
the hook, daddy-wise. Because he comes home from his depressing day
to find this guy camped on his doorstep, a guy with the sexy-skeavy look of an
'80s-era Calvin Klein model. The guy
talks in this vaguely Euro-trashy accent, which is well-known TV code for "Amoral
Lothario."

He tells Sammy
that he's Tammy's "phosographeee eenstructorre." Oh, and also that he's in love
with her and wants them all to be adult about this and do what's in the best
interests of the baby. As he leaves, Tammy comes out and is all, "Oops."

I love this! I
love how every episode is now ending with Sammy getting utterly gobsmacked on
his own doorstep by some crazypants revelation from his crazypants wife. In
fact, I wonder if this is how every episode is going to end from now on.

Like next week
Tammy will be all, "Hey, Sammy! Guess what? I was cooking up some meth in the
kitchen and our house exploded!" And the week after that, "Hey Sammy! Guess
what? I signed you up to be an organ donor and now these men are here to take
your kidneys."

And then, for the
big season finale, "Hey Sammy! Guess what? There's some snarky gay guy out
there watching everything we do and blogging about it … Let's get him!" Gulp.

Proud to be joining the cast of Real Housewives of New York. Tagline: "When it comes to my TV viewing, I don't believe in guilty pleasures. It's all pleasure."

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Source: http://www.newnownext.com/southland-episode-302-recap-swapping-partners/01/2011/3/

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