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It's Halloween, and the employees of Jam Pony convince Normal to close early so that they can get busy partying. Honestly, I don't think Halloween is such a big deal these days, but I can see how that kind of release would be much more important in more depressed times.
Max and Original Cindy visit Joshua, who is living in Sandeman's house (located in "Proof of Purchase"). Joshua thinks he would be able to go to the party at Crash with Max because everyone will believe he is in costume. Max is way too paranoid about what could happen, and convinces Joshua to stay in. Max drops by Logan's apartment to ask him to go to the party, but he and Asha are trying to track a hitman that is supposedly going to be taking out a good guy sometime soon. Max heads home for a bath before the party.
Max falls asleep in her bubble bath, and almost all of the rest of the episode is a dream. (I have a small nit with this, since it was well-established in the first season that Max doesn't sleep.) Of course, we as the audience don't know that it's a dream, and we get to ride along as things get weirder and weirder.
In the dream, Max's possible-boyfriend Rafer shows up to pick her up for the party at Crash. His mother wants to meet her, so they go by his place. His mother turns out to be a psychic, and she weirds Max out by correctly "seeing" some of Max's past and telling Max that she's going to be chased until she's dead. Joshua follows Max to Rafer's place, and Max sneaks out to try to convince him to go home. However, Joshua has brought another transgenic that has a problem. This transgenic is superflexible and has somehow accidentally gotten his head turned around 180 degrees and can't get it back straight. When Max and Joshua try to twist it around, the head snaps off and the body runs off. The head is OK and can speak and think.
Max is in a panic to track down the headless body before the public starts to panic. Joshua helps the head call a couple other transgenics to help them. Then Max hides the head, and she and Joshua convince Rafer to drive them on an errand in his paramedic ambulance. (Rafer thinks Joshua is in costume.)
They meet Dieter (a lizard guy) and Katarina (with lots of cat traits) in a diner, where it is haggis night. It's a hoot when the three animal transgenics flip over the idea of haggis. Normal is at the diner, in traditional costume, for haggis night and stops by to harass Max. The head finally tells Max that he had planned to go to Jam Pony to find a package that was supposed to be delivered to him that day, but hadn't been because the business closed early. The head supposes that that's where his body has gone. Everyone piles into Rafer's ambulance and head off, having told Rafer that they are participating in a German scavenger hunt (since Joshua is from Germany, naturally).
At Jam Pony, they hardly get started searching when they have to hide because Normal and some other employees show up. Normal tells his minions that he has confirmed that there are mutants around, and hands them all pictures of Max and the others from the diner. (This shows up in Max's dreams because in real life Sketchy had been talking to Normal about mutants in the tabloids.) He has additional proof from his surveillance cameras at Jam Pony, because a headless mutant showed up and stole a package. Normal orders his minions to track down all the mutants - after they have cake and ice cream.
After Normal and friends leave, Max consults the head about where his body might go next. Apparently he had planned to go to Crash, where the Halloween party is. They catch up with the body there and discover he has a sniper rifle, but the body manages to get away. Max breaks up a couple that she thinks is Logan and Asha making out, but it is look-alikes. Max realizes that the head (and his body) is the hitman Logan and Asha are looking for, so they go to Logan's apartment to try to find his target since he refuses to reveal it.
Things had been strange up to this point, but now they get truly bizarre. While Max, the head, and Logan dig for information, the other transgenics and Asha play charades. Logan says that his informant told him the hitman's target is "a priest, a minister, or a rabbi." (What a scream! Earlier in real life, someone started out a joke with this.) Max gets fed up with the head's refusal to help and begins dunking him in the toilet. Just as the head finally confesses the target, Rafer comes in and sees the head. He doesn't believe Max's explanation that it's a "voice-activated fully articulated animatronic head" (or something like that) and realizes that none of the transgenics are in costume, but they are actually mutants.
Max knocks out Rafer and leaves him with Logan and Asha while she and the others go to save one Father McAllister, who is participating in the dress rehearsal of an award ceremony he will be in. Max and the others manage to foil the body and save the Father. As the Father is thanking them, Logan and Asha show up and announce their identities as Eyes Only and the "supreme commandant" of S1W and claim credit for the rescue. Then the police bust in and arrest all of the transgenics except Max. When questioned, Max denies that she is a transgenic.
The episode seems to begin wrapping up with Max lamenting the sad turn of events for Joshua and the others while seated on the Space Needle. Then Original Cindy arrives and chides Max for denying who she is, which is probably really the only serious message in the entire episode. Then to emphasize that the events have been a dream, Max is suddenly naked.
We jump back to real life, with Cindy waking Max up in the bathtub. Max cancels on the party with Rafer, and instead takes Joshua trick-or-treating.
This episode was truly bizarre and funny. I didn't give it a higher rating because it was pure fluff, but it was fun fluff. The transition from real life to a dream was transparent, and only the fact that events kept getting more and more bizarre began to clue the viewer into the truth. I don't remember when I realized it was a dream the first time I watched it, but I certainly think the "priest, minister, rabbi" joke must have made it obvious. Once I realized it was a dream, I could overlook some of the things that I had earlier been thinking "they can't really be serious", such as the head that even when disconnected from its body needs to breathe.
The small touches are what really made the humor. I already noted above many of the "real life" incidents that obviously sparked various aspects of Max's dream events. There were a lot of other good touches, as well. For example, Katarina directed Rafer to the "sand box" instead of the restroom in the diner, and then later she was watching with cat-like intensity when people were wiggling their fingers in charades. The on-going gag of them being on a German scavenger hunt, with "German rules", which they used to excuse anything weird. Logan playing on-line bingo instead of taking care of their urgent situation.
The writers must have had a lot of fun with this episode. It felt like they took all their ideas that had been deemed just a little to weird for a "real" episode and dumped them into this. Someone must have had quite the imaginations to think of the transgenic losing his head, and setting up a situation with one normal human and a bunch of transgenics playing charades was near genius.
I don't have much more to say about the episode, because it won't really have any long-term effects. Possibly it reinforced Max's identification with the other transgenics, but frankly I'm not sure that was necessary.
avondale@astro.umd.edu