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The Increasingly Poor Decisions of Todd Margaret: In Which Brent Wilts Arrives and Things Take a Turn for the Worse

By Claire Zulkey | October 23, 2010 | 2:30am

TV Reviews TV

The Increasingly Poor Decisions of Todd Margaret: In Which Brent Wilts Arrives and Things Take a Turn for the Worse

Another day, another reminder that Todd’s clothes smell like shit and the has a reason to apologize to Alice. The morning after his disastrous dinner, Todd heads to the cafe to say he’s sorry. Alice is getting the restaurant ready for the Thunder Muscle commercial, which Hudson offers to help direct. Todd declines with contempt and then gets further irritated when he misinterprets Hudson’s sarcastic remark for denseness. “Because I’m tall, right?” “Yeah, no shit. Jesus!”

Todd heads to work, where the office appears to have been robbed and Dave’s missing, so Todd calls the police, but it’s not very effective when Todd realizes he doesn’t even know Dave’s last name (I like that he still offers up his story about growing up in Leeds, seeing the Who every weekend.) Todd tries to charge the cop a pound for his evidentiary can of Thunder Muscle.

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Brent calls: he’s in London, ostensibly for business but he’s “gotta get my dick wet.” I’m just going to list his most colorful epithets at the bottom of this post. Can we think of TV characters as misogynistic as Brent? I'm not even sure if it's possible to compare, since he's basically just half-character, half-awful-saying-thing machine.

Brent wants to come to the office but Todd lies and says there was a “poo bomb” so he meets his boss at the hotel. Todd tells Brent he has a thing for Alice and also informs him that all the ThunderMuscle is gone, which Brent misinterprets as success and demands that Todd give him the money instantly. Todd’s former boss (Spike Jonze) appears to ask Brent to properly terminate him to which Brent doesn’t respond kindly, although in the meantime it seems like there’s possibly an ulterior motive.

Todd brings Brent to the cafe/commercial set, and when Brent questions whether Alice is hot enough for the commercial, she slaps him. Todd fumbles over whether he’s really attracted to Alice, and she pretends to be hurt, and then she teases him for falling for it—twice. “What fun you are!” Todd says.

Predictably, the commercial shoot is something of a disaster, due to the combined elements of Steve Davis hating the taste of Thunder Muscle, Todd’s inept directing and Steve’s violent reaction to the way Todd pronounces “snooker.” Steve ends up beating Todd with his cue and gets admonished by Alice, “You’ve really let yourself down today, Steve Davis.” Brent tries to steal some cash out of Todd’s wallet, tragically tossing away the photo of Todd’s kitty in the process.

Back at the office, Dave tells Todd that they’ve sold all the Thunder Muscle to the Turks, so Todd heads over to their shop to collect the money. The Turks try to hedge, first by saying that they’re still giving to Haiti (every day: it’s a Turkish custom) and then by saying that the owner needs the money for his wife’s surgery. They stare at Todd, waiting for him to decline the money, but he stares back at them stupidly and just asks for some more tea. Finally, Todd gets a suitcase full of cash and has a hair mysteriously plucked from his head.

Todd catches a cab, and the cabbie informs him that his cash is counterfeit: there’s no “Y” in “Bank of England” and Helen Mirren doesn’t appear on any English currency. In the meantime we see Brent freaking out in his hotel room: he’s broke and getting broker as he loses simultaneous games of online poker. Todd rushes back to the store to get real money but it appears to be closed permanently. With no money on him he gives his clothes to the cabbie and walks home in the rain.

This is the first time in the series where Todd didn’t soil his pants. Sure, they’re wet, but I have to confess I felt a little disappointed. Overall I felt like tonight’s episode was just a tiny bit repetitive of what we’ve seen already but I'm intrigued by the fact that there are only two more left in the season and we have so many elements to wrap up before Todd’s big court scene. I’m just excited to see where the next two episodes will go—my hopes are pretty high that they’ll be extremely ridiculous.

—I liked that in the intro Todd was accused of unnecessary public nudity.

— “I bet your bush smells like Chinatown like a heatwave. Boom. That’s the hammer coming down.”

— “It’s a shitty British cunt desert.”

—”You’re dying…” “…of ass-AIDS!”