Brothers & Sisters

Forget massacre — it was more like a conflagration. Old and new flames flared. Smoldering sibling resentment was ignited. And a little spark and smoke landed Mom in jail. The Walkers were on fire! It’s not even giving much away to reveal that Kevin and Justin both had ex sex and Kitty slept with the senator, ’cause the show gave all that away in the first five minutes of cell-phone gossip. How they got to the point of calling around with “Oh no, I slept with ____,” and how Nora got to “Oh no, I slept in jail,” form the bulk of the episode, with a little business intrigue on the side (the married siblings needed something to do, you know).

Senator McCallister (at some point we’ll have to just start calling him “Robert,” won’t we, although Kitty’s made it pretty clear we can never call him “Bob”) takes Kitty, and only Kitty, along with him on a trip to San Diego to woo some bucks from a billionaire. Does he bring her because he thinks she’ll charm Mr. Megabucks? because he hopes to romance her himself? because he wants to see if she’ll bring all those shoes from her closet? Whatever — the answer turns out to be “yes” on all counts. Kitty also correctly guesses that the senator is hoping to be the president, which would make an affair between the two of them even a worse idea than just bad workplace etiquette, but he’s Rob Lowe, and he argues forcefully in favor of fooling around, and he looks great in a white dress shirt, and aw, heck. A girl’s gotta have something to gossip with her siblings about.

Kevin gets roped into going to his boyfriend’s girlfriend’s sister’s Valentine’s Day party because the girlfriend is going to set him up with a cute guy and the boyfriend wants him to be around, you know, unofficially, not to have fun or anything. And just to make the evening more awkward and painful, the cute guy turns out to be Scotty. They banter a little and miss each other a little and then, under the influence of quite a lot of alcohol and the sight of Chad dancing with his girl, Kevin winds up going home with Scotty — and calling his siblings the next morning in his underwear to eek! about it. He also gets a call from Chad, who figures out Kevin slept with Scotty and gets all unreasonably huffy about it, leading Scotty to assume Kevin was just trying to make Chad jealous, and everything ends even more badly than it began, with Kevin looking confused and heartsick and really, really hungover.

Not at all under the influence or hungover is Justin, fresh out of rehab and moving back home. He narrowly escapes a Valentine’s date with Mom (oh, how ironic in light of the rumors) by agreeing to babysit for Sarah and Joe, but he no sooner settles in with Cooper and Paige than Tyler calls to … what exactly? Express general romantic longing before going off on a date with her boyfriend? The guy just got out of rehab, lady, either love him or leave him but don’t kind of dangle non-specific intentions in front of him. Justin’s read the script, though, so he packs up the tots and heads off to pop in on Italian restaurants until he finds the one where Tyler and her thuggish beau are dining. And because it’s every girl’s dream to have a romantic dinner interrupted by a guy in a sweatshirt with two tired children in tow, Justin’s declaration of devotion works and he and Tyler wind up hooking up later — despite the fact that, as he explains to his siblings the next morning, he’s not supposed to have sex right after rehab. Man, that program is harsh.

Jilted by Justin, Nora winds up going out to dinner with a friend we’ve never seen or heard of before, played by Margot Kidder. Actually, she’s not so much a friend as a Plot Device designed to encourage Nora to live it up, lighten up and let her hair down. Also light up, which the old — no, mature — friends do with a joint in the car until a cop comes along and harshes their mellow. No sooner has Sarah absorbed all the gossip about her brothers and sister and their inappropriate bedmates than she gets the most delicious of calls, this one from Mom asking for bail money and a ride home from jail. As Sarah rightly says later, “Our family should have a Bat Signal for news this good.”

Ah, poor Sarah. She laments that she’s the only one in the family who didn’t get laid on Valentine’s Day, but she sure got screwed, by her arch-enemy Holly and turncoat brother Tommy. The two are teaming up to force through the purchase of a vineyard that Sarah wants to torpedo because a) the price went up and b) Holly wants it. But Holly reveals to Tommy that his father wanted to buy the vineyard for him to run, and that’s why he made Sarah president of Ojai Foods — because Tommy wouldn’t be able to run both. Tommy has to know, on some level, that he’s being played, but all those times Sarah didn’t listen to him have piled up and he’s ready to get his. So he tells Sarah at the end of the episode that he’s backing Holly’s efforts to win the board over to the purchase, over Sarah’s objections. And suddenly, all the fun of having your mom arrested for drug use evaporates.

Original air date: 2/11/07

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