Brothers & Sisters

These Walkers, they don’t have such a hot track record with parties, do they? There was the party in which Nora outed Holly, the party featuring Sarah and Joe’s sex tape and a lot of closet drinking, the party at which Nora was accused of making a play for her friend’s husband and Tommy and Julia were caught in the cloakroom, and just last week a nice little dinner party that ended when Kevin pulled a hair out of Rebecca’s head. Perhaps they ought to think about not socializing so much, because tonight’s tres fiestas didn’t go so hot, either.

There was the party new black sheep Rebecca persuaded her big bro “J” to take her to in Venice, at the home of someone Justin remembers all too well from his druggy days. That party might have gone better if they hadn’t started the evening Chez Walker, with Rebecca taking in all the photos of her bad-Dad and alterna-family and having a friendly but kind of heartbreaking chat with Nora about William. Going from “William Walker” to “wasted” seems like a reasonable transition to our poor pretty fatherless girl, causing Justin’s previously overlookoed sense of overprotectiveness to go into overdrive. His attempts to get Rebecca out of there get him in a fight with the host, and he goes home with a black eye as a party favor.

There was the party at Nora’s professor’s house, which might have gone okay if the Walker Mom hadn’t made the obvious error of consulting Emily Craft for clothing advice. When last we saw Emily, you may remember, she got Nora high and arrested. If it was one of her kids, Nora would make darn sure she never took the counsel of that particular “friend” again. But Nora’s nervous; she’s gotten some classroom praise from the prof, and then had a nice little picnic lunch in which he talked about being all widowed and lonely. Emily convinced her that the “party” she was invited to would be a party of two, and dressed her accordingly. Oops. It really was a faculty party, and she really was dressed like a hired escort.

There was the party Kitty and Sarah attended, in Castroville, where the artichoke is king and Robert McCallister is a saint. Kitty’s there in the senator’s hometown to do a video of folks singing his praises, and Sarah’s there because the only place she ever gets to have fun is on road trips. When Kitty gets bummed about Robert’s high school girlfriend refusing to say he was ever a bad boyfriend, and Sarah gets bummed because every business in town is closed for the Artichoke Festival, they find the one place that’s still operational: a bar, and one that serves artichoke margaritas. It also apparently serves minors, because the tipsy sisters are invited to a kegger by a pair of what turn out to be not college but high school students. As if that’s not mortifying enough, the youthful host is the son of that same McCallister high-school sweetheart, who with some prodding tells Kitty the truth: that “Bobby” was not only a good boyfriend, he was a good friend when she was a bad girlfriend and got pregnant by somebody else. Alright, so does this mean we have to forgive him for being so crabby last week?

The party’s over for Kevin and Chad, as a party Kevin didn’t attend last week — the movie premiere — comes back to bite him. Chad’s itching to fire his manager and come out of the closet, and when Kevin lets slip that he knows the manager’s name, it’s only a matter of time before Chad finds out that they met behind his back and put the kibosh on his outing. Kevin somehow makes a leap from discouraging Chad from coming out to being mad at him for not doing so, and walks out all self-righteous. So it’s not too surprising that when Chad goes ahead and ditches the closet, via a note on his Web site, he’s determined to go onward alone, and gives Kevin the boot. Dare we hope that this time Kevin has learned his relationship lessons, and next time he can actually have a sustained romance without getting arrogant, skittish, or dumped?

Justin, with his bruised eye, and Kevin, with his bruised heart, end up in Mom’s kitchen, making jokes about her party wardrobe and drowning their sorrows in eggs and English muffins. Nora continues in motherly mode at her next writing class, when she finds one of her young classmates crying after being dumped by their professor, that cad. Nora confronts Mark about it, and he admits that he finds the young thing boring and the more mature Nora fascinating. Personally, if I were Nora, with her recent history as a victim of male duplicity, I wouldn’t trust this dude as far as I could throw him. Maybe she’ll get a good story out of it.

Luckier in love, at least at the moment, is Kitty, who drops the “L” word in a conversation with the senator and gets it back from him, along with a story explaining why he’s been resisting her and the staff’s attempts to paint him as a big war hero in his presidential declaration. Seems he doesn’t remember much about his supposed heroic action, but what little he does remember makes him pretty sure it didn’t go down the way everybody thinks. And then he’s called to the stage to throw his hat in the ring, in a scene that gave this viewer very melancholy West Wing flashbacks.

So did the Walkers learn from these new painful embarrassing party experiences to stop with the socializing already? Nah. Next week’s promo shows what looks to be a fairly disastrous game night with a rival family, including a couple of scenes intended to make us suspect a romantic indiscretion between Rebecca and Joe. No, no, no. I cling to the belief that the people who write promos are evil, manipulative, and wholly ignorant of any actual storyline, and that no such turn of events will actually occur. Otherwise, I look forward to watching Justin pummel the hell out of his brother-in-law.

Original air date: 4/08/07

Brothers and Sisters, ABC, Three Parties, recap