Trophy Wife 1.13: "The Tooth Fairy"

“Mom didn’t want me to do yoga until her swami came back from his spirit journey.”
-Bert

“The Tooth Fairy” was a kind of disjointed episode of “Trophy Wife” in the sense that it had three rather different plots going on at once. There was, at least, an overarching theme, which would be that the Harrison kids are growing up. Bert loses a tooth, Warren tries to flirt with a girl, and Hillary has her first high school sleep over. The Harrison parents all have to come to terms with the kids growing up, and the kids, especially Warren and Hillary, learn to appreciate their family just a bit more. While I appreciated the thematic ties, I will say that I just didn’t really find the episode all that funny. Pete and Jackie especially were acting rather immature and pathetic. It was kind of fun to see Kate and Warren team up, but I still didn’t really laugh all that much during the episode. When I watch a comedy, I’d like to laugh at least a little.

The episode opens on a Harrison family lunch at an Italian restaurant. While eating his pasta, Bert loses his tooth. Apparently it’s his first lost tooth, which makes Pete really excited. We learn later that Pete has a thing about body parts. He has a box in a drawer of all his kids’ lost teeth. I think this character trait is more gross than funny, really. The overall point Pete tries to make with Kate is that every parent has something where when they see there kid has achieved it, they get really emotional. For him, it just happens to be kids losing teeth. There’s just one problem on this particular occasion, though. Pete put Bert’s tooth in a napkin and put the napkin in their leftovers take-home bag. The pasta sauce from the leftovers seeped through the bag and made a “bag hole.” The tooth has been lost. Jackie’s on her way home from a meditation retreat to congratulate Bert and play tooth fairy, and Pete’s upset about the situation in his own right, so the tooth search begins in earnest, with Kate checking the car and Pete going back to the restaurant (where they think he’s a bit nuts, of course).

Meanwhile, Hillary is at her mom’s house for the evening, because she’s having a sleep over party for the student government girls at her high school. He wanted the party to be at Diane’s house because she thought it was classier. Diane certainly has a classy affair planned, with charcuterie and mulled cider (mulled cider is kind of awesome, by the way…we always have some in my family for Christmas). Since these girls “literally” run the school, Hillary thinks she needs to impress them, and pizza at Pete and Kate’s house just wouldn’t have cut it. Turns out, though, that student government girls are still teenage girls, so what they really want is pizza and a cheesy horror flick. Hillary tries to change herself immediately to fit in, which I found a little sad. Throughout the course of the episode, Diane also realizes that her presence is making the other girls mock Hillary, so she goes to read in her bedroom. Hillary feels bad that Diane can’t join in the fun, but Diane assures Hillary that this is her (Hillary’s) night, not Diane’s. It’s one of the few good parenting moments we’ve seen from Diane ever, really.

The Great Tooth Search is unsuccessful, so Pete and Kate try to pass off one of the other teeth in Pete’s collection as Berth’s tooth when Jackie arrives. Somehow, though, Jackie can instantly recognize it’s not Bert’s tooth just by smelling it. While she sort of salvages the situation by painting a popcorn kernel while and doing the while Tooth Fairy routine with that, she’s still really pissed off that Pete stole one of Bert’s “firsts” from her by losing the tooth. In retaliation, she lets Bert watch “Indiana Jones and the Raiders of the Lost Ark” (the only good Indiana Jones movie, in my opinion). Pete had planned to watch it with Bert on Bert’s tenth birthday. Pete continues the retaliation train by teaching Bert some yoga moves and sending a picture of it to Jackie. As you can tell from the Quote of the Episode, Jackie had very specific plans for how to teach Bert yoga. Kate finally gets Pete and Jackie to call off the war, but then she makes things even worse by mentioning that the “tooth” wasn’t real In front of Bert. Bert is then all worried about having cheated the Tooth Fairy. Pete and Jackie have to work together, first to try and find the tooth, then when that doesn’t work, to decide that they would use (yet another) of Hillary’s teeth as a stand-in and not tell Bert about it.

When she’s not trying to deal with the tooth related drama, Kate is kind of delighting in teaching Warren how to flirt. He gets a text from a girl named Ally that Kate interprets as flirting, and since Warren thinks Ally ticks all his boxes, Kate is only too happy to help him get the girl. She stops Warren every time he’s about to text something completely inappropriate or something that would make Ally think he wasn’t interested, and she coaches him on what to text instead. While Ally is over at the Harrison house to study math with Warren, Kate tries to talk up Warren to Ally. Which really just ends up being hilariously awkward and inappropriate (Kate talking up Warren makes it sound like Kate is into Warren, which she’s obviously not). Ally leaves her sweatshirt behind when she tries to escape the weirdness of Kate, and when Warren returns it, he gets his first kiss. This is the “proud parent” moment that makes Kate tear up. Of course, when he gets back to the car, Warren says that after the kiss, Ally told him that she’s gay. Warren’s still pretty happy about the first kiss achievement, though, as is Kate.