Today is the 10th anniversary of the first airing of “Café Disaffecto.” One of the hardest parts of writing about this episode was establishing an overarching theme, and evaluating the rest of the episode by how the components support or detract from that theme.

I then realized that this doesn’t work for “Café Disaffecto.” The reason why is that “Café Disaffecto” wasn’t supposed to be about anything. There was not supposed to be some cryptic inner meaning, no heavy philosophical ponderings. It was supposed to be a lighthearted and fun episode, and in my personal opinion, it was the first successful episode written by Glenn Eichler.

At the beginning of the episode, thieves toss a brick through the window of Lawndale’s cybercafé alt.lawndale.com and make off with valuable computer equipment. The business closes shop, and Mr. O’Neill concludes that the shutting down of alt.lawndale.com is an assault on the heart of the community of Lawndale itself. He bemoans the loss of the café in front of his class, but his students are ambivalent at best about the loss of alt.lawndale.com.

Daria is (unfortunately) queried as to her own opinion about the incident and she states that the ambience of the café could be replaced by putting a coffee machine in the computer lab. Mr. O’Neill somehow interprets this as being a call to create a coffeehouse, complete with poetry readings, in place of the shuttered cybercafé.

Mr. O’Neill’s quixotic quest draws little interest from Daria until Quinn’s mention of the Fashion Club at home prompts Helen to ask why Daria can’t be involved in such extracurricular projects. (If Helen knew the exact details of the Fashion Club’s “extracurriculars,” she’d make Quinn wear a chastity belt.) Unless Daria finds some outside-of-school involvement that she could put on a college application, Helen “suggests” (read: threatens) to send Daria to music camp during the summer.

All Daria can remember about music camp is the endless practicing of “Pop! Goes the Weasel” during the brief time she played the flute. To avoid a fate worse than death, Daria “volunteers” for helping with the new coffeehouse, but avoids Mr. O’Neill’s call to perform. Instead, she agrees to help with fundraising by selling candy, and sways Jane from her disinterest in tagging along by noting that as candy salesmen, they’ll get to look inside other people’s houses.

While Kevin and Brittany end up at an unhappy Mr. DeMartino’s door, and Quinn uses role-playing to become a successful salesman of phone cards, Daria and Jane end up at the door of Mrs. Johansen, a morbidly obese woman very interested in purchasing candy from Daria and Jane. Mrs. Johansen wants to buy all of the candy, but mentions that her doctor said she shouldn’t have “too much” chocolate, and later passes out from overexertion.

When she comes to, Daria has misgivings about selling the woman any candy at all, even as Mrs. Johansen insistently agrees to purchase candy at a high markup. Mrs. Johansen becomes quite belligerent, but Daria states later that “the chocolate would have killed her,” and Daria and Jane leave the angry Mrs. Johansen behind.

Daria and Jane are both called into Ms. Li’s office. All Principal Li can understand is that a woman was willing to pay for chocolate beyond cost, and Daria and Jane refused to sell it to them. When Daria states that they were afraid of killing the woman, Ms. Li tells them that because they refused to make a sale to a customer, they cannot claim extracurricular credit for fundraising for the coffeehouse.

Not wanting to return to the Morgendorffer household and have no defense against the threat of Music Camp, Daria reluctantly agrees to gain her credit by performing at the coffeehouse. The question is, can Daria find something to perform that won’t deliberately alienate the customers and the school authorities, but still allow her to be Daria? Daria tells Jane that she will write something new.

The opening night is no great shakes. A punk rocker sings a crappy lyric and smashes his guitar, Brittany’s plans for performing the balcony scene of “Romeo and Juliet” fall apart because Kevin forgets his lines, and Andrea gives the customers a view of her particularly dark universe.

This leaves Daria, who reads from her newest story “Where the Future Takes Us.” It starts out briefly with a vapid statement about the challenges students face in the future, but rapidly turns into something more interesting: a story about a spy called Melody Powers, who bloodily dispatches communists in the Cold War era. The crowd cheers Daria’s work, which inspires the attending football players to riot, as they march down Lawndale’s streets looking to stone the Russian Embassy. (There are no embassies anywhere in Lawndale, the local paper notes.)

Mr. O’Neill is forced to shut down the coffeehouse, lest it become a “base of operations for political extremists.” Daria, however, finally has her extracurricular credit.

Before the closing credits run, a brick is hurled through the coffeehouse window and a thief makes off with the espresso machine. Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose.

I was mentioning “Café Disaffecto” to my wife, Ruth, and one of her first observations was “That episode is so dated!” And it is dated. Undoubtedly, many of you 17-and-18-year-old readers might have no idea what a cybercafé is! Some explanation:

Early in the days of the Internet — I’m talking 1995 or 1996 here — a good desktop personal computer could set you back about three thousand dollars. Thus, instead of purchasing an expensive computer, you could just “rent the Internet” by going to a cybercafé and renting time on a personal computer. Before you jest at the suggestion, Janet Neilson (Canadibrit) spent much of her time at cybercafés and was quite productive as a fan-fiction author. (I do not know whether coffee was served.)

Today, the cybercafé is deader than dinosaur shit. PCs are cheap and almost everyone has a laptop. The closest thing to a cybercafé these days is Starbucks, and everyone there has brought their own personal PC. The only thing a modern-day thief would be able to steal at a Wi-Fi hotspot would be bandwidth, and he’d steal that hiding with a laptop in a parked car.

However, we do come to a few conclusions beyond the obvious. The episode establishes that Mr. O’Neill is not just a horrible self-esteem teacher — he’s a horrible teacher, period. He commits all the major sins: He doesn’t remember students’ names, not even after he’s had a long time to interact with them. He speaks in a sort of self-improvement “cant” that precludes true human involvement. What’s worst of all, he substitutes the real needs and opinions of his students with his own needs and opinions.

One suspects that Mr. O’Neill had the idea of a coffeehouse percolating (so to speak) in his mind for a time after learning of the theft at alt.lawndale.com; when Daria expressed her opinion about the matter, he substituted his opinion for Daria’s!

I always figured that if confronted with a modern-day Mr. O’Neill, I could do what Jane suggested — “Just enjoy the nice man’s soothing voice.” But after “Café Disaffecto,” I wouldn’t be surprised if a lot of students left the class with a loathing of literature in general, and of Mr. O’Neill in particular. The man deserves the lack of respect he gets from his students.

We do see a situation where, once again, Daria is compelled to do something she’d rather not do. But unlike earlier episodes, Daria has more choice in the matter. She could have done anything else other than participate in Mr. O’Neill’s coffeehouse dream, but decided that this would be the most convenient project. Furthermore ... this time Daria actually brings Jane along with her in a scheme!

This episode also portrays Daria, and other supporting characters, in a bit darker tone than usual. (Is this Eichler being influenced by his Beavis and Butt-head days?) And I’m not talking about Andrea’s coffeehouse poem. Rather, the bizarre scene with the morbidly obese Mrs. Johansen and Daria and Jane. Johansen passes out and Daria and Jane have this discussion as to what to do next:

Jane: We should be doing something right now. I’m sure of it.
Daria: Yeah, I think you’re right.
(Silence. Jane lifts up her instant camera to snap a picture
of the unconscious woman. Absolutely no concern about
Johansen on Jane’s part.)

But the pure strength of the episode — one of the reasons why fans make this one of the favorite Season One episodes — comes from the fact of many very funny lines. A sample:

Kevin: Daria, you’re a chick, right?
Daria: Why? You have a biology test today?

Mr. O’Neill: I think what’s most disturbing about this crime is the symbolism involved. Don’t you agree, Jane?
Jane (deadpan): No.

Mr. O’Neill: Right here and now, let’s pledge to make Daria’s dream a reality.
Daria: You mean the one where people walking down the street burst into flames?

(Mrs. Johansen has passed out)
Daria: Uh-oh.
Jane: Did she hit her head?
Daria: I don’t think so.
Jane: Do you know CPR or anything?
Daria: I once gave the Heimlich maneuver to Quinn.
Jane: Did it work?
Daria: She wasn’t choking.

(About Daria’s and Jane’s refusal to sell Mrs. Johansen chocolate)
Ms. Li: How do you know it wasn’t for her family?
Jane: She has no family. She ate them.

Ms. Li (to Daria): You do want this extracurricular activity, don’t you?
Jane (quietly to Daria): “Pop! Goes the Weasel!”

(At Brittany’s botched Shakespeare reading)
Brittany: “Oh Romeo, Romeo! Wherefore art thou Romeo?”
Kevin: I’m right here, babe!!

All in all, definitely some very funny stuff. It might not be a very deep episode, but “Café Disaffecto” is worth a refill.

Random thoughts:

• One of the earliest Daria fan sites, run by Katherine Goodman, was called alt.lawndale, obviously inspired by this episode.

• The alt.lawndale.com comes from the naming conventions of Usenet (which is also deader than dinosaur shit) and from the .com suffix appended to Website addresses.

• We learn that Kevin has a computer. What does he use it for? Undoubtedly nothing educational. Maybe it’s loaded with “Madden ’97.”

• There are lots of firsts in this episode: first appearance of Mrs. Johansen, first speaking appearance of Andrea, and the first mention of the infamous Melody Powers, who leaves a trail of dead men wherever she goes. Melody is sexy, and willing to kiss and kill, very much unlike her creator.

• You can’t say that Quinn is completely brain-dead — not only is she perfectly up to date with fashion, but we find out that Quinn is a master salesman.

• The appearance of the muumuu-clad Mrs. Johansen adds a Fellini-esque element to the episode, leading me to think that Eichler is flashing back to his days with Mike Judge. However, in my opinion, nothing beats Mr. DeMartino holding a conversation with Kevin and Brittany at his front door — while wearing a chef’s toque blanche and holding a frozen chicken. That’s wrong on so many levels it boggles the mind. I’ll bet, however, that Mr. D’s chicken would do a better job at memorizing Shakespeare than Kevin Thompson.

Labels: Cafe Disaffecto, Eichler, Essays