For several weeks, MTV had taken Daria off the air, leaving the nascent fandom with only seven episodes to obsessively watch over and over again until the tape broke. On June 9, 1997, the eighth episode of Daria was aired, “Pinch Sitter,” and new episodes would continue week by week until the first season was finally over.

My initial goal in watching these shows was to plot the slow progress of the characters, tropes, and detail of the Daria universe from episode to episode. This involved a self-imposed restriction: namely, not to refer to episodes that took place after the most recently-reviewed episode.

However, “Pinch Sitter” is so tempting in that respect that I’ll be breaking that rule after the recap, and write about what people thought it was about, and why it might be a more important episode than one might think when one looks at the episodes that followed it.

A quick (HA!) recap ...

The show begins with Mr. DeMartino giving a lecture on the massacre at Jonestown. After a few jokes, he tells the class that he expects each member of the class to write an essay about a cult.

Quinn, who doesn’t have the “cult” assignment, has other goals — namely, to try to find someone who will take over her weekend baby-sitting commitment. She tries sweet-talking a young man named Ronnie into taking over, but Ronnie concludes that Quinn has no intention of ever going out with him, and Quinn tells him, without malice, that no, she doesn’t. She plans on going out with Skylar Feldman, whose family has a boat.

Ronnie tells Quinn that she can forget him taking over and she should ask “her sister” to babysit, as Daria doesn’t look like she’ll be having busy weekends any time soon. (This proves the Fashion Club members aren’t the only people at LHS who know that Quinn is Daria’s sister.)

Daria and Quinn discuss the prospective deal for Daria to babysit. Even though Daria “didn’t like kids when [she] was a kid,” the prospect of $6 an hour (Quinn later adds a $2-per-hour bonus) and time to write her essay is tempting. However, she’s opposed as a matter of principle to helping Quinn out with anything.

Helen, however, walks by and reminds the girls that the Morgendorffers are hosting a “couples’ night” with a “focus on teens” — and she expects both Daria and Quinn to be there. Quinn bails out because she has the “commitment” of a scheduled date with Skylar Feldman. This leaves Daria, but Daria also bails out because she has a “commitment” ... to babysit. Daria has clearly chosen the lesser of two evils.

Helen has found out that Daria will be babysitting for the Guptys — a family that usually calls Quinn as their primary babysitter. Helen feels that Quinn has broken a commitment, but Quinn complains that she accidentally “overbooked.” Helen offers to help Quinn get her time-management skills under control with a visit to time management expert Deena Decker.

Daria chats with the Guptys on the phone. After the pleasant but odd conversation, Daria imposes a $10 surcharge if she has to spend more than 15 minutes with them. Quinn, who probably knows the Guptys very well, thinks that’s fair.

Helen and Quinn show up in Deena Decker’s office. Helen and Quinn each are asked to state their list of priorities.

Helen:
1) Spend more time with the family
2) Break through firm’s glass ceiling
3) Beat Carly Fishbeck in the library board election
4) Get spice back into marriage

After Quinn states her embarrassment, Helen changes this last to “Window treatments for living room.” After Helen learns from Deena that one must be honest, she moves “Get spice back into marriage” to number one.

Quinn:
1) Dating
2) Shopping
3) Bouncy hair
4) School

Quinn is given her own personal planner. Once she finds out that it comes in coral with matching makeup accessories, she feels she can be “attractive, popular, and organized.”

Everyone goes their own way. Quinn is busy recording the bonus points for Skylar’s expensive car on her Teen Life Runner. Daria, armed with some babysitting tips from Jane, is ready to face the inevitable. Jake wishes that he could go babysit, dreading the upcoming couples’ night and its enforced sensitivity.

When Daria reaches the Gupty house, she finds that the interior and exterior are decorated with the sort of brick-a-brack from Reader’s Digest. Lauren Gupty asks Daria to wait in the living room until the Guptys are ready to leave.

While waiting, Daria flashes back to the times when someone had to babysit Daria and Quinn. The flashback scenes show:

• Daria throwing a fit because Quinn is crying and isn’t being “punished.”
• Daria and Quinn fighting on the floor, exchanging “brain” and “brat” as insults.
• Daria informing her babysitter’s boyfriend that the babysitter stuffs her bra. Quinn informs him that she’ll be ready to date ... in four years.

The Guptys finally come downstairs and introduce Daria to their “little monsters,” Tad and Tricia. They appear to be sweet, well-behaved kids. The Guptys inform Daria of their schedule for the night’s activities. The schedule is broken into fifteen-minute blocks, with such activities as “discuss current events,” “snack,” and “post-snack flossing.”

After the parents leave, Daria informs Tad and Tricia they can drop “the act.” This merely confuses them, as their abnormally good behavior doesn’t appear to be an act. Daria makes the decision to turn on the TV, but not only have all channels except for “The Forecast Channel” been locked out, the kids almost robotically recite “Commercials are bad” and “Commercials lie” whenever a commercial comes on.

While Quinn is evaluating Skylar in her planner at Chez Pierre without his knowledge, Daria deals with the sometimes-robotic, other times sickeningly sweet Gupty children. When the two kids sing a sappy self-esteem song to the tune of a worn-out record, Daria is at her wit’s end and invites the kids to play “Cemetery” — a game Jane had told Daria about if she ever ran out of things to do.

Daria waits for Jane, but Jane must wait for her ride from Trent, which leaves Daria to deal with the kids again. Tad and Tricia tell Daria that they always do what adults tell them to do. Daria asks the children what they would do if two different adults gave them contradictory advice, and the question reduces Tad to tears.

By the time Jane arrives, Daria has consented to letting the Gupty kids braid her hair — truly, it must be a major concession for Daria. Jane has no problem dealing with the Gupty kids, as unlike Daria, Jane has practical baby-sitting experience.

The Guptys ask Daria and Jane to read them a bedtime story, but all Daria or Jane can find are politically correct children’s materials and books like Mr. Potty Goes to Town.

However, there are some classic children’s tales available. Daria and Jane put their ... uh ... spin on the endings of these stories. The kids like the altered stories better, and after Daria and Jane share important information with them (such as that no one will ever ask to see your “permanent record” when you are an adult), Tad and Tricia are astounded at how smart Daria and Jane are.

“Gee, Mom and Dad never told us that people can think for themselves,” says Tricia. She, however, asks Daria and Jane that if it is true that adults can lie, how do they know that Daria and Jane aren’t liars? “You don’t ... and that’s the greatest lesson of all,” says Daria.

After Jane figures out how to unlock the channels on the Gupty TV, Daria and Jane prepare for Sick, Sad World viewing — only to have Tad and Tricia come bounding down to watch. “Just don’t tell your parents we let you stay up late,” says Daria. “Do we look stupid or something?” answers Tad. Clearly, Tad and Tricia have learned a lot from Daria and Jane.

At the Morgendorffer house, Skylar asks Quinn when they will be able to date again. Skylar is suspicious of Quinn’s note-taking, and after grabbing the planner, finds that Quinn has already scheduled her breakup with Skylar in September — because there is another boy who has a ski house.

The Guptys return, happy that Daria had no trouble with the kids. Daria turns her babysitting experience into an essay on mind-control deprogramming, and gets high marks from Mr. DeMartino. Meanwhile, Mr. and Mrs. Gupty find out that Tad and Tricia have changed the lyrics to their self-esteem song ... and they find that they don’t know their kids as well as they thought they did ...

Over the previous seven episodes, Daria had been written as a “Bugs Bunny” type character. One who basically would like nothing better than to be left alone, but forces disturb her tranquility, so Daria makes sure to set things straight in the end.

This is probably the first episode of a truly pro-active Daria. Unlike previous episodes, Daria was actually given a legitimate choice (so to speak) — she could have attended couples' therapy night, or could have babysat. Not much of a choice, but at least she was not being compelled to choose one outcome over another one.

This is also the first episode of the “Babe in the Woods” trope. This occurs when a character meets another character who doesn’t seem to have any practical knowledge about ... well ... anything. The second character is completely clueless, and the first character resolves to set the second character straight about modern life. Shows like Mork and Mindy, Taxi, and Perfect Strangers used this trope over and over again.

Daria finds Tad and Tricia’s sheltered life rather disturbing, until the end, where Daria and Jane make the deliberate choice to “deprogram” the kids. Tad and Tricia are given a bit of street smarts by Daria and Jane, and a bit of sassmouth at the end, and this change in them is portrayed as a change for the better.

Up to this point in the series, we really don’t know what Daria stands for. We know what she doesn’t like, but only with “This Year’s Model” did we get any impression that Daria had any core beliefs of her own.

Fans, however, seemed to draw the wrong lesson from “Pinch Sitter.” They came to believe that Daria was an advocate of subversion of the status quo, a person who wanted everyone else to be as cynical and suspicious of authority as she was.

Most of the early fanfic reflected that, with Daria in opposition to something that was too “normal” — say a prom, or a dance, or some sort of school competition — and working actively to undo it or destroy it because it displeased her.

How fans got the conclusion from “Pinch Sitter” that Daria was some sort of anarchist — a person who is in opposition to authority because it is authority — is unknown. But that conclusion seemed to fit the pattern of the “Daria Triumphant” fan fiction of the first two seasons, and, oddly enough, might have cemented Daria’s popularity with the fans.

Daria was now a combination of misanthrope and crusader, and what was worse, she could put on and take off these roles whenever it seemed convenient for the writer.

“I am cool, and that is it, and everyone else is full of” ... shit. A motto used for humor at the end of the episode, but unfortunately, too many fans took it seriously. It could have been the motto of much of early Daria fanfiction, and, unfortunately, it became the personal motto of some of the fans in early fandom.

As it turned out, this was the second episode written by Anne Bernstein. It’s a funny episode, and it has a lot of funny lines, but it never explores any consequences of this change in Tad and Tricia’s behavior.

I suppose it was a smart thing for Ms. Bernstein to end the episode where it was ended. I don’t think it would have been that funny for the viewers to see the Gupty parents take away the record player and ground the kids for a week for being potty mouths. (Also notice that Daria is never asked by the Guptys to come back and babysit again over the next fifty-nine episodes.)

Indeed, it’s not an episode as complex and as rich as “The Invitation,” the first episode written by Ms. Bernstein. The only enlightening parts of the episode were a look back into the relationship between Daria and Quinn — a relationship that had apparently always been acrimonious — and a look at Daria’s complete inability (at first) to deal with or understand children. Her discomfort at the Guptys’ is palpable.

Part of the problem with the episode was the choice to end it with some kind of moral. The danger in ending an episode with a moral when there is no obvious moral to be found is that a writer might choose the wrong moral — and the fans picked up the wrong moral and ran with it for two years.

It would have been a much stronger and more realistic episode if, like “The Invitation,” the episode ended with no moral, just a wacky story about Daria’s bizarre experience in babysitting the Gupty children. (The punchline could have been that the Guptys wanted Daria back!)

... And now we look back, using the knowledge of future episodes to examine this particular episode.

My first comment is that Lester and Lauren Gupty are not malicious parents. They might be overly protective, and a bit misguided, but one gets the sense that they love their children and care for them. One also gets the sense that this feeling is reciprocated, and that neither Tad nor Tricia hate their parents in any way or resent them for their overprotectiveness.

Further proof is that Daria writers Sam Johnson and Chris Marcil dust off the “Babe in the Woods” trope and use it again in “The New Kid.” Once again, we have a character that seems clueless of the world around him — in this case, the character is Ted DeWitt-Clinton.

However, Ted’s parents are not just overprotective, but actively paranoid about the dangers of the outside world, believing that the Beatles and chewing gum have the power to lead their sweet, innocent Ted to become a corporate sellout and a Tool of the Machine™.(It’s kind of odd that Daria isn’t as willing to “subvert Ted’s paradigm” as she was willing to “deprogram” the Guptys.)

I’ll even play Devil’s Advocate: How in the fuck was it Daria’s business to do what she did with the Gupty kids? The Guptys never asked Daria for their help in child rearing. The Guptys could argue that Daria seems like a miserable, distrustful, and unfriendly person at heart ... so why do Tad and Tricia need Daria’s philosophical advice?

We can argue about that later, but the fact is that Tad and Tricia are only about six or seven years old. They’re not that capable of making adult decisions, and Daria and Jane’s misguided attempt to help might lead Tad and Tricia to implicitly distrust authority figures that might have their best interests at heart.

At some level, Tad and Tricia need protection from the outside world, and the only real argument is how much protection they need. Do they need to be turned into cynics when they still believe in Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny? (Or perhaps, in the case of the Guptys, when they still believe in the Kwanzaabot?)

When I saw this episode with my wife, she suggested another motive for Daria in doing what she did — jealousy. Yes, the Guptys are overprotective. But they also love their kids and probably have a great deal of involvement in their children’s lives.

Whereas Daria has, till this point, been the victim of parental neglect. For most of Daria’s youth (“Boxing Daria”), Jake had been the breadwinner and primarily an absentee figure in the children’s lives. Now, the roles are reversed, and Helen is the breadwinner and workaholic mom. For most of Daria’s and Quinn’s lives, either one or both parents have simply not taken part in building Daria and Quinn as people.

Jake has paid the heavier price. Now that he is a “consultant” (a lousy one who makes no money), you would think he has all the free time in the world to get to know his kids. The problem is, his kids are now teenagers and he’s been absent for so long that he can’t connect. (“Cat’s in the Cradle” cues up in the background.)

He doesn’t even know the most essential information about Daria or Quinn, and now prefers to hide from any sort of conflict that might illustrate just how absent a figure he’s been. Or he prefers to drown his sorrows in a martini and ruminate as to how his own absent and emotionally abusive father destroyed him.

Helen still tries to be an influence in the lives of Quinn and Daria, although “Psycho Therapy” implies that she’s essentially given up on Quinn. But she’s like Jake — she really doesn’t know how to relate to them, except professionally at first, when she rides to the rescue like Custer’s cavalry on horseback to provide use of a legal threat to Ms. Li in “Arts ’n’ Crass.”

Only later in the series does the relationship between Helen and Daria reach the point where Daria doesn’t automatically assume the worst of Helen.

As for Jane, her parents have been absent in the truest sense of the term — physically absent. Amanda and Vincent are essentially self-centered hippies who, for all of their cant about peace and togetherness, see no problem with hiking to Iceland and literally abandoning their own children like feral cats who can take care of themselves.

Jane’s parents simply lack any sense of responsibility, and this ethos has filtered down to all of the Lane children in one way or another, with Jane being the only child who has a chance to escape it.

So maybe there is a tinge of jealousy — or, if not, a tinge of sadness and regret — in Daria and Jane. It’s an interesting thought, that Daria and Jane might be hurting more than helping.

The story of the back relationship between Daria and her parents is much more interesting than the story being told in “Pinch Sitter.” Indeed, the “B story” of Quinn’s time-management skills falls flat. One suspects that it’s a prop that’s used to hide the weaknesses of the “A story,” but only serves to illustrate those weaknesses all the more clearly.

This is the first (and only) appearance of Skylar Feldman, who was pressed into the role of “Figure of Menace” in Martin Pollard’s “Sins of the Past.” To this day, Skylar is still seen as some fundamentally bad person ... although from what I can see, his only sin was that he was even more conceited than Quinn is.

Of course, in terms of the lines and dialogue, “Pinch Sitter” is one of the funniest Daria episodes ...

Ronnie: You want me to take over your baby-sitting job?
I’m not sure, Quinn.
Quinn: Please?Just this once? You’re the only person I can
trust to do this, Ronnie. I can tell by your eyes ...
Ronnie: Really?
Quinn: Yeah! They’re so ... sincere!
Ronnie: Well ...
Quinn: And your face, it’s very ... honest! You’re so nice,
and dependable, and ...
Ronnie: “Nice”? “Sincere”? ... You’re never gonna go out
with me, are you?
Quinn: ... No.

Jane: Hey, there’s Quinn with one of her many admirers.
Daria: She’s well liked among classmates of both sexes,
and yet, strangely, she turns my stomach.

Ronnie: Skylar Feldman?
Quinn: His family has a boat! It’s almost summer!
Ronnie: Yeah, right. Ask him to baby-sit for you.

Quinn: But I didn’t mean to double-book. It’s hard to keep
track of dates when you’re attractive and popular!
Helen: I can’t have another fiasco like last Saturday night.
Think of how it must have felt when those three boys all
showed up here at the same time!
Quinn: It felt great!

Jake: Hey, Daria, where are you going? It’s couples therapy night!
Daria: Baby-sitting job, Dad.
Jake (to himself): ... wish I had a baby-sitting job ...

Daria: Your parents put one of those lock-out things on here,
didn’t they? All I’m getting is “The Forecast Channel” ...
Tad and Tricia: Yay! The five-day report!

Quinn: Oh, Skylar, you’re number one in my book ... by
fourteen points!

Tricia: Sugar is bad.
Tad: Sugar rots your teeth.
Tricia: Sugar makes you hyper.
Tad: Hitler ate sugar.

Jane: “All hail, Pippi Longstocking!” Hey, Trent, come look at this!

Lauren: I just love the new picture in your living room!
Daria: You were at my house?
Lauren: Yes, and we had a breakthrough tonight ... your father cried!

Mr. DeMartino: Brittany, although your topic — “The Cult of Abs” — was an intriguing one ...

Labels: Bernstein, Essays, Pinch Sitter