Cox Digital Cable Description: Karen’s grades drop dramatically when she refuses to date her teacher.
We’re in Step by Step University! Dana and Karen are in poetry class together. Come on Dana, still signing up for freshman classes? That’s some crap I would do, and you’re supposed to NOT be an academic failure, right? Karen semi-flirts with the dorky TA as he hands back their poems. Karen got an A for her vapid and shallow poem about mall-shopping, while Dana got a mere B for her bleak, dark poem that would do Cindy Sanders proud. Wow, brilliant job Step by Step writers, you picked one word from their character bios and expanded it into their poems. If Mark wrote a poem it would have been about science. If JT wrote a poem it would have been about sandwiches. If Brendon wrote a poem it would have been a blank sheet of paper with the word BRENDON written in magic marker at the top. Dana says that Karen only got an A because the TA (Jace, his name is Jace) wants to get into her (in this scene, flower-embroidered) jeans. Karen accepts this as her role in life (good for you, babe) and gets drooled on by an oaf as she makes her exit.
Next, most of the family is hanging out in the living room; Al reading a magazine, JT and Rich playing Battleship (shh, you two are going to interrupt the scene in the foreground) and Frank and Carol going over the phone bill. Hahaha, remember when that was something? When making too many phone calls cost you more money? Thank god that shit is over, fuck land lines in their grave. JT made a 28 dollar phone call to New Zealand to get in touch with Xena Warrior Princess. I hear that once a sitcom makes references to Xena Warrior Princess, Barney the Dinosaur, and Dr. Kevorkian, it hits 90s Time Capsule Trifecta and can then be cancelled.
The doorbell rings, who can that be? It’s
Al recognizes this girl as Amanda Dank, a rude crude high school dudette, and she is there to “peep her squeeze” (come on Step by Step, this was NEVER slang). Even JT and Rich laugh at this joker. But the hilariously “sitcom bad girl” getup and made-up slang aren’t even the lamest thing about her; the fact that her aforementioned “squeeze” is Mark is. It actually makes sense though, she can beat the shit out of this twerp all she wants and he’ll be grateful for the human interaction and appearance of heterosexuality as long as she doesn‘t make him look at her private parts. Mark comes downstairs dressed as a hip hopper, and his performance is so otherworldly white and out of touch and embarrassing that I’m positive the writers were playing a practical joke on the actor. I approve. The family does not approve of Mark’s new beard, Carol thinks she’s much too wild for Mark. Al retorts “The CAFETERIA LADY is much too wild for Mark,” which is actually accurate; working with food all day I bet she spills all sorts of beverage on her tits.  Hey, guess what, Mark stays out late. Carol and Frank stay up worrying about him, and when he gets home they ground him for two weeks! Oh no Mark, the next two weeks will be like your entire life before this episode! Hope you enjoyed your last night of freedom, and since I have a feeling you spent the night in the men’s room glory hole of whatever filthy club you were at while your date made out with a dude with face tattoos and a thinning mohawk, I’m sure you did.
Hey now it’s time to go back to the other plot. Dana is reading her dark, sad poem to the class, putting them all to sleep. Boo, Dana, boooo. Then it’s Karen’s turn. She stands up to scattered audience whoops, and reads a poem about make-up. All the boys love it! Even the black dude! No really, the camera makes a specific point to cut to the black dude in the class, and he’s all “hell yeah.” Now that the only two actors who have been paid have read their poems, class is over. But Jace the dorky TA asks Karen to stay after class. He asks her on a date, and if she says no, he will turn her A’s into D’s (not to be confused with the episode where Karen considers breast implants [banned from syndication {man how much you wanna bet an episode about that actually exists}]).  Karen comes home and tells Dana all about this jerk’s plans to blackmail her for dates. They hatch a plan to get back at him, and refer to him as “Professor Horndog,” losing me a bet (I put my money on “Skeezeball”).
You want to know how much Mark sucks? When they went back to the Mark subplot I honest to god thought “I wonder what JT and Rich are up to right now.” Mark is that fucking dire. We’re in Mark’s room (I hope they didn’t work too hard on this set, I don‘t want us to be seeing it too often) where he is sleeping with a teddy bear. I refuse to make a joke about the teddy bear, it just made me mad, man fuck Mark. Amanda Dank comes to Mark’s window and tries to get him to steal Frank’s truck and drive her to a rave. But Mark’s grounded! And anyone at all would notice if he was gone! She kisses him until he agrees to do all these crimes. Yikes, using torture methods, good thing there was no soda around.
Cut to later, a cop takes Mark home because of his reckless behavior. I know, I know, they didn’t give him the chair, unfortunate. Then Carol yells at Mark, Frank tries to keep his cool, Carol yells at Frank for being so calm, some other shit happens I guess, and then Mark hangs himself. Or, he learns a lesson about how he shouldn’t change who he is for some girl, I forget which. Mark decides to stop going out with Big Dank because she wanted him to get his nipples pierced. I guess “pierce” is slang for “spill soda on” (nope, still not tired of making jokes about that).
Now that that shit is over, let’s get as far away from that Mark subplot as we can, shall we? Back at college, Dana and Karen start their plot to get back at the dopey TA. Oh yeah, and at the end of this scene it looks like they’re about to kiss, it’s so awesome, I can’t wait to get to it. Ok, so basically, in this scene Dana hides in some sort of large cabinet (what the hell is that cabinet and what is it for?) with a heinously-dated ridiculous-looking video camera while Karen prepares to lure Jace the space case. Jace says “Ok Bob, I’ll see you at Hooters!” at the same time as Karen is being sexy, so I don’t know if the audience was whooping at her or at a shared enjoyment of Hooters. Maybe both? Ok so Karen gets the dorky TA to confess his sleazy plot to trade dates for grades, but the battery dies before Dana gets it! Oh well, things are hopeless. But he confesses again because he didn’t realize that Dana changed the batteries! And she catches it on tape this time! They did it! Hooray! Then Dana and Karen make kissy faces at each other real fast in front of the camera, no really they do, it’s awesome. Lilly watch: Lilly does not appear in this episode (it is illegal to show an image of Mark kissing someone to children, thank god no one has ever watched CBS Block Party).
But anyway, Mark's performance here shows he'd be much better suited as an actor in a troupe that travels to various catholic schools and puts on morality plays for school assemblies. Also, Dana and Karen's plot to get the TA back is stupid as heck, since Karen's poem with the CROSSED-OUT A and then BIGGER D should be enough proof, right? Like "hey look this guy changed my grade, you wanna know why?" I don't know, I woulda tried that before having Dana make like an Indian and hide in a cupboard.
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