Cox Digital Cable Description: Frank and Carol try to scare away the potential buyers of their home. Well, here we are, the very last Step by Step. It’s been a long journey, arguably a journey one season longer than it should have been. But truth be told I am really going to miss season seven. When a sitcom that had no real reason to exist in the first place gets dragged on until well after it should have ended and continues filling up time between commercials with increasingly boring plots and increasingly hot daughters, well, honestly that’s the kind of crap TV I live for. But Step by Step, like all good things, must come to an end, and we all must move on to bigger and better things. Not the cast and crew of Step by Step, though, just us write-uppers, moving on to writing up season one. If the series finale is anything like the last two Step by Steps, with Al bumbling her way through a play before sincerely apologizing to the audience for it and Sasha Mitchell plus 25 pounds leaping headfirst back into the Codeman character like he’d spent the last two seasons sitting on the edge of his seat waiting for Miller/Boyett to call him back, it will be embarrassing to sit through and vaguely depressing. Let’s see if it is!  The episode starts out with Frank getting some great news on the phone! He sits down to eat breakfast with (most of) the family and explains that some dude he knew at some point is going to sell him a new house on the cheap. Karen is excited about what the appearance of being rich that comes with purchasing a house will do for her social life. It hasn’t been mentioned here but Karen’s been wearing her bangs up and/or to the side for the last few episodes, I guess that’s going to be as much of an arc as she gets on this show. I would have sworn her country music career kicked in in season seven. Man, when was the last time Karen even had her own episode? I guess seducing the TA, and even that she had to share with Dana, and fucking MARK had a subplot of his own that week. THAT’S gotta suck. Here’s something I’ve been thinking for a while, and I guess the final episode write up is the best place to say it, and I might be completely wrong here, but I think Karen might be legitimately funny. Has she ever done anything again? If she’s anything like JT, Mark or Brendon she hasn’t. So Karen, I think you deserve a little more love in these write ups, especially if the show’s writers aren’t going to give you any, and besides writing about you sure beats writing about what’s going on in this episode now. Everyone gets excited about moving to a new house, while Lilly makes sad faces and slinks away from the table. Yep, this is going to be the Step by Step version of the Full House episode where a rich dude tries to buy the house and they turn him down because Michelle got sad. Carol says she doesn’t want to leave the old house, and in hands down the biggest laugh of the episode, if not the series, Lilly walks up and stands in the background, all sad and out of focus, between Frank and Carol while they argue, and then walks off. What genius directed this episode? Holy shit.  Now time for the show proper to start. Carol gets a call from Lilly’s school saying that she got in trouble for throwing a BALL on the ROOF. Oh fuck, they’re ending the series with a Lilly episode? Come on Step by Step, it’s not like you had much of a legacy to begin with, but this is how you want to go out? Lilly comes home and gets in trouble. Man I just realized that throwing a ball on the roof is a great way to get in trouble, too bad it was wasted on Lilly.
We then go to the model house Frank and Carol are going to buy. From the exterior shots it seems to be played by the CGI version of Carl’s house from the Aqua Teen Hunger Force pilot. Everyone agrees, this is one cool house! It’s got talking appliances “like The Jetsons” for Carol. It’s got a view of the lake for Al (and a view of Al in a bikini by the lake for my brain). It’s got solar panels and “built in recycling bins” (as opposed to “a wastebasket you can put cans and newspaper into”) for Dana. It’s got a three-way mirror for my new favorite character Karen. Even JT and Rich pipe in through the intercom to say how much they like the toilets. Lilly hates it though, of course, no one can have anything nice while Lilly’s around.
Back home, a real estate person is showing the house to some yuppies. They love the house! They plan on buying it, even after Frank confesses through a series of foot-in-mouth babblings that he wishes to see the Jew neighbor from down the street naked. Lilly walks in as the yuppies leave to be awful a little more. “Mommy, daddy, who were those people?” she asks in the most excruciating line-reading in sitcom history. Frank and Carol say that they’re the people who are going to buy the house and then leave the room. That means we are left with a LILLY SOLO SCENE. Lilly tells her stuffed bunny Mr. Buttons that she doesn’t want to move to “that stupid house,” and at this point I’m convinced they’re ending Step by Step with a Lilly episode as a fuck you to CBS for putting them on a block that nobody has ever watched.
Commercials happen, and we then go to the kitchen where Carol walks in yelling at Lilly for getting in trouble at school again, giving Lilly more chances to “act,” barf. Dana, having taken two semesters of child psychology, tries to handle Lilly. She does so by acting like a dipshit clown named Bootsy. Two semesters, huh Dana? Because you seem to know as much about child psychology as a lazy television writer. “Bite me Bootsy,” Lilly says like a rude little troll, and she gets sent to hell I mean her room while Al laughs about her little outburst. Come on Al there’s only one episode left now, don’t make me hate you.  Next scene, the yuppies are back and they’re being rude because they are yuppies in a sitcom. They talk about their plans to destroy the house and redo everything. They put post-it notes all over like there aren’t people still living there. JT makes a plea to keep living in the apartment next door and the yuppies say they are going to turn it into a dog kennel. There won’t be much difference if you keep JT and Rich there too. (The actual show makes a joke similar enough to this but ehh whatever.) Basically, the yuppies be rude and Frank and Carol decide to start being sentimental.  Then another scene happens. It’s pretty much all filler. Carol looks through photo albums, her and Frank get sentimental, they decide the house is like another member of the family and they don’t want the rude yuppies to come in and live there. Lilly comes in and acts like a little piece of shit. The most notable thing about this scene is the bizarro-ass page-flip syndication edit at the end. Not all paragraphs can be winners, folks.
The next day, the rude yuppies come in for their FINAL walkthrough of the house (I guess the day when they put post-it notes on everything doesn’t count). Frank and Carol play pranks on them to make it look like the house is falling apart. They make the sink explode. Then Mark comes downstairs dressed in a soccer uniform that a five-year-old boy or member of Weezer would wear. He also has a clothespin on his nose, and I honestly thought that Mark looking and presumably smelling like shit was supposed to be what scares the yuppies off, but instead he says that the toilets are backed up. Well it takes a clogged toilet to know one Mark, and if this is the last we see of each other, fuck you and get bent.
Man when the Fresh Prince got to this point they could at least get cameos by the Jeffersons and Conrad Baines, all this show could get for their last episode was Yuppie #1 and Yuppie #2. Do you really have no good will in the sitcom world, Step by Step? Not even Urkel could stop by? Anyway, Frank and Carol continue to prank the yuppies by putting holes in the walls and ruining the kitchen table. Their final prank is making ghost noises and saying the house was built on an Indian burial ground (it’s never revealed who is actually doing the ghost noises). As the yuppies run out of the house (without going to any room past the kitchen), they spot Lilly and shriek, the second biggest laugh of the show for me. Then I notice that Lilly has a rat on her shoulder, and I feel bad for the rat.  The end: Frank buys everyone a gift to make up for not letting them move to The House of Next Tuesday for the sake of that little fuck Lilly. And by “everyone” I mean JT, Dana, Karen, and Al. They didn’t even get the entire cast back together for one last hurrah before they got cancelled. Well, look on the bright side Step by Step characters, now you get to keep living in the house in season nothing! And now instead of being torn down by yuppies your house will instead be torn down by Warner Bros. crewmen and rebuilt into the George Lopez Show set or something. At least it’s not canon, I guess. Lilly is happy in canon, that’s what we have to show from seven years of Step by Step.
You know what? I think I probably stopped all TGIF-related obsession when South Park started. Step by Step probably fell away a year or two before the rest of TGIF. Good to see Lilly be an asshole and ruin the family's move into a nicer house. Also, good to see the yuppies not have the wherewithal to realize that maybe you don't act like you own the joint in front of the former family. If only you knew to show some tact everyone would be much happier right now. Except Lilly, but she'd get over it. She's a kid. She's not emotionally mature enough yet to understand that stuff in your life doesn't last forever, and in order to teach kids important life lessons you make sure they occasionally don't get their way every now and again. You are shit parents, Frank and Carol. Have fun burning in sitcom hell. Goodbye, Step by Step. But not really. We actually have only reviewed about a fifth of your total episodes. So from our stand point, it’s more “see you on a daily basis for the next few months, Step By Step.” So what I really want to say is: “get out of my life, Step by Step.”
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