30 ROCK: Funcooker

Yay! How much do you want a Funcooker? Just knowing it’s named after Tracy’s backside would probably be enough for me, although the prospect of microwaving food in the same shower in which I am simultaneously bathing is a pretty sweet bonus. Mmmm…bathroom food…

Let’s start off by putting this one in the win column for the season, for sheer lunacy alone, and also for the callback to Liz’s previously foolproof jury duty escape plan: a Princess Leia costume that’s ingeniously capped off with a Yoda voice. Except: oops! She’s in New York City now, where a jury of her peers will include one person dressed in Christmas lights, one preteen boy wearing a fake mustache, two tight-faced elderly twins, a woman carrying a dog wrapped up like a baby, and what appear to be a couple of homeless people. (As a current resident of New York City, I will say: all plausible. Princess Leia: apparently also plausible.) Plus I am a sucker for any episode that can tie together three seemingly disparate plots and work in all (or most) of the cast, and then wrap it up by teaching Liz Lemon a valuable life lesson that she is able to forget in under two minutes.

Giving Liz a glimpse of her even sadder self in the form of a drab, crazy-eyed Mailbox Plus assistant manager who’s on trial for burning down her workplace is a nice nutty piece of business, and actually manages to one-up last year’s “Rosemary’s Baby” in the future horror department. I will put a lot of the credit for that right on the shoulders of the awesome Jackie Hoffman, because she didn’t just make this woman sad, she made her weird and plausible. To wit: “I could feel that it was time. Time for a new beginning. And I knew that this was possible only through a cleansing fire. It would all have to burn. The packing peanuts, the delivery slips, all of it would dance in the warm mouth of my fire. And a new, better, wonderful me would rise from the ashes like a phoenix. Behold: the splendor of my beginning!” And almost all of that speech echoing back to Liz’s own earlier comments. Of course Liz is hardly comforted to learn that a nutbag arsonist who’s excited to eat a sandwich in a jail cell is freer than she is, until she experiences a similar workplace meltdown (by inadvertently igniting her Princess Leia costume with an extinguished match), only to be cheered by the prospect of using the Funcooker to heat up some ham in the shower. Which means Liz Lemon is already free, and already Rochelle Gaulke.

The B and C stories worked for me, too, just because I like watching Jack boss the writers around for the good of microwave oven programming, and enjoy watching Tracy do basically anything. It would’ve been nice to see Kenneth take charge of more with his “in charge” time, though (banning menstruating women and facial hair seems like the start of something bigger and better and Schrute-like), and maybe less of the albino rat.

But that’s just me; what did you think?

A FEW MORE FAVORITE THINGS

Liz: “Already today I have lost faith in décor-ganizing, chipped a tooth, and lost a shoving match to what I thought was a female bike messenger.”

Jenna singing as “Janie Jimplin”: “Synonym’s just another word for the word you wanna use…”

Tracy’s jolly St. Patrick’s day sweater and Frank’s tighty whiteys.

Tracy: “I feel I should be rewarded for going this long without swearing on live TV.”

Jack’s 15-second reenactment of the standard sketches that make up any given TGS episode, which he presumes are easy enough for Liz to crank out on her own in an hour.

Tracy: “I guess FCC stands for ‘Federal Bunch of Sticklers.”

“Shut up, Lutz!” And the return of Dr. Spaceman, purveyor of dubious anti-sleep medication, smasher of bear heads. (“You know what I like to do for eight hours? The TV Guide crossword puzzle.”)

Jack: “Remember this isn’t TGS, guys; let’s not shoot for the middle this time.”

Rochelle Gaulke: “Christine was late, as well as Harry S. They said it was a problem with ‘the subways,’ but I suspect they were doing sex with each other.”

Jack trying to name the portable microwave using Scrabble tiles, first coming up with “vagina,” then “nipple,” and finally “Hitler.”

Dr. Spaceman: “Professor Bananas is dead!”

Jenna to Kenneth: “Is your vision steadily narrowing down to a pinpoint as if a darkness is closing in on you?” Kenneth: “No, ma’am!”

The biteNUKER, new Franco-Dutch curse word.