‘Freaks and Geeks’ Episode 10 Recap: No Language in Our Lungs

Freaks and Geeks Episode 10
"The Diary"
Original airdate: Jan. 31, 2000
Writer: Judd Apatow, Rebecca Kirshnerv
Director: Ken Olin
Cast: Linda Cardellini, John Francis Daley, James Franco, Samm Levine, Seth Rogen, Jason Segal, Martin Starr, Busy Philipps, Becky Ann Baker, Joe Flaherty

I say it about a lot of episodes, I know, but “The Diary” is about the perceptions we hold about people. More than that, though, it’s an episode in which miscommunications, violated boundaries, and hurt feelings open up who these people are. Kim Kelly isn’t made of steel; to quote Daniel, “She’s like the rawest nerve there is.” Despite the opinions of all the jocks and Coach Fredricks, Bill isn’t uninterested in sports, and being picked last for baseball in gym class is leaving him frustrated, hyper-aware of how he’s viewed by his peers.

But Harold and Jean are the true central characters of “The Diary,” as they become horribly aware of how their daughter views them, and this forced self-awareness tears their comfortable routine apart.

It begins with a classic act of teen rebellion: hitchhiking! Lindsay opines that she and Kim are just like Jack Kerouac as they stand by the side of the road with their thumbs out. When someone finally picks them up, he reveals that he’s a regular customer at Harold’s store, and that he intends to tell him about Lindsay’s faux-Kerouac adventures. Harold is infuriated (“You could have been picked up by Ted Bundy!”), but rather than grounding Lindsay, they instead request to have dinner with Kim’s mom, the absolute worst advocate for Kim Kelly there could possibly be.

Mrs. Kelly doesn’t hold back, telling the Weirs that Kim uses drugs, gets loaded, and has sex with strangers in the backs of vans. She also reveals how she finds out these things about her daughter—she reads them in her diary.

When Harold and Jean bring up Kim’s behavior to Lindsay, she can’t bring herself to defend her against them. Kim is a bad girl, after all. So her parents declare, “No more Kim Kelly!” She’s a “bad banana,” and Lindsay will spoil too if she gets too close.

(I absolutely love Harold misremembering Mrs. Kelly’s claim that Kim “ain’t the sharpest crayon in the box”: “She’s as dumb as a crayon!”)

When Lindsay tells Kim that she’s not allowed to hang out with her anymore—though she insists that it’ll blow over—and that her parents think she’s a drug-addicted slut, Kim becomes infuriated. She doesn’t care about what Lindsay’s parents think, but Lindsay’s inability to stick up for her shows how little respect or faith she has in her own friend. So the two begin seriously sparring for the first time since they became besties six episodes ago.

While Lindsay is at school, Harold and Jean take Mrs. Kim’s advice, and take a peak in her diary. Rather than telling them what their daughter is doing, this invasion of privacy tells them what Lindsay thinks of them. That they’re repressed robots, stuck in a monotonous routine, and that it’s possible they don’t even love each other. Harold is a fascist dictator who refuses to help clear the table, and Jean is subservient, cooking the same meal every night and allowing her husband to walk all over her. This breaks the two of them, albeit briefly. Jean tries to mix up the routine, attempting to feed her family Cornish game hens and asking that Harold help her with chores, a request he refuses.

Bill, meanwhile, gets his first true storyline (as in, the first storyline that focuses on his own feelings and interests, independent from the other geeks). And if it proves anything, it’s that he contains multitudes, as the assumptions everyone makes about his not being interested in sports (and furthermore, that he has no talent for them) is proven wrong. Being picked last for baseball in gym class is actually devastating for him, not only because it’s humiliating, but also because he thinks he might be good at it, but never gets a chance to find out.

In a Vanity Fair article where he explained where the Freaks and Geeks characters likely ended up, Paul Feig said that Bill would have become a jock, joining the basketball team. If any episode hints at that, it’s this one, where he’s so annoyed by the lack of faith everyone has in his potential athletic talent that he begins prank-calling Coach Fredricks. First, he pretends to be Gordon Crisp’s father, telling him that Gordon is the one who wants to be shortstop. When this doesn’t work, he goes the vulgar route, throwing such classic insults at Fredricks as “you like patting boys’ butts,” “go sniff a jock strap, you poophead,” and “you’re a perv and a loser and a stinky turd.” He’s found out when Fredricks is so infuriated by these calls that he makes everyone in class read a transcript of the call to him, with Bill the clear match. But rather than Bill being punished, he instead turns this into a moment where he’s able to tell the coach how he feels: that it hurts to be picked last all the time, that girls remember who gets picked last, and that he wants the chance to show that he’s not as bad at sports as everyone assumes.

So Fredricks lets him pick the teams, and now the geeks get a chance to show their worth on the field. Bill catches a ball, and the geeks are all so excited that they forget to tag up, celebrating like they’ve achieved victory when it’s only the first out. We don’t see the rest of the game, because it doesn’t matter. That one victory, Bill proving that he isn’t hopeless, is the point.

Where Bill is misjudged physically, Kim is misjudged emotionally and intellectually. Lindsay can’t figure out why Kim is angry at her, because she assumed that Kim was so strong she couldn’t hurt her. When she realizes the mistake she’s made, she gets back in good graces by siding with Kim’s criticism of Kerouac in English class, offering evidence to back her up.

The geeks, Lindsay, and Kim all end up at the Weirs’ house after school, where Harold and Jean’s storyline is ending, loudly, in the bedroom. They’ve made up, reestablished their love for each other, and are now having noisy makeup sex that disgusts everyone except Neal (who tries to listen in) and Kim (who exclaims, “Your parents are swingers!”). The two even respond happily to Kim’s presence for once. It’s not always a quick fix, but occasionally, repressed suburbanites just really need to get laid to chill out a little.

Grade: A