My Name Is Earl: Sold a Guy a Lemon Car

Earl is cornered into an unbelievably boring conversation by Kippy, a weird neighbor that Randy finds endlessly entertaining. Catalina helps lure him away with the promise of HBO and a room without killer mold, and Randy chastises Earl for “getting rid of all the cool neighbors, like the guy with that illegal penguin.” Oh, how glad I am that I’m not one of those cool neighbors.

A creepy new neighbor moves into the hotel and wakes Earl and Randy up by making noise at night. To figure out what the man is doing, Randy looks through the bullet hole and sees the man looking back. The guys go to Catalina for help, but she refuses to make him leave because he thinks she’s pretty. Downstairs in the hotel pool, Earl finds Joy trying to catch a fish. She’s trying to help Dodge win a $500 science fair prize so she can use the money to buy a Jane Seymour necklace. Joy dreams that Jane Seymour tells her to “prove evolution is a bunch of bullcrap,” and that’s where she gets the idea. Joy recognizes Lloyd as a guy they conned into buying a lemon car, so Earl asks Lloyd what he can do to make things right.

It turns out that all Lloyd did with the car was con someone else into buying it off him, because Earl basically taught him the ways of the world by conning him. Earl sees Lloyd with a box marked “explosives,” and assumes he’s “created a terrorist.” To solve this problem, Randy suggests cutting off his hands so he can’t light the fuses, proving that Randy should go into law enforcement.

Meanwhile, Joy’s fish (which is really a tadpole) grows legs, proving she doesn’t have to go to church anymore. Lloyd agrees that if anyone who bought the car didn’t con someone else, then people are good, so Earl takes him to find all the car’s owners.

In my favorite scene of the night, they meet a junkyard employee who agrees to sell Lloyd something that he could use to make a bomb because “I think we’ve established that scruples are not a part of my nature.” If I ever get arrested, I think I now know what to say as I am being dragged away in handcuffs. Thanks, My Name is Earl.

In the end, Lloyd realizes that even though Earl thought he was building a bomb, he still tried to help him, and so some people are indeed decent. Lloyd takes that cross-country trip after all, and Joy uses the spaceship that Lloyd was actually building to win the science fair. Dodge gets a savings bond, but Darnell gets Joy the necklace.

This episode was okay, mostly for Joy’s take on science, but I thought the product placement was really heavy-handed. I liked the Jane Seymour cameo, but I thought the episode could use a lot more Randy and a lot less creepy Lloyd.