By Sabrina Cognata

Silly Earl (Jason Lee), tricks are for kids.  Seriously, this week Earl talks about how all the things he’s done to help the warden (Craig T. Nelson) has substantially diminished the time he has to serve behind bars.  Now he’s left with about six-months and ten days left.  Miraculously, the warden needs his help implementing some crazy new program that he accidentally brought up while being grilled by a really tough reporter about the massive failure of the programs he implements in the state prisons.  The warden retorts saying he’s currently working on a program he likes to call the SUPER DOOPER, SUPER PROGRAM.  Which becomes a program about reconciliation for the inmates.

The warden tells Earl if he can make the program look like a success he will take ANOTHER six-months off Earl’s sentence.  If things workout the way Earl wants he’ll have only 10 days left in the clink.  Earl accepts this mission and goes about trying to figure out which inmate’s situation would work best for this situation.  After carefully reviewing the inmate’s personnel files Earl finds his candidate, John the Artist.

John is in prison for arson because his at home meth lab exploded while he was painting and his parent’s house caught on fire.  Earl tells him about the reconciliation program and says John’s the perfect candidate.  John seems mild mannered enough and sort of goofy so everything points to the fact that things will workout and Earl should be out of jail in less than no time. 


Earl sends Joy and Darnell to speak with John’s parents about coming to the prison for the reconciliation.  When they get there John’s parents act like John is the anti-Christ and say that they do not want anything to do with their son the monster.  Finally, Darnell is able to talk some sense into the parents saying how things will be a lot better—blah blah blah and they agree to show up and work things out with their son.

Everyone shows up for the meeting including the stupid reporter and the warden.  Once John sits down he wants to know when his parents are going to apologize.  Everything goes haywire and the warden wants to fake a heart attack.  John throws a fit blaming his parents for everything and has to be dragged back to his cell.  Earl immediately goes into damage control and tells John that he has to apologize so Earl can get out of jail.  John refuses to, unless Earl throws him a prom.  Earl uses the last of his lottery money to throw the most rocking prom in prison history, and that’s probably because it is the only prom in prison history.  After the prom John is suppose to reconcile with his parents, but once he sees them he goes bananas and has to be taken away again. 


This time Earl is livid because he used up al his money to buy his freedom and John’s not even agreeing to his part of the bargain.  Earl then burns up all of John’s paintings and while on his rage filled warpath he beats the hell out of John saying it isn’t his fault it’s John’s fault because he made him turn into this sort of monster just like John kept saying the monster he turned into was his parents fault.  Blah.  Blah.  Blah.  John realizes he is an asshole and sends his parents a painting of their wedding photo that he memorized while high on meth.  This leads to a reconciliation between them and Earl achieves his six-month certificate from the warden and will be released from jail the next day.  On his way out of the warden’s office Earl mentions this fact and the warden gets scared that he’s going to lose Earl and puts the certificate in the paper shredder.  I think this episode is suppose to be funny, but mostly it is boring except for the fact that Earl’s date to the prom is about one metric ton.