Marva Joins The Great Food Truck Race

Episode 1 was about Rose, Episode 2 was about Diane, and now it's Marva's turn to take center stage in an episode of Rags To Riches. (If this pattern continues and Mickey's on deck for Episode 7, I am already in a state of existential dread.) The one and only fact we have learned about Marva thus far is that she has an interest in business, and sure enough, the episode revolves around her dream of becoming an entrepreneuse by purchasing the roach coach that services her school. Guess what? It doesn't go well.

If the setup alone seems like has the potential to strain your credence, then you have excellent instincts. Behold, a list of all the episode elements -- in the order in which they occur -- that evaporate under scrutiny.

Someone thought adding an explanatory pre-credits sequence detailing how these girls came to live with this SINGLE MAN would (a) make this entire enterprise seem less creepy and weird, and (b) mitigate the scene Nick and Marva share at the end that REALLY causes confusion as to the nature of their relationship. But we'll get to that.

Mickey is like six. (Okay, she's probably nine, but she acts like a six-year-old.) Why does she go to the same school as a bunch of teenagers?

I get that Marva is greedy as hell, but I wish we knew more about what made her want to buy what appears to be a shit-smeared truck.

What actual child watching this show cared about or could follow any of the business intrigue storylines Nick is involved in? I definitely don't care but I also don't understand what's happening. Why was Nick ever building a mall or trying now to buy a chain of hotels? He is in the frozen food business. Does Green Giant have an ownership stake in Kimpton?! (A: no.)

I don't even know where to start with this shit. Granted, we will later learn that these two food-truck guys -- one of whom is Fabian and one of whom is Leave It To Beaver's former Eddie Haskell, which cameos 1987 kids must have gone gaga over -- are working a long con with the sale of this lemon, but I still think it might give them pause to make a business deal with a fifteen-year-old.

0% of the outfits in this scene are period-appropriate. Jesus Christ, look at Rose: she's a goddamn Esprit mannequin.

So after a terrible filk set to "Money" in which Marva further lays out her capitalistic fantasies...

...she storms back into Nick's office and screams that she's going to buy the food truck with or without his help. At no point is he going to forbid her from buying it based on the facts that (a) she's a full-time high-school student and (b) she can't even drive? In every other episode, he's an overbearing tyrant, but now he's totally hands-off? If this is an "invisible hand of the market" gag, it's very subtle.

Now they're trying to make the boring business shit interesting by turning Schweigert into a crazy person? I guess the slapstick stuff is supposed to appeal to kids, but it's literally in the middle of a scene about bids on a hotel chain. What the actual fuck.

So Marva decides she's going to raise money for the food truck down payment by selling a bunch of worthless shit at school. Some of it is just reselling dime-store crap, which, fine, but she starts with Mood Rocks and later moves on to "love lotion" and "glow in the dark nail polish" which are clearly worthless garbage. And yet no one in the school who bought a Mood Rock went on to tell any of their fellow students that Marva is a con artist?

Basically the only storyline of the episode is Marva buying and running the food truck. So when does she actually start serving her first customers? Two-thirds of the way through the episode.

"We were so terrible at running our last food truck that we tried to make money in a shit-smeared vehicle. Clearly, the path to success involves buying ANOTHER food truck and serving ethnic food that will probably be strange and alarming to our 1961 customer base!" - Fabian and Leave It To Beaver's former Eddie Haskell.

Solving the problem of declining revenues due to aggressive competition through ARSON is probably why most insurance companies don't sell policies to FIFTEEN-YEAR-OLDS.

So when Nick, thanks to Diane and Clapper, figures out that Marva is about to get out of her problems by committing a felony, he races to the scene to stop her, which is when it finally comes out that the reason Marva is so determined to become a businesswoman is not that she's greedy, but that she thinks it's the only way she can ensure that Nick won't send her back to the orphanage that no longer exists or whatever. And this is what Nick tells her, as a soulful sax jam plays WAY TOO LOUD on the soundtrack: "How can I send away someone that I love and I need? You can depend on me any time. I sure depend on you and the girls. That's a new feeling for me, to depend on you. I'll let you in on a secret: I love the feeling." I have no way of knowing if Joseph Bologna's dating habits were James Woodsian at the time, but he really plays this scene like he's pretty sure it should end with Nick and Marva in a clinch and it is NOT OKAY.

Episode 4 is when we're going to start directly addressing the camera? If it's just Nick and just in the last seconds of the episode, fine. If Mickey does it...look, Mickey just better not do it.