30 Rock: Embrace Your Elitism

It’s flu season at 30 Rock, and fittingly, love is in the air.  Jack and Salma Hayek are still hot and heavy, and Liz is headed to her annual vacation at “St. Bartleby’s,” where this year, she’s aspiring to get whatever’s left of her groove back by wearing a swimsuit modeled in US Weekly by Judi Dench’s mother and making a certain young Filipino gentleman into her island lover.

But their dreams are nearly dashed.  To finance her grandmother’s online poker habit, Salma works too much to spend quality time with Jack, and Liz’s vacation is threatened by the TGS crew (who spend their evenings driving around Newark looking for their runaway daughters).  They’ve all come down with a hardcore flu, but are working anyway, because sometimes working in TV sucks.  Liz doesn’t care, as long as they don’t infect her and ruin her vacation.

But it’s okay, because Dr. Spaceman is back!  He’s busy, though, giving out flu shots and lollipops to the upper crust of 30 Rock, forcing Liz to do the robot, and offering up gems like “When is modern science gonna find a cure for a woman’s mouth?”  Liz is ready to shoot up with the vaccine, until she learns that there are only five shots left, and Jack is rationing them out to the people he considers worthy.  Liz, bless her heart, is genuinely aghast about this for a while, and refuses to get a shot on principle.  This makes her a hero to the crew – until, following a horror-movie sequence and a fever-dream sequence and a series of unintelligible text messages about hotel bookings from Cerie, she changes her mind and reveals her true elitist colors.

Fortunately, Jack is there to deliver the moral of the story: Not everyone gets to get flu shots and go to the Caribbean, but Liz does, because she’s better than other people.  Lesson learned, people, lesson learned.

And Jack knows his stuff on this front, because he and Salma have spent the episode toting around one of Nurse Salma’s unwitting patients while they go on dates.  In the end, the patient – a Mr. Templeton, who’s in a vegetative state and has a beak on his foot and has always dreamed of going to a “Negro bar” (and yes, I went through some internal debate before typing that, but I figure if Tina Fey can type it, I can too) – almost outs Jack and Salma to his bow-tied Londoner son.  But Jack cuts a deal with him, because Jack can cut deals with anyone, regardless of vegetation.  Also, we get to hear an awesome montage song about Mr. Templeton, which I suspect will be next year’s Emmy winner (following in the great comedy-song tradition of Justin Timberlake and Sarah Silverman).

Other things we learned this week:

• Howie Mandel has his own reality show now.
• Upon their deaths, Parcell men are traditionally wrapped in Confederate flags, fried and fed to dogs.  (Does anyone else think Kenneth and Dwight are probably related?  Sure, Dwight’s from Pennsylvania and Kenneth’s from Kentucky or something, but the hick diaspora is wider than you’d guess.)
• Important people get better health care, better restaurant reservations, bigger seats in planes, and a more refined class of prostitute.
• Alec Baldwin tiptoes awesomely.

Season 3, Episode 8: Flu Shot (originally aired January 15, 2009)

For another take on this episode, check out UR V8K8SH1 iz baqon by Jaimie Campos.

For more on 30 Rock, click here.

Thursdays at 9:30/8:30C on NBC

Photographs courtesy of NBC