"That 90s Show" Episode 2.4: We meet Ozzie's boyfriend, sort of. Plus nude photos of 90s teen idol Brian Austin Green

16 years after we said goodbye to the kids smoking pot in the Forman basement on That 70s Show, their own kids have returned in That 90s Show.  The premise: Eric and Donna's daughter Leia spends the summer with her grandparents, and has humorous misadventures with Michael and Jackie's son (Mace Coronel) and some other teens.  Except now it's a more diverse crew: Ozzie, played by Reyn Doi, is Asian and gay.  

The grandparents are still around, the original gang pops in from time to time, and there are guest spots from a lot of iconic teen hunks from the  1990s , such as Seth Green, left, Kevin Smith, Kadeem Hardison, and Brian Austin Green -- bonus dick and butt pics below.

I reviewed Episode 2.4, where we meet Ozzie's Canadian boyfriend, Etienne. Sort of.

Scene 1: In the iconic basement, Ozzie is excited that Etienne is coming to visit.  The Hunk, Mace Coronel, sits with his arm around his girlfriend.  The Dumb One, Maxwell Acee Donovan, has broken up with his girlfriend.  A lot of heterosexual coupling going on.  

The guys offer to give Ozzie a ride to the airport in their van, but Ozzie asked Mrs. Foreman to do it: he doesn't want Etienne to get off the plane and hate America.  What about his parents?  Oh, regular cast only.

Gwen enters and introduces them to her new "not my boyfriend," Cole, played by Niles Fitch. 

Ozzie tells him that he ranks guys on looks, popularity, communiy service, and butt.  He's #1.  Cole: "I know.  I got your letter."  At least this isn't a neutered gay guy.

Everyone razzes Gwen: "Not your boyfriend, right!  No way you're not dating!" 

Scene 2: Red, the father from That 70s Show, is reading the newspaper and drinking coffee.  He asks, "Can you top me off, Honey?"  

"Sure, Babe," but it's not his wife Kitty, it's Ozzie, har har.  He wants to know where Kitty is: she agreed to drive him to the airport, and they have to leave soon. 

Next door neighbor Bob ( Don Stark),  also Leia's other grandfather, wants to show Red his rattlesnake eggs.  "No one will fall for that prank," Red complains.  But Kitty falls for it, and she's so surprised that she topples over the couch!

Scene 3: Kitty has sprained her ankle.  She told the neighborhood ladies about her injury, maybe exaggerating a little, or a lot -- "I may have said I had a collapsed lung" -- so they are bringing over casseroles.  

Neighbor Bob advises against lying about the severity of her injury: once you reach a certain age, the number of available men goes into sharp decline, so if they think that Kitty is dying, they'll latch onto her husband...

Scene 4: Gwen, the one who's not-dating the new guy Cole, yells at the other girl -- about that "boyfriend" stuff.  "Now he wants to have a talk about us! He wants to be my boyfriend!"  

The other girl doesn't understand what's wrong with that.  Isn't it the goal of life? 

"I....um...have never been in a relationship before.  I'm nervous."   

"Just hold his hand and leave your heart open." Ugh.

Scene 5: Since Grandma Kitty can't drive, Ozzie has to allow the guys to drive him to the airport in their van. They agree to "no hot-boxing, no Dutch Ovens, no mooning, and no Jay Leno impressions."

Scene 6:  One of the girls reports back to Kitty about the ladies flirting with Red: Pam is cooking him chicken.  Kitty imagines her as singer Carmen Electra hanging all over him and cooking seductively: "Do you want to shake or bake?"  She forces the girl to piggy-back her downstairs and yells "Get away from him, you slut!", but it turns out to be an elderly lady.

Scene 7: At the airport, Ozzie is nervous. The passengers from Quebec arrive. The Dumb One: "I never realized how much Canadians look like us."  But boyfriend Etienne isn't there!

Meanwhile, Gwen tells Leia that she broke up with "not my boyfriend" Cole. 

"But he could be the love of your life. My parents met in high school."  Eric and Donna?  Aren't they divorced?

Suddenly Cole appears. They have a heart-to-heart: "I'm scared," yada yada yada.  Why does the straight couple get a happy ending, while the gay guy gets left at the airport door?   

More after the break

Matt Smith: Who doesn't want to see the penis of Prince Philip, Charles Manson, Christopher Isherwood, Superworm, and Dr. Who?

 

We've been watching the 2011 series of Doctor Who, the seemingly endless British sci-fi series that sends the last remaining Time Lord through time and space to save Earth, an alien planet, or the entire universe.  Again and again.  Oddly, when his world-saving takes him to modern day Britain, there are plenty of exteriors, but when it is a distant planet or the far future, all we see are endless corridors. 

Doctors regenerate every few years, getting new bodies and personalities.  Right now it's Matt Smith, an effervescent, jokey type, with an inner trauma that sometimes comes out.  After all, he saw the destruction of his people, and he's over 1,000 years old, so dozens of human companions have died, gotten lost, or left him to go on with their lives.

Matt Smith has appeared as the Doctor in dozens of projects outside the show itself: videos exploring odd corners of his universe, video games, a lot of four-episode miniseries, spin-offs starring former companions Sarah Jane and Amy Pond

The children's program Blue Peter. 

Comic Relief: Red Nose Day, An Adventure in Time and Space...I got tired of counting.  You have to be British to really understand his amazing popularity.

The Doctor would be enough for a career, but Matt has played a wide range of other characters, mostly based on real people:

Christopher Isherwood, the gay author of A Passage to India and Maurice, in Christopher and His Kind, a 2011 adaption of his memoirs. Left, the one without the biceps.

Rowing star Bert Bushnell in Bert & Dickie, 2012.  Neither was gay.

Prince Philip, the consort of Queen Elizabeth, in The Crown, 2016-7.

Robert Maplethorpe, the controversial gay artist, in Mapplethorpe: The Director's Cut , 2018  

Left, the one with the ring

Hippie cult leader Charles Manson in Charlie Say, 2018

Plus a variety of fictional characters. As far as I can tell, they're all heterosexual.  I guess he only takes gay roles if they're of historical significance.

A detective fighting witchcraft.

An evil clone with a nice bulge.

A zombie-fighting parson in the Regency era.

The case worker of a refugee family facing evil

An evil spirit in the psychedelic 60s

A tourist in Morocco for whom things go terribly wrong

More Matt after the break

Gemstones Episode 1.8: Kelvin's testicles, Jesse's butt, and ancient Philistine penises. WIth testicular bonus

Previous: Episode 1.7, continued: Bisexual fish, Thai brothers, and Scotty with a broken heart.

In the last episode, Scotty kidnapped Gideon and Jesse, forced them to open the church vault, and stole the Easter offering money, incidentally confessing that he had been in love with Gideon.  Judy and BJ had a breakup scene, but Kelvin and Keefe barely appeared.  In Episode 1.8,, their romance is centric. 

Title: "But the righteous will see their fall." Proverbs 26:19: "When the wicked are multiplied, transgression increases; But the righteous will see their fall"

An Old Man's Dick:  It's still Easter evening.  After dropping off Judy at her house, Baby Billy asks Tiffany "Who wants to suck an old man's dick?" She goes down on him while they are driving down dark country roads near the estate.  Suddenly Scotty, driving away with the money he stole, runs a stop sign and crashes into their car!   They are unharmed, but Scotty is near death (Tiffany finishes the job by accidentally shooting him).  Then they steal the money.  An interesting call-back here: earlier Scotty implies that he forced Gideon into oral sex, and he dies while interrupting consensual oral sex, an ironic punishment of the sort you would see in 1950s horror comics. 

Top five young ministers:  Gideon admits to being Scotty's partner in the offering-theft plan, and is rejected by Eli and Amber.  But he doesn't mention his part in the blackmail plan!  We cut to Jesse telling his siblings that they are in the clear. But how do they know he won't tell later, and implicate them in the assault?   Worried that he'll be arrested, Kelvin is having anxiety attacks and "sharp shit pains in my stomach" (hemorrhoids?).   Even if he wasn't convicted, the scandal would destroy his career.   "I was in the Top Five Young Ministers to watch last year -- I got a reputation -- a following."  Wait -- if he's so famous, why is his whole plot arc about proving his worth?

Denim brings lunch:  We cut to scenes where Baby Billy and Tiffany leave town with the offering money, Eli worries that the whole enterprise is corrupt, and Jesse apologizes to Gideon for pushing him away and starting the whole mess. Eli admits, for the only time in the series, that the church's finances are not entirely above-board.

 Next, Judy tries to mend her relationship with BJ by bringing him lunch at the optometrist office.  Whoops, his coworker Denim already picked up lunch.  "So you're having sex with BJ?"  No, she's a lesbian -- she has a wife.  This does not convince Judy, who calls her: "One of those benevolent lesbians, out to meet a hot guy, make friends with him, so you can sample-suck some clean dick."  BJ's nonchalance about LGBT people, plus Judy's sort-of nonchalance, will become important later.

He refuses to take Judy back, so she storms into the parking lot and starts destroying cars, finally getting arrested.

Hemorrhoids and Testicular Tumors: Keefe is swimming while Kelvin tries not to look at the body that is giving him so many unwelcome desires.   He wants to know how he can rid the world of darkness, when he's surrounded by it: his mother died, Eli was assaulted, the church was robbed. Not to mention Jesse committing assault and probably vehicular homicide.  He concludes that God is punishing the family for "not being who we say we are."  

Left: Kelvin's testicles.  Look behind the cock.

But Kelvin had nothing to do with those things. He was in the car with his siblings when they ran over the blackmailers, but he didn't assault anyone.  At most he failed to tell anyone.  How does "not being who we say we are" apply to him?  Unless he is talking about being gay.

"Don't you think God is being a little harsh?" Keefe asks.  We all wear masks; we hide things even from ourselves.  

Kelvin laugh/cries and says "I think we're getting off easy...when the Philistines stole the Ark of the Covenant, God punished them with hemorhhoids and testicle tumors."  

He's referring to an obscure story in 1 Samuel 4-5, where the Philistine thieves were punished with opalim. The King James Bible translates the Hebrew word as "emeroids" (now "hemorrhoids") and the NIV as "tumors."  An article in Biblical Archaeology Review points out the importance of penises in Philistine art, and suggests "flaccid penises."   No one mentions testicles; apparently Kelvin invented it, to correspond to the glimpse of Keefe's testicle that began his recognition of his homoerotic desire.

Next: "You should go, Keefe."  Keefe doesn't understand: "You want me to make a store run?"  Kelvin becomes angrier and angrier: "Go.  Leave.  Get out. I am no longer fit to lead you!" 

Kelvin scratches his butt as he says this.  Apparently he has hemorrhoids, and thinks that God is punishing him -- an ironic punishment for having anal sex? Will testicular tumors come next? 

Keefe disagrees: "There's no one more worthy than you."

 "Get the fuck out of here! Now! Do I need to call security, motherfucker?"  This is shockingly aggressive. Besides, if Keefe has been living there for several months, you have to give him 30 days notice.

Keefe wades away, holding his swimsuit like he held his shirt during the mushroom head scene.  The intimacy he enjoyed that night has been revoked.  Kelvin falls into the pool and screams and cries.

Why does Kelvin send Keefe away?  If he's no longer qualified to be a spiritual leader due to the assault of the blackmailers, they could certainly continue to live together.  It must have something to do with the "hemorrhoids and testicular tumors," the intimacy they shared, or even homoerotic desire itself.  Kelvin believes that it is evil, demonic, that Keefe is a serpent who tempted him.  I don't care much for this association between LGBT identities and sin, but the show has been careful to establish that it's in Kelvin's head, not a general theme, structurally or in-universe.  

Testicular bonus after the break