"Brothers & Sisters" Episode 302 Recap: “Book Burning”

Cut to Robert and Kitty arguing in private. He says it was bad enough not telling him about the book, but not telling her family and then writing about them is “irresponsible” and he’s worried about how they’re going to react now during their important kiss-the-social-worker’s-ass dinner. Kitty assures him that Sarah said they’d be fine.

Robert: Great, so we’re all in the same boat. Mad at you and pretending we’re not.

They go into dinner with fake smiles plastered on their faces. The Social Worker tells Nora that she heard she’s a wonderful cook, and Nora, venom in her voice, says, “I’m the Happy Homemaker.” The meal proceeds exactly as you would expect, with various family members torturing Kitty with little digs like that, like Tommy saying he wishes there were more meat and potatoes since he’s that kind of a guy.

Robert does what politicians always do in situations like this, and makes this pointless yet grandiose speech with the deluded belief that the sound of his own voice will be enough to bring stability and comfort to the hysterical masses.

The only trouble is that during his speech, people have started tasting the over-spiced paprika chicken and gagging and retching and downing their wine.

Julia, in fact, does one better and rushes from the table to toss her cookies, since she’s also car sick from reading Kitty’s book on the drive up. I don’t know what’s more depressing — that the only thing this poor actress gets to do this entire episode is make a convincing pre-puke face before fleeing the scene, or that that’s still more than Scotty gets to do.

Nora finally figures out what’s wrong with the food. She also sees that there are mere nanoseconds before the Social Worker’s fork hits her lips bearing the dreaded chicken, thereby certainly foiling the chances Kitty will ever be permitted to adopt a child, or even talk with one, or with social workers, ever again. To stop the Social Worker from making that life-altering mistake, Nora dumps ice water in her lap and pretends it’s an accident.

This is all so ridiculous that I don’t even know what to say. Actually, I do … Why for the love of Jon Stewart couldn’t Nora just have said, “Excuse me, but I think I over-spiced the chicken. Maybe we should order a pizza instead. I’m so sorry.” Knowing what I know about social workers, the Social Worker would have greatly appreciated her candor. Heck, she’d probably have initiated a group therapy session where everybody got to share how the ruined chicken made them feel.

Instead, Nora gave the poor women a case of frost-crotch that it’s going to take hours to recover from. Nora and Kitty are all over her with the apologies, and the Social Worker’s appropriately icy response is, “It’s. All. Right. Really.” She decides to go home immediately, and on the way out, gives Kitty and Robert the old, “We’ll be in touch” line.

After the Social Worker has left, Kitty accuses Nora of ruining the dinner on purpose. Nora swears she grabbed the cayenne pepper instead of the paprika by accident. Kevin says it was an honest mistake, unlike Kitty’s efforts to eviscerate the family in writing. Kitty’s defense is the same lame “it’s all in the context” argument Sarah made, claiming the book isn’t really about any of them, it’s — get this — a “commentary about the state of the American electorate,” in which the Walkers represent “archetypes of American voters.” So in other words, the context is pretentious and booooring.

Now Nora lays into Kitty and it’s a pretty awesome sight to behold. She talks about how Kitty’s book reminded her of the days when Kitty lived in New York and would make snide comments about her family on her radio show. She says she thought that since Kitty’s been back home they were past all that, that Kitty had changed. But instead, she feels like Kitty’s been spying on them all along, and she absolutely hates this side of her.

Robert comes to Kitty’s defense, telling Nora that the thing she likes least about Kitty is the thing he loves most about her. I’m wondering what exactly that thing is. That she’s planning on voting yes on Proposition 8? That her wildest bedroom fantasies all involve Ronald Reagan?

What he actually means is that she’s “upright,” “honest,” and “opinionated.” He proceeds to offer a series of scathing critiques of the rest of the Walkers that — and maybe I’m still obsessing too much over last week’s V.P. debate — but I swear it sounds like he had someone on his staff write these lines, then memorized them for use whenever the situation might call for it.

Like if at the dinner there was an argument and one of the Walkers mentioned their feelings being hurt, his staff coached Robert to say, “I know how all of you feel because the minute you have a feeling you start spewing with complete disregard for anyone else like children.” And if someone mentioned “education,” he could take advantage of the opportunity to praise Paige and Cooper and welcome the class of third graders currently visiting the dinner table.

Robert caps off his diatribe with his favorite insult these days — telling them that they’re all no better than a bunch of Washington politicians. I find it amusing how naïve he is about how self-defeating and even self-hating this kind of comment is. It’s like if every time I got annoyed at my sister, I accused her of acting like a total recapper. Which, come to think of it, would be a pretty devastating accusation.