My Name Is Earl In case you thought...

My Name Is Earl In case you thought Randy and Darnell were cut from the same simple, naive cloth, tonight we got the perfect example of what differentiates them: When imagining his dad as the mayor, Randy says, "We'd get to wear top hats and sashes and judge beauty contests!" When asked if he'd like to register to vote, Darnell says he already is registered, "not that it matters because until we reform the electoral college, the popular votes will be ignored and we'll keep electing presidents who only get a minority of the vote," and turns back to his game of Mousetrap. I'm not going to even touch Earl's politics, but I like to think that this episode sort of explained his moral ambiguity. With such a wishy-washy mom and a blowhard dad, how is a kid supposed to learn right from wrong? Mayor Park's ads had a point. What did Carl Hickey do to prevent his sons from continuing their life of petty crime? Of course, I'm biased, and I think Carl doesn't even deserve to have his son work so hard for his forgiveness, but I did feel bad for Earl when he found out that even Catalina had been to the Hickeys' house for Sunday dinner. Loved the childhood flashbacks in which Earl was already wearing his signature plaid flannels. The best scene of the night, though, had to be that montage of everyone in town realizing how much they hated that airplane noise overhead. Panning upward as if showing apartments in a high-rise, it went from a strip joint, to a patch-eyed man playing pool, to a poodle humping the prosthetic leg of Earl's car-robbery victim, to Joy and Darnell enjoying a game of Mousetrap. Like last week's scene in which Earl spoke to the heartbroken Darnell in a plastic tunnel, it was a bit of cinematic artistry slipped in among the lowbrow comedy.