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Original Air Date: November 24, 1985 Review completed January 1, 2007 "The Gift" The new school janitor, Linda, is a sweet, dedicated worker who happens to be mentally retarded. While Mike admires her spirit and Punky muses about how unfair it all is, Linda's worried that she'll lose her job after Allan calls her out in class for miming along with a violin solo. Mike works to correct Allan's attitude, while Punky re-assures Linda that she isn't going to be fired for one incident. The next day, Mike is setting up some musical instruments for a lesson when a conversation with Linda reveals that she may have a greater gift than even she realizes. That day, Mike brings in a person to play a violin solo... it's Linda, who plays for the class the solo from the previous day, which she's only heard by ear. One point that actually did bring me to pause and start writing was the part when Linda is playing the spray bottle along with the violin solo. Allan's reaction didn't really shock me; kids can be cruel, it's a fact of life. But Punky's reaction sure did. If the rest of the class were that shocked by Allan's japes, then why did none of them comment? If the rest of the class doesn't care, why do they stay so reverently silent while Punky spells things out at him? I wrote, a long while back, an article about how the episodes in Season 2 cast Punky more as a superhero figure than as a little girl with a strong moral sense. Well, that came back to me as I was talking with my sister, who had wandered into my viewing of this episode and sat and watched for a bit. She wasn't exactly eating this episode up either, and as things came down to around this part, I was expressing my displeasure about writing for it. She came back with a line about Punky seeming really weird at this part. "Like a superhero or something?" I tried. She agreeed. Looks like it's not just me. The other major thing I didn't like about this episode was the sequence of events leading to the ending. I couldn't put my finger on why until I tried to type out the summary, and that's when it hit me: It has nothing to do with the rest of the episode! That's nice how Linda has such a musical gift, and I fully realize that even with that gift, she'd have to work for a lot of years to be able to play like that. Too bad the episode doesn't do much to give us that information, though. If you take it just by what's on the screen, it makes Linda look like she's doing it all unconsciously, like she doesn't really know what she has at all. Wouldn't it be a much stronger story, and a greater contrast, if it had been showed that her ear for music had helped her to get to that point, but that it still took years of likely frustrating effort to be standing up there to play? The one other criticism I can think of is that a few more lighter moments could have done a lot to break up the story into digestible chunks. Mike trying frantically to put a stop to an out-of-control "performance" by Punky, Cherie, and Margaux gave me a chuckle, and Linda got in a good one at the beginning about the irony of working for a school that had denied her entry as a child, but that's about it. The rest is stone-faced moral, which is just too much. It goes down like a rock in soup. Thus ends probably the shortest review in Treehouse history; feel glad for that, because the blow-by-blow notes were pretty awful. Besides, for what I want to say, it's the right length. The next episode features a really young Candace Cameron and enough goofy logic to drown a cow, so if you want longer, wait 'til next week. For "The Gift", I'm finished. It's unremarkable, it's imbalanced; it's over. - Jimmy Vibes |