- Blendin Catering
- The surveillance van is labelled “Blendin Catering,” similar to the other surveillance vehicles. CONTEXT
- Bluth Banana Jail Bars
- Annyong is seen with some jail bars on top of his surveillance equipment. CONTEXT
- boom mike
- A boom mike is clearly visible after Bob Loblaw says the room might be wired with a listening device. CONTEXT
- clue
- When Michael says Rita’s not a man, G.O.B. responds “As far as you know”; perhaps referencing the scene in Notapusy where Rita leaves the men’s restroom. CONTEXT
- infomole
- George, Sr. searches for jetpants at InfoMole. The screen first shows the results of his search on “ankle monitor” and one of the sponsors is “Watch Arrested Development: All good people watch the best show on TV. Buy the DVD’s and Merchandise!” CONTEXT
- juice
- Buster has a juice box in the company conference room. CONTEXT
- Junk
- A poster for the Tom Jane movie is seen on the studio lot.
- Les cousins dangereux
- When Michael rips down George Michael’s “fun and failure” poster, a poster for Les cousins dangereux is revealed. CONTEXT
- Love, Indubitably
- According to the review “Love, In-don’t-itably A Limey Lemon”: “A surfeit of apologies, an onslaught of stammering, Tantamount Studio’s Love, Indubitably is the latest blunder in a long line of forced, derivative flops. And, although it’s consdiered a no-no in the film critic’s world to place films on any sort of quality continuum, this piece of faux-mannered drivel deserves to be singled-out as the worst movie that I have ever seen. In fact, Indubitably’s only success comes from the fact that Tantamount as officially killed the once-charming subgenre of the British romantic comedy. What was once a light-hearted, witty niche—Hey, I’m not ashamed to say I even enjoyed Pardon Me, I’ve Fallen In Love—is now a leaden, painful cliche and only the second coming of John Cleese can prove otherwise. Perhaps the best way to illustrate this reviewers’... desert. When Sir Trevor Sturbridge (Grant Hughes), our hunk p-p-protagononist [sic], falls backwards into a too-small (and why above-ground? Is this Reseda?) Jacuzzi with three perfectly nice lingerie-clad ladies, we are forced to listen to a full five minutes of his I’m- so-terribly-sophisticated- yet-unequipped- for-this- dreadfully-embrassing- moment shtick. It takes Trevor ten minutes to realize he’s ruined his Burberry suit and another eternity to even notice the gender of his chesty tubmates. Of course, we’re supposed to be laughing our charmed heads off the whole time because a British aristocrat is flopping around a hot Tobias: with half-naked women but, sadly this fish-out-of-water scene is lukewarm at best. Which leads us to the crux of why this film is so disappointing. Indubitably asks us to suspend our disbelief in one particular way. It wants us to think that modern British men... urges. Instead of creating stock characters that hide behind their social classes, why can’t Fünke and company show the darker side of British repression? I’d pay good money (12 bucks a pop at my local multi-... of tired romantic comedy set pieces. Each one feels less “witty” and the last, and each time we see actor Hughes go to his yammering well, we feel cheated. Perhaps most fiendish of all is his karaoke scene in... A comedy of manners that actually creates its own new brand of obscenity, Indubitably is a colossal failure. Please stay at home and rent anything with Mey Ryan in it because when it comes to romantic comedies, my recommendation is that you stay on this side of the pond for a while. And for now, we’ll keep spelling Fünkes name with an F. F” CONTEXT
- on the next Arrested Development
- “George, Sr., disoriented in the walls, almost makes contact with a new mole—not that one... wait for it—and Michael and Rita start a new life together.”
- Pretty Woman
- The scene with Trevor snapping the lid shut and Rita giggling is an homage to Pretty Woman. CONTEXT
- pun
- George, Sr. discovers a way to “possibly slip by the sensors” while the writers discover a way to slip by the censors? CONTEXT
- Scandalmakers
- Narrator refers to Scandalmakers poor narration, as first mentioned in Spring Breakout. CONTEXT
- Sudden Valley
- G.O.B. decorates the water tower for Tiny Town with a “Sudden Hill” logo.
- miscellany
- Alias, Astroboy, Ben Johnson, bird, couple of girls, factoid, Godzilla, Groundlings, Homeless Dad, ice cream, Jack Welch, jet pack, pro, Quicken, Tantamount Pictures, “I’m having the time of my life”
Jump to: References | Image Gallery | Quotes
- Broadcast 305
- Production 305
Originally broadcast
- November 7, 2005
Written by
Directed by
Appearances by
At work, Michael must deal with a huge mole problem in order to salvage a major real estate deal. But when G.O.B. and Buster team up with George, Sr.’s surrogate, Larry, to help Michael save the deal, their plan falls apart in a big way. Meanwhile, Tobias mistakes a CIA agent for a CAA agent and inadvertently betrays the family, and Michael makes Rita a proposal she can’t refuse.
References
Image Gallery
Quotes
George Michael: A suit! Dad, it’s a Jack Welch!
Michael: I want you to look under the pants.
George Michael: Quicken! Premier! Dad, I hope you kept the receipt.
Michael: You want to return that?
George Michael: What? No, I want to deduct it.
Talk Room
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« Older posts#246 xfoo wrote on April 26, 2006:
I think the Rita "twist" wasn’t supposed to be a "look back over the old episodes once you know the twist to catch the hints" thing, it seems like it was supposed to be more of a "keep making obvious references until the viewer catches on" thing... More like the hints with Oscar being Buster’s father - they were obvious, and the writers did as many of them as possible.
maybe, but you can’t seperate thinking that they were obvious hints from you already knowing. eating a note, lingering on the space shuttle ride, going to the mens restroom, walking in little kiddie pools.. if you don’t know, the only thing these hints suggest is that rita is weird, or at least absent minded, which doesn’t make her unusual cause she’s an AD character. (however the note eating suggests spy). anyways, i have a non-biased sample to back it up: my friends didn’t see it coming.. they also don’t watch each episode at least 3 times and then discuss the minutiae on a web board. and one last point: even though i had some sort of foreknowledge, it was still speculative foreknowledge, and i didn’t know which way it was going to go with rita. she’s a spy, she’s an idiot, she’s something even more insane, i didn’t know till she ate the gold star. for all we know she could still be some sort of double or triple agent.
#247 Beamer wrote on April 27, 2006:
I was always fairly confident she would be mentally retarded. The retard hints ("I like to think they teach me," Wee Brain, etc.) always had so much more substance than the spy ones (zooming in on her hat?).
#248 xfoo wrote on April 29, 2006:
because you were looking for it. this seems to be going in circles, so i’ll try to lay it out as clearly as i feel like doing right now. so, here’s the timeline:
like a month or two before the airdate, tv guide or some other magazine publishes an article about charlize theron guest starring on AD. it says "charlize theron’s character has a huge twist and it will be controverisal. maybe too controversial" someone links it here, along with production or publicity photos or a trailer or something from the episode. we attempt to guess the twist. someone speculates that maybe she’s slow cause of her hats and how she’s dressed, etc.. there were some other theories put forward, but they were wrong.
the months pass and the episodes start airing. there’s clues in the episode that support slow - if you’re looking for them. normally, things like that are there so that when the twist is revealed, the weird little things add up. there’s no way it was supposed to be obvious because rita’s MRF status is set up as a closer/punchline. on anyone except us it wouldv’e been extremely funny. i know cause i’ve seen it happen. for some reason i was expecting a triple twist that would make the earth blow up so i didn’t know what to think, but i was leaning towards slow. for a second in mr f i thought she might actually be a spy.
wee brain is not a hint. it’s a meaningless coincidence without the foreknowledge/hindsight. so is the ’they teach me’ comment. it’s possible that these things might have tipped off someone who didn’t have foreknowledge, but we are a ruined sample, so we’ll never now. we could watch those episodes again, forgetting everything we know about them and taking pains to be extremely unobservant in an attempt to find out, but even if we pulled that off, our findings would still be worthless.
#249 Beamer wrote on April 29, 2006:
Just look at the amount of callbacks, self-references and in-jokes in Season 3. It’s obvious that it was aimed more at fans than casual viewers. The writers knew we’d be examining this (and it’s not like they hid the fact that she had a secret - they said so at the end of For British Eyes Only), and they knew that we’d pick up on things like Wee Brain, "I like to think they teach me," etc.
If you compare the "Rita is retarded" hints with the "Light treason" hints from Season 1, or the "Buster will lose his hand" hints from Season 2, you’ll see that they were a LOT less subtle. They never really tried to keep it in the background, and they were copious in amount. The number of Rita hints in her FIRST episode far surpassed the number of treason/seal hints from previous seasons in total. I honestly don’t think the writers were trying to keep it that secret - maybe from the occassional viewers, but they were certainly cluing the fans in too much for it to be a surprise to us in the end.
#250 Musty Old Claptrap wrote on April 29, 2006:
Does it really matter who picked it and who didn’t? It’s hardly important.
#251 xfoo wrote on April 29, 2006:
that’s not the... well whatever, i cede the point to beamer.
#252 Musty Old Claptrap wrote on April 29, 2006:
It clearly IS the point. Who cares who’s right or wrong, let’s just enjoy the show now that it’s gone.
#253 vcalzone wrote on April 29, 2006:
There’s something else that you have to keep in mind. Mitch has said on numerous occasions that FOX told him to dumb down the show. Perhaps part of that effort was to make the Rita clues much LESS subtle. To not really work to hide things too much in the background anymore, and make it really easy to notice on even just one repeat viewing.
#254 Chelpo wrote on April 30, 2006:
^That’s true. But also it would be incredibly difficult for the writers to get the right balance between making it subtle and making it believable. If they made it too subtle, it would be really hard to buy it when we found out the secret. You wouldn’t want to look back and say, "I still don’t see it." It’s usually pretty obvious when someone’s mentally challenged, plastic surgery or no, and I think they succeeded at making it believable both that she was disabled and that Michael wouldn’t notice. I knew right from the beginning, but it’s hard for me to judge whether it’s because I read it here and was looking for it or if I would’ve bought into the spy thing had I not been reading people’s theories.
#255 Nicholas Angel wrote on June 06, 2007:
Pure-f**king-awesomeness, that’s all I can say about this episode.
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