The Valentine’s Day episode should be 30 Rock’s true metier: The pathologically desperate Jenna and Liz, the dashing playboy Jack — the show’s basically one big cat-lady joke. (We’re not a chick, and even we can feel our biological clock ticking while watching.) This episode, however, fell back on actual cat-lady jokes. And our main characters felt about as rote as a Valentine’s Day dinner out. Sure, Jack has his own problems. This week he half-falls for a very hot business-network anchor who just wanted a lay. But we’d rather see her return — Jack’s got more chemistry with her than any of his other random paramours to date — than have a point halfheartedly made about the troubles theoretically shared by men. Also, her show’s called Hot Box. That pun (assuming it’s not a reference to filling a car with weed smoke) will get us every time, we just know it.
Maybe our lady parts are just feeling a little tender because of Frank’s service-worker fetish. (Ew, he wants a “cleaning ladyâ€?! How amusing!) But Liz had one of the worst story lines in recent memory, as she tried to find someone to pick her up after a planned V-Day root canal. (Hey, look, the janitor wouldn’t do it! She got turned down by a janitor! Also, is it overly P.C. of us to find it a little bothersome that all three nurses had to be black Jamaican ladies?) The Liz laughs? “Maxim’s I’d Rape That 100,†and the contract from the dentist’s reading “I, the alone … †Things get a little more complicated with Jenna, whose plot about being spurned by her stalker was wonderfully nutty, but also sad in a real way, given that just a few eps back she was feeling proud to play a mother. See video of the very best, and really rather disturbing, part of that story below. In the meantime, we leave you with: “Someday we’ll live in a world where you ask us to be scientists.â€