For a long time I believed that Sandi Griffin’s tearful bonding with Quinn in “Fat Like Me” was undone by later developments in season five. Sandi doesn’t appear that season until the third episode, “Fat Like Me,” when she breaks her leg, becomes overweight, and falls into a depression from which she is rescued by Quinn’s coaching and support. “Oh, Quinn, I love you so much!” Sandi cries when she realizes Quinn is sticking with her. “Oh, Sandi, I love you, too!” cries Quinn, and they hug and you think things are going to be different for good, and indeed by the episode’s end, Sandi does seem more flexible in her leadership of the Fashion Club. Plus, she and Quinn do not bicker ever again. . . .. . . until the sixth episode, “Lucky Strike,” when a wicked spat erupts between them once more. Sandi attempts to hang Daria’s actual family relationship to Quinn over the latter’s head, but Quinn, to everyone’s amazement, announces that Daria really is her sister. Then Quinn reveals that she has a picture of Sandi wearing braces on her teeth in fifth grade, given to her by Sandi’s brothers. This revelation puts a chastened Sandi in her place. But why would Sandi do something so mean-spirited to begin with, and to the friend who saw her through that weight-gain crisis? It doesn’t make any sense at all unless you assume Sandi is just plain bad to the core. Was “Fat Like Me” a complete waste, then?
Amazingly, there might be a good explanation for this anomaly, and it comes from Glenn Eichler himself.
In the first interview conducted with Glenn Eichler by Kara Wild (March 2005, available on DVDaria), the out-of-sequence nature of the Season Five episodes is discussed. Ms. Wild asked, “Were the Season 5 episodes aired out of order? (Some fans have worked out a chronology and are convinced that ‘Fizz Ed’ and ‘Sappy Anniversary’ should have aired later in the season, to match up with events that occurred in ‘Dye! Dye! My Darling’ and ‘Is It Fall Yet?’, while ‘Prize Fighters’ should have aired earlier.)”
Mr. Eichler responded: “No, they were not. It might have made more sense to air them in the order you suggest, but they were aired in the order they were produced. I hope that gives you an indication as to how little planning of ‘season arcs’ there actually was.”
In other words, there was no chronological order to begin with. Fifth-season episodes were not meant to be perfectly sequential, and little “story arc” planning existed, period. I would guess writers wrote out their scripts without always consulting other writers about long-term changes they were making in the characters.
There are a few significant fifth-season arcs, I believe: Stacy’s increasing independence from Sandi’s rule, Quinn’s personal growth and acceptance of Daria, continuous bouts of turmoil between Daria and Tom, continuous bouts of angst for Daria as she re-examines her life and relationships. Mr. Eichler doesn’t dispute that, for storytelling purposes, airing episodes in a different order would have made more sense in the long run, but that wasn’t the primary concern at the time the show was being aired.
Richard Lobinske has pointed out that the fifth season and Is It College Yet? make more sense if they are assumed to overlap, and if some episodes are rearranged to improve chronological ordering. Given this and Mr. Eichler’s comments, a practical solution becomes obvious.
“Lucky Strike” makes complete sense if it occurred before “Fat Like Me” in actual story chronology. We see the very last of Sandi’s attacks on Quinn, with Sandi being outmaneuvered and stopped cold thanks to the unflattering photograph Quinn has in reserve. Quinn, however, is not hostile to Sandi and still regards her as a valuable friend, just a friend who needed a reality check to be a little nicer. “Fat Like Me” then follows.
In fact, in the other episodes of season five, Sandi gets along well with Quinn and even supports Quinn’s ideas. In “The Story of D,” “Art Burn,” “Life in the Past Lane,” “Aunt Nauseam,” and Is It College Yet?, the two appear to be in close if not perfect sync with each other. True, in “One J at a Time” Sandi helps Quinn get a permanent boyfriend only so that Sandi and the other two Fashion Clubbies can date everyone Quinn has been hogging for herself, but no permanent damage is done as a result. This sort of dating rivalry has gone on for years, and Sandi and Quinn take it in stride. It’s all a part of life in the Fashion Club: all for one and one for all, except where boys are concerned, then it’s the Darwinian every-girl-for-herself approach. (Tiffany once compared it to warfare.)
It’s also true that Sandi is quite nasty toward Stacy in many fifth-season stories (“The Story of D,” “Life in the Past Lane,” “Aunt Nauseam,” and most famously in
A few things from “Fat Like Me” still look odd to me, like how long Sandi had her broken leg and weight issues, and how long she had laryngitis in Is It College Yet? (It must have been a miserable year for Sandi.) However, the bonding of Sandi and Quinn is secure if you reshuffle the chronological order of the episodes a bit. “Lucky Strike” is the only anomaly in a whole year’s worth of good relations between the two queens of the Fashion Club.
Sandi did grow—not as much as Quinn, perhaps, but enough to be a better person. And, let’s face it, Stacy really is pretty annoying, so maybe Sandi had a point there. ‘Nuff said.
1 comment:
Here's another perspective:
the entire fashion club has been a portrait of female competitive syndrome from the beginning. Although Quinn and Sandi most certainly bonded over the weight loss, the tendency to compete -and the desire - doesn't fade altogether. While Sandi's never been a favorite character, the "bad to the core" view is more of a fan interpretation than I think what was intended with Sandi: were she not a cartoon, she'd just be another teenage girl scrabbling for her place in the vicious social order of the high school caste system.
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