At the top of the episode, Sarah chirps that she gets up at 4 a.m. during Alaska's nightless summers. When she's finished greeting the day with a literal wave, she starts on the difficult Alaskan business of going to a shooting range. She brings Todd with, and Bristol -- because who better to shoot skeet with than a humorless abstinence coach? Like the Inuit saying goes.
After Sarah, Todd, and Bristol set up on the shooting range, Sarah unleashes the following anecdote:
"My girlfriends threw my baby shower here," she says. "I love to share that story because it gets the liberals all wee-wee'd up."
Now, I'm liberal, but I personally wouldn't know if I were wee-wee'd up. Maybe that's the sneaky genius of Sarah Palin. I think I'm just annoyed with her, but she's actually cranking up my wee-wee meter like a dastardly Aleutian buccaneer. I'm none the wiserRRrr.
Anyway, Sarah and Todd prove themselves to be expert marksmen. There goes one clay pigeon! And two! And three! It's like when you discover your friends' parents are still really good at Duck Hunt -- always unnerving. Now, Bristol's not up on her NES motor skills, so she misses her first few discs. Fear not, here's Sarah with an adage.
"Don't retreat," she says, reloading Bristol's gun. "Just reload."
Yep. Pimping out the old catchphrases like Jimmie "J.J." Walker. She'll make a hell of a Hollywood Squares panelist some day on a TLC revamp hosted by Ty Pennington. Mark my words. Or the next POTUS.
(By the way, Bristol finally hit a clay pigeon. Unfortunately, she's never visibly excited or happy or un-lethargic, so there's no need to embellish her triumph. We obviously have Dancing with the Stars for that. Onward.)
Next day, Sarah packs up most of her family for a major RV trip to Homer, Alaska, the halibut capital of the world.
"We're headin' down there just for the halibut," Sarah tells us, before looking to a producer off-camera. "See, Alaskans know that joke. I don't know if everyone will."
Yep again. That's as bad as TLC's smear campaign editing will get today, but who knows, maybe next week they'll show her teaching Willow Palin homophobic slurs and lewd flyfishing metaphors for the halibut.
(By the way, let's forgive Willow Palin's homophobia. The only gay person she knows is the one mounted in the den. Ruhspect.)
Upon arriving at Homer, Sarah says she can tell her 9-year-old daughter Piper is becoming an ornery child. Worse yet, she says fame is really wearing on Bristol. This trip will be good for the both of them, she claims. It'll add some color to the early chapters of their ghostwritten autobiographies Just a Piper Dream and That's So Bristol. That I know. The troop soon encounters some fisherman who take them aboard a boat and tell them to beat the hell out of any halibut that fly on deck.
And also, Sarah decides to tell everyone lessons.
"Todd, your lesson is 'This is the first day of the rest of your lives," she says. "Willow, yours is 'The sun will come out tomorrow.' And Bristol, yours is 'There are plenty of fish in the sea.'"
Don't ask why Sarah just became a fleshy fortune cookie oracle. Soon she'll look into the future and proclaim that the world is in for "achieving goals." Anyway, back to bludgeoning alive things.
"When they land on deck, help bop 'em right between the eyes," Captain Dan says to Bristol.
For some reason Bristol is reserved at first. Sarah helps by taking the billy club from her hands and whacking the first halibut like a genius slapstick vet. Bristol handles the next one pretty well, throttling the flopping fish with elan. She's still Shemp compared to Sarah's Mo Howard, but good on her.
"I was proud of Bristol!" Sarah proclaims. "She got that billy club and she started stunnin' those fish! I was lookin' at her out the corner of my eye and thinking, 'Wonder what she's picturing as she's makin' her mark there on those fish?'"
There will be no anti-Levi rhetoric in this post, so you can interpret Sarah's comment on some blog where that hateful behavior is tolerated. Let's get back to more loving actions: Bristol grabs a halibut's beating heart and trembles with power when it starts to throb in her hand. Not kidding.
Todd tries to divert us from her hyperventilation with a quick note about sea otters. "They roll in the water to trap air bubbles in their fur!" he says. But it's too late: Bristol has rubbed the bleeding heart on her face, chest, and convulsing limbs, and now she's tonguing the halibut's eye sockets to feel their lifeless pupils tickle her gums, epoxying her lips together in a ripe slime.
Fine, I was kidding that time. But she does like squeezing bleeding hearts, sort of.
After a quick clam-digging adventure, the episode closes as Sarah and Todd cook some clams and compete to see who can fry 'em better. Todd beats Sarah, but she finds some kind words to say about him.
"He's my helpmate," she says. "He's the best common sense adviser I could ever ask for."
Not that she's accepting applications, guys. Settle down.