After losing a week of their summer vacation due to missing school, the kids go on a riot and are sent to a new boarding school to get straightened out. Alison loses touch with her beliefs when she cozies up to the headmaster, unaware that it's Nurse Sonja seeking revenge. The teens go on vacation and argue over where they should go.
Plot[]
Prologue[]
A flashback to Ms. Chapley's class several years ago is shown. Ms. Chapley is giving her final word to the students but is struggling to remember something she wanted to tell the students. One of the students ask Ms. Chapley if they could do a countdown and it somehow helps Ms. Chapley remember that she wanted to give the students a long worksheet that'd count for a substantial amount of their grade, to the ire of the rest of the class who throw things at the students.
Episode[]
Ms. Chapley's class talks amongst themselves over what they're going to do for the summer. Ms. Chapley comes in and class begins. At the end of the day, as the students head out of class to begin their break, Ms. Chapley tells them that they need to be in school for another week to make up for missed days. The students go against it because a flash flood occurred around that time and they couldn't be in school if they wanted to, but are rebuffed. Cosmo tries to cheer them up by showing them a movie, but it doesn't work. Fed up, Alison rallies the students together and convinces them to riot the next day.
Meanwhile, the teens prepare for an annual road trip, but are skeptical over the vehicle Abe got. Wearing out any other options, they reluctantly agree to ride in it, but are unsure of where they want to go. Through the help of Julie, they decide to follow a police chase in the hopes of finding something exciting, but are led down an overly long highway. The next day, the kids begin their riot by hogtying Ms. Chapley and having Cosmo sent down a waterslide. Per his revenge, he decides to send the kids to Moralington Academy for the whole summer in an attempt to straighten them out.
Alison vows to get them home, but is rebuffed by the kids who appropriately blame her for having them sent to the academy in the first place Without any support, Alison finds solace in the academy's headmaster who convinces her to command the kids and punish them for what happened. Alison is assigned as the kids' counselor and immediately gives them a strict set of rules and orders to attend a rigorous series of exercises come morning. Colleen tries to keep the kids morale up, but the fact that Alison confiscated stuff that made them happy and realizing that the academy they're in is barely on the map causes her pleas to fall on def ears.
The kids' are worked to death the next day, deprived of food and driven to the point of exhaustion. They decide to take a break and go swimming in a nearby lake but Alison catches and reprimands them, but having enough of what they went through the last few hours stand up to her. Alison threatens to punish them but is flung up by a rope that laces to her ankles and is dropped into the lake. The kids deny having any involvement in the trick but Alison refuses to believe them and seeks to find the one behind it.
The next day, the kids learn that Clifford is gone. Colleen gets into an argument with Victor after he admitted to pulling the prank on Alison but is distracted when shooing away a chimpanzee. Both discover that it's wearing Clifford's wristband and they conclude that Alison took him and turned him into a chimpanzee as a punishment. It's soon revealed though that Clifford merely managed to find a way out and strolls alone on the highway, where the teens pass him due to Abe wanting to focus on finding a vacation spot.
Colleen has a nightmare dealing with what she believes to be the means of Clifford "turning into a chimpanzee" but is immediately awoken from it by an irate Alison who orders the kids to harvest a group of runaway apes. Believing them to be victims of the headmaster, spurred by Suzy misinterpreting Dolly's description of the apes' sign-language, Colleen convinces the kids to keep the apes hidden. They hide them in a storage area, but they find a way out and begin tearing up the academy.
Alison learns of this and plans to punish the kids, but believing it to be her turning them into apes, defy and attack her. Alison retreats to the headmaster, where she learns that it's actually Nurse Sonja who successfully groomed her and is planning to destroy the kids using a missile she constructed while she was unemployed, converting a testing range into a decoy academy to ensure they came to it. Refusing to concede, Alison gets into a physical fight with her and accidentally activates the missile, which promptly vaporizes the kids and all outside life. Alison gets the upper hand and knocks Sonja down a flight of stairs and causes her upper body to fall into a furnace. Alison loses conscious, having had multiple blows to her head and faints.
Upon waking up and coming to grips with the manslaughter she committed, she discovers the outside was vaporized and concludes that her friends are dead. In an attempt to keep her sanity intact, Alison decides to do things she never got to do now that she's alone, but she is soon confronted by her friends who survived, but were mutated in the blast. They seek to kill her and claim the Earth from moralistic people and Alison runs away, later coming across the teens who give her a ride back to Belbury where she confronts Cosmo. Cosmo claims that the entire plan was headlined by Ms. Chapley in an attempt to teach them a hard lesson regarding their riot, and that he was only along for the ride to get back at Clifford and Tiberius for throwing him down the waterslide. Alison and Ms. Chapley get into a fight, which gets shortened when the mutant children arrive. Cosmo takes Alison's side and offers to help by subjecting them to a cure previously created to combat a similar series of mutations by the Perrinos (it was intended to be shot off like fireworks after school ended.) Ms. Chapley refuses to allow Cosmo to go through with the plan, intending for Alison to suffer for what she did before to teach her a lesson, leading to an argument and Ms. Chapley ultimately conceding.
After the cure works, the kids see Ms. Chapley muling over how the kids practically got away with what they did without any longterm ramifications. The kids apologize to her, but are unable to get fully forgiven due to the extent of their damage. The kids also offer to spend the remainder of the week in class, but Ms. Chapley admits to an oversight that she didn't have any lesson plan for those weeks and that she isn't liable for having them in class. They manage to make her feel better after giving her "Clifford", but she collapses before they could determine if their gesture worked. The kids leave and mull over the loss of Clifford, but ultimately agree that his untimely demise indirectly saved them. The real Clifford soon arrives to the disbelief of the others, and it's dropped when they all decide to get something to eat.
It then goes to the apes, who're revealed to be on a mission for world domination. They intend to abort their mission due to believing that the humans aren't worth the struggle of dealing with and move their focus to taking over a remote area to live and plot in peace, but are driven away from that when the apes drive into the area, seeking fast food and are already morbidly obese from eating at previous places. The episode ends with them struggling to vote in favor of not eating for the rest of the day.
Cast[]
- Mae Whitman: Alison
- Melissa Fahn: Colleen
- Jenn Forgie: Julie
- Ian James Corlett: Jerry
- Carrie Finlay: Jenny
- Peter Kelamis: Sparky
- David Paul Grove: Brighton
- Brit Irvin: Emily
- Lisa Ng: Becky
- Julie Lemieux: Sam
- Antoinette Spolar: Francis
- Tara Sands: Ruth, Anita
- Amber Hood: Ashley
- Sandy Fox: Fiona
- Dexter Bell: Leland
- Richard Ian Cox: Randall
- Tony Sampson: Dante
- Alyson Court: Angela
- Tabitha St. Germain: Georgina, Mandy
- Erin Fitzgerald: Phoebe, Alanis
- Daniel DeSanto: Tiberius
- Steven Crowder: Tommy
- Sarah Gadon: Marie
- Chantal Strand: Elizabeth
- Ashley Taylor: Dolly
- Chiara Zanni: Suzy
- Janyse Jaud: Selma, Mercury
- Trevor Devall: Clifford
- Nika Futterman: Sally
- Peter Oldring: Larry, Victor
- Oliva Hack: Jupiter
- Tracey Moore: Bernadette
- Roger Dunn: Cosmo
- Hiro Kanagawa: Ned
- Howard Jerome: Bob
- Tony Rosato: Lars
- Linda Kash: Enid
- Kelly Sheridan: Stephy
- Stacey DePass: Nicole
- Rachel Wilson: Britney
- Carly McKillip: Rachel
- Katie Griffin: Jen
- Megan Fahlenbock: Day
- Tara Spencer-Nairn: Tyne
- Lenore Zann: Meda
- Dan Petronijevic: Seth
- Yannick Bisson: Malcolm
- Chuck Campbell: Abe
- Michael Eklund: Other Damien
- Jayne Eastwood: Nurse Sonja
- Amy Drain: Bex
Trivia[]
- This episode features the most actors, 51 in total.
- Bex the shark girl was actually a fan character submission and is voiced by its sender, Amy Drain from Milwaukee Wisconsin.
- First episode where a character actually dies. In its first airing the death is clearly shown, but later prints cut the scene in half.
- Elliot Strange wanted to make the antagonist a character played by Robert Wisden, but he couldn't locate the actor in time.
- Had Strange got to him, the episode would've been radically different, where Wisden's character would be a man who's obsessed with morality tales and the kids attempt to defeat him with it.
References[]
- The Burbs: When Colleen and Victor discover a chimpanzee they believe to be Clifford. Also when Colleen angrily crushes two cans of soda and a nightmare sequence.
- Planes, Trains and Automobiles: A brief instance when Cosmo is sent down the waterslide.
- The Omega Man: Certain elements.
- Lancelot Link: Secret Chimp: Certain elements.
- The game of Perfection: The fundamental portions of Perfection are referenced in an auditorium where Cosmo apprehends the kids.