Main cast: Maia Filar (Julia), Mpho Koaho (Marty), Karen Burthwright (Brooke), Kyle Downes (Brock), Alison Sealy-Smith (Julia’s Mom), Philip Akin (Julia’s Dad), and John Kassir (The Crypt Keeper)
Director: Rick Marshall

So Very Attractive is the creepiest episode of the entire series, because it tries to deal with a theme that is far older than the targeted audience, and the result is a kind of dissonance that can also be… well, let’s see:

• The Cryptkeeper squeals in the final bookend scene that he “never asked for a facial”. That’s not very subtle, is it?
• The protagonist Julia notices that the Cryptkeeper isn’t human in appearance and that his “store” is full of spiderwebs and other creepy motives, but she happily accepts his offering of facial cream — uh, I don’t know what to say — and rub it all over her face with abandon. No, that’s not a double entendre, although the entire episode sure feels like one.

Basically, Julia is pretty and she has a creepy simp of a BFF, Marty, that basically stalks her even to her home just to ply endless flattery at her. She doesn’t notice him because she’s too busy whining about how ugly she is and why the pretty mean girls in the neighborhood won’t accept her. 

Naturally, the moral guardians of TV Land can’t have a woman not being content with what and who she is, so the Cryptkeeper gives her a cream that makes everyone and everything attracted to her, even corpses in a graveyard. Weirdly enough, her parents seem immune to the effects, although given the nature of this show, that’s probably for the best and we should all be grateful.

As with every other freaking episode with a female protagonist, this one grates on the eardrums because for some reason, female characters need to have shrill, annoying voices that make my ear drums bleed in protest. 

On top of that, the entire morality of the episode is cracked. Instead of letting Julia make her mistake and learn from it, this episode as usual terrorize her into submission and into behaving. On top of that, she isn’t even ugly! They should have made her genuinely unattractive so that she comes off as someone with genuine issues instead of just some dumb whiny tart that gets disproportionately cowed and bullied into behaving like the grown-ups making this show think all kids should behave. 

Anyway, one more episode down in a crappy season, so one step closer to the end. Let’s go and get this over and done with!