I remember seeing this episode of Recess on ABC, possibly when it first aired. I would have been about fifteen at the time, and while fourth grade was already several years behind me, it wasn’t exactly ancient history. I never cared much for Recess. There were some genuinely good episodes, and there are bits of the show that have remained stuck in my head for decades, but one episode stands out more than most: “The C-Note.” The setup is simple. T.J. finds an envelope containing a hundred-dollar bill. For elementary school kids in 2000, this might as well be a suitcase full of money. Split six ways, they would each get about $16.67, which is more than thirty bucks each in today’s money. Spinelli’s reaction sums up the magnitude of the discovery: “It’s an everloving C-Note!”
Naturally, everybody starts fantasizing about what they’re going to do with their newfound fortune. T.J. wants a rocket and a skyscraper, then figures he’ll use a jetpack to do his shopping. Spinelli invents some bizarre combination of wrestling and bowling and referees it from a jetpack. Gretchen cures every disease known to mankind and then surveys the world she saved from her jetpack. Mikey, surprisingly, has one of the more reasonable fantasies. He pays off his tab at the store and gives the shopkeeper a ride on his jetpack. Vince wants a yacht. He arrives on it by jetpack, naturally. Gus decides he’ll build an even better jetpack, only for the thing to go completely out of control. He gives up and decides he’ll buy stickers for his mother instead. The jetpack joke works. It’s stupid, but it’s supposed to be stupid. T.J. introduces the idea and everybody runs with it until it becomes increasingly ridiculous.
Then Mikey points out something obvious. Somebody lost the money.
That’s where the actual story begins. T.J. decides he’d feel bad spending somebody else’s money, so the gang starts trying to determine who lost it. This gives the episode an excuse to parade the usual background characters past the camera. The Diggers don’t care. A random girl keeps her money in her socks. Randall launches into his usual routine and claims the money is his. Mikey actually believes him for a moment. Principal Prickly acts as though losing $100 would mean firing his broker. Finster, amusingly, appears to have a massive wad of cash on her person.
Then there are the Ashleys.
They consider returning money practically un-American and try to lure T.J. into their absurd clubhouse. For some reason they have a candy spa and a forty-million-dollar candy bar (name, not worth) that is “twice as expensive as the other bars.” They convince T.J. that he’s rich now and should behave accordingly. For a few seconds, it actually works. Then they compare him to his old friends and he snaps out of it. As he leaves, they dismiss him as “nouveaux.” That line flew completely over my head when I was younger. “Nouveaux” refers to the newly rich, particularly people who have acquired money without acquiring the social status or manners associated with established wealth.
Eventually the gang exhausts its options. Vince reports “bupkis” on the bulletin board, which I swear sounded like “buttkiss” when I first heard it. Nobody has claimed the money, and at this point everybody is ready to spend it except T.J., who continues insisting that they should do the right thing. This is where the C-Note stops being a story about finding money and becomes a morality play.
They eventually trace the money to an extremely wealthy man named Thaddeus T. Third. T.J. goes to his house and returns it. Thaddeus accepts the money and sends him away without so much as a meaningful thank-you. T.J. is visibly disappointed, and so are his friends. After everything they went through, that’s it? T.J. nevertheless concludes that they did the right thing. That’s actually where the episode should have landed its moral. He returned money that he could easily have kept. Nobody would have known and he expected nothing in return. He did it because he decided it was right. Fine. Message received.
Then Thaddeus comes flying out of the sky on a jetpack.
It turns out he deliberately leaves envelopes containing money around town to see whether anyone will return them. Nobody ever does. T.J. and his friends are apparently the first, so Thaddeus decides they deserve something more substantial than a thank-you. He offers their families a trip to attractions he owns and, most importantly, offers the kids a ride on his jetpack. Everybody goes nuts. And then T.J. gives this smug, self-satisfied grin and says, “Now that sounds like the right thing to do.”
What the fuck?
That one delivery manages to sour what the entire episode spent building. T.J. had just demonstrated that doing the right thing mattered even when there wasn’t a reward. He had every reason to believe he’d been brushed off by some rich guy, and he still defended his decision. That was the character moment and lesson. Then the episode rewards him anyway and gives him a snot-nosed little expression that makes the line sound less like a joke and more like, “See? I was right, and I got rewarded for it. I deserve this.”
Maybe the intention was to bring the jetpack gag full circle, that’s clearly what the writers were going for. Everybody fantasized about jetpacks at the beginning, and after giving up the money they actually get one. Stupid. The problem is the delivery. Instead of T.J. simply getting excited with everybody else, he gets cocky with his own morals and the punchline. Suddenly “the right thing to do” means taking the cool reward. It undercuts the point the episode had just finished making. I mean, to be honest, T.J. starts to sound like a prick at this point. But that’s always been Recess for me. There are funny details scattered throughout this episode. Randall’s ridiculous behavior works, Finster is funny and the Ashleys are absurd
But the ending? T.J. spends the episode arguing that you should return something that doesn’t belong to you even if you get nothing in return. He proves that he means it, then the writers undermine his intent by rewarding him anyway… and then he congratulates himself like the fantasizing prick that he is. Could they not have made him look like trash in the last five seconds? I mean, the moral of the episode could stand, the ending and gag could have worked, but they just pissed it all away as the episode closes. After all that buildup, what a letdown. No wonder I can’t stand this show years later.
