I don’t think I’ll ever “beware” of a dog named Twinkie. Directed by Ron Underwood, this is his first of only two outings as Ugly Betty director. Underwood previously directed for Boston Legal, Monk, Desperate Housewives, Reaper, Heroes, most recently Elsbeth, and of course, the 1990 Kevin Bacon-led film, Tremors. It is also the first outing (of two) for our writer, Dawn deKeyser, and I could honestly give every one of her credits; you’d still never know who she is. Unless you watched every episode of the Dave Foley, Stephen Root, Andy Dick, and Joe Rogan-led comedy, NewsRadio, from 1995.

With Bradford’s man-splooge in a container in Wilhelmina’s freezer, she and her flying monkey are prepping Wilhelmina Slater to have a baby with a dead man. There isn’t a more succinct and direct way of explaining that story if we’re entirely honest with ourselves. Meanwhile, the magazine is prepping for the big event of the year, Fashion Week. Skeletons are everywhere, wearing similar outfits that no one will ever wear because high-fashion is expensive, and everyone’s perception of a woman’s healthy body shrinks once again. Including the young women of Justin’s school, whom Betty will single-handedly set out to change that perception. See, do good from within.

Now that Alexis has been established as Meade Publications president, we can look forward to the siblings fighting time and time again. This time, about Alexis establishing a stable position as the boss and Daniel going behind her and Betty’s back to get Betty’s plus-sized fashion show off the ground. Meanwhile, Marc is around Mode again, meeting up with his beard and a psychic, as Henry tells Christina that her health insurance won’t cover Stuart as well. All while the wicked witch of the Upper East Side is never promised that her rose garden will be fertile… if you catch my drift.

Let’s talk about the Wilhelmina stuff first, because then I’m giving my editor less of a headache by dragging it out. As established last time out, the rather stiff (indeed) Bradford was being prepped for post-mortem removal of liquids, typically called cavity aspiration, I believe. Apparently, this is a real thing, also typically called Posthumous Sperm Retrieval, and they don’t just tug a dead man until it happens, as funny as that image is. To make it less appealing and less funny, the IDF is noted to be doing it to 170 young men in the year following October 2023 – very much a real, and still a creepy thing to do.

This time Willy goes to the not-Willy doctor – the ham doctor, one might say. Dr Weiss, played by Rob Brownstein, tells the woman that Marc has been injecting with hormones that she has a hostile womb. Better you than me son. I’d rather wipe myself clean with a nail file than tell a woman high on hormones that she’s unlikely to squeeze out another kid. That’s unless you prefer your kid-producing bits to be mulched by a hammer. So, of course, there is only one option. Get a pornstar to be your surrogate.

We’ll come back to that. As Willy is told she’s barren, Betty is showing her former teacher and Justin’s classmates around Mode as the magazine preps for Fashion Week. Has anyone else seen a small, obscure film called Mean Girls? Yeah, I don’t think anyone popular was in that, either. Anyway, the class is effectively run by a young woman called Lindsay, played by Elizabeth McLaughlin, who is the Regina George without the proper sense of style. A pink puffer vest, that dark purple and gray V-neck top, the blue scarf with the matching bag, and the really pinkish-red lip? How 2007.

The whole point of this is to show that one person has power over the rest of the little ones in class, and after seeing the models, you have these 12-14-year-old women saying, “Yeah, I’m too fat, I’m going to skip lunch.” If extracting man-liquid from a dead man doesn’t make you physically sick, then the idea of young women having an unhealthy body image from such a young age should. I can’t express how horrible that scene feels, especially since this was before the boom in social media.

Seeing this, Betty gets the bright idea: She’s the assistant to the EIC of the very magazine putting these sheets of A4 paper in dresses and prancing them about, so ask him to be the change. Surprisingly, he agrees, kinda. Daniel runs to Alexis and asks for this change to the models booked, to which she refuses, and we’re back to square one. The kids are fighting, and Wilhelmina is looking to give them another sibling to fight over. Well, you know another after the other one, but we’ll get to that soon enough.

Look, I’m not going to say “you shouldn’t make Alexis the villain, she’s trans, she’s already villainized by some.” You can have a trans woman being a villain, but you can’t have her being a villain because of that, and here she isn’t. She’s more so, fighting this idea that she’s going to give Daniel preferential treatment to some degree, and establishes herself as the boss by refusing this. Then we get the scene with the wrestling scales.

Holding a press conference in the boardroom, there is a massive set of scales in the center of the room with pin-thin models being paraded onto the scales with all the pomp and circumstance of “wow, she’s 120 lbs.” No, she’s thinner than the 0.96 mm guitar picks on my desk; there is no way someone thinner than two-ply toilet paper weighs that much. Of course, the models don’t; the scales have been rigged to add 20lbs (and what about the rest), which Betty and Justin find out rather quickly.

While I won’t argue that Alexis is the villain, I do think it is good that we get her set up as such in this way. Of course, the assumption is that Alexis is the one to rig the scales, and as Betty calls Daniel from the bathroom, she also confronts Alexis. The point being Betty’s line: “You know, we’re not that different. We both grew up not liking what we saw in the mirror. I thought out of everyone, you might understand. I know your brother gets it.” This shows, despite all the snide remarks, there is some understanding of being trans within the characters and writers.

Better still, Alexis points out that she isn’t the villain that she’s made out to be. In fact, it is Betty’s hero, Daniel, who suggested the rigged scales. As I said about three to four months ago when writing these, Daniel does make a lot of progress as a character, but he also takes almost as many steps backwards. Thankfully, we’ve got the likes of Betty holding him accountable.

Meanwhile, as this and Wilhelmina’s adventures go on, Amanda is still looking for Daddy. With Marc’s help, he finds a psychic to help Amanda, and she offers: “You’re going to rescue a Black dog, then follow a B and it will lead you to a kiss.” That’s about as cryptic as Rockstar with its alien missions. Anyway, this is the episode where lil’ Bow Wow isn’t so little anymore and gets stuck in an elevator with Betty. Could it be a Black “dog” and a B making love in an elevator? Oh, wait, they didn’t do that one.

Jokes aside, in the sex dungeon, Amanda and Betty have a moment, effectively bonding over the fact that both of them have lost their mother; Betty’s to cancer, Amanda’s to Claire Meade acting like Big Liz II. I said no jokes. The point is, Betty gives Amanda that moment of “No, I still think about her every day.” After a moment of heart and warmth, we get it, we get Betty handing Amanda the photo of someone you could say has a lot of tongue action. Indeed, KISS bassist and singer, Gene Simmons, because I guess Burt Reynolds was too expensive.

Shall we go back to the spunk story? After Willy is told she could have someone stick their willy up her and she won’t carry a pregnancy to term, Wilhelmina looks at her sad and bland pedicurist, who’s had five kids. Jesus, woman, how low is the rent up there? Well, it is decided there, and then, as this woman scrubs Wilhelmina’s feet, she’ll become the surrogate.

As established above, Christina’s insurance at Mode won’t also cover Stuart to the point where his experimental treatment will be covered. So, with the help of the flying gay monkey and a mannequin’s arm she threw moments before, Marc comforts Christina in the closet. This was before Marc and Cliff went to the video rental shop to get a film to watch. Now, children, before Netflix was on your TV, they would send out these round things with the films and shows on them called DVDs and square boxes called VHS. Yes, those things from Stranger Things.

Though I think in this shop it would be called Strangle Things. Now that some of us feel older than Jesus’ first pair of sandals, neither Marc nor Cliff can pick a normal film to watch. So they go behind the curtain to look at Strangle Things, Game of Whores, Breaking Backs, and of course, Broke Back Mountain. “Good news, if she can do that with a ping-pong ball, it’ll make for an easy delivery.” It turns out that Mistress Brandy enjoys whips, chains, and maybe smashing some testicles with a hammer too. Really Cliff, a ping-pong ball? Heads are a bit bigger than that.

With the news out that the pedicurist does what I said about “Something Wicked This Way Comes” and sounds files down some men’s hole, Wilhelmina thinks better than to have this woman carry her devil spawn. Luckily, her flying monkey has been around her former workplace and found someone just as desperate for money. To which I am just going to take an aside, don’t call someone who’s Scottish “Scotch,” I’ll personally swing a chair at you as The Rock does at Ken Shamrock that one time.

It should probably also be noted, with the tenuous link, that this was one of the episodes affected by the 2007-08 WGA Strike. In the US, two more episodes would still be released without question in January, but in the UK, “Zero Worship” was held until September 2008, and the prior episode of “Bananas for Betty” was aired in December 2007. Originally, the season was scheduled for 20+ episodes, but given the state of production between November ‘07 and February ‘08, that drops us to 18 episodes this season and the shortest of Ugly Betty’s 4-season run.

After seeing a small child version of Betty in an oversized T-shirt after she confronts Daniel about the scales, he comes to the house to offer a peace offering. A “Full Fat” plus-sized/real women fashion show behind Alexis’ back. Small group, secret production, another special guest, and Henry wanting the codename “Black Dragon;” Son, if you want so badly to be called Bad Dragon, you’re going to need to be spicier than beige paint. With Justin’s little friends invited and Daniel hijacking the normal Mode show, Bow Wow and Omarion of B2K show up with music that Black Dragon believes will lower the property value of the neighborhood.

The clothes aren’t really the focus here. As far as I know, they aren’t proper designs because of course not, but rather the focus is the tall Black woman, the curvy brunette, the older White woman, the slightly lesser older White woman, the curvy Black/Brown women, Betty’s teacher played by Carol Ann Susi, and of course the star model, Betty Suarez. With a good portion of the tent actually being receptive to more normal/plus-sized models, something that was gaining traction following shows by Jean Paul Gaultier and John Galliano back in 2006.

Not that it was becoming a standard. Betty’s thing to Daniel at the end is very much about cover models that are plus-sized, something that wouldn’t happen to Vogue until January and March of 2017. So with that in mind, you have the little ones led by Lindsay saying they didn’t care too much about it because the models aren’t pin-thin. No, the episode isn’t outright addressing it, but knowing that we’re making reference to young women developing that unhealthy view and most likely eating disorders is heartbreaking. Not just because I know and have known people with them, but also because of their age.

I don’t think it will be referenced much again, but seeing that peer pressure on Juliette Goglia’s Hillary is horrible in all the ways it is supposed to be. Even if Hannah Marks’ Taylor is supposed to be the one to be honest that she liked the show, it is still difficult to say the storyline was fully capitalized on. It does the right things and isn’t overly preachy, but still has marks I feel that could have been hit.

As an episode, there are certainly things that wouldn’t fly the same way today as they did then. We’re skating a little too quickly over the young women developing unhealthy opinions of food and obsessions with being one type of body, which now could easily be a character’s whole season. Yet it also has some good amongst all the rough bits. I like that we get that grey area of “I’m not the villain here” from Alexis and how she’s trying to establish herself as the boss.

Ultimately, “Zero Worship” is one of the season’s highlights despite a couple of odd decisions. I’d have liked addressing the relationship with food a little more head-on, but we’ve also done that before. The true highlight of the episode, though, has to be a pull of focus onto Christina and Amanda’s respective stories. Two plot points to launch at least a couple of ships, metaphorically.

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Ugly Betty “Zero Worship”

7

Score

7.0/10

Pros

• Cementing the idea of normal models.
• Showcasing that relationship with food.
• Highlighting that, no, Alexis isn't the villain.

Cons

• More could have been done about the teen eating disorder storyline.