- Bridgett, Cody?
How familiar are you with the 1980s hit,
Small Wonder?
- I know enough about it that it wasn't a hit.
(laughing)
But it's like a little robot girl.
- Yes, that's exactly right.
This is a show about a normal nuclear family,
except one of the kids in the family
was a robot that the dad had built
at his office and brought back home,
and raised as his daughter,
and everyone else,
no one else was in the know,
and it's impossible that they don't know,
cause she's constantly outing herself.
- Wait, does the family know?
- The family knows, yes. - Okay.
- And the way that she talks
is the way how you'd imagine an 8 year old
imagining a robot.
(robot voice) She talks like this a lot
(normal voice) and it's very monotone.
It's basically like a show that put back
our understanding of autism by like nine or 10 years.
- Oh no.
(laughing)
- Everybody who then saw a kid like this
was like, uh, that's a robot for sure.
- They're small wondering us.
- So I wanna talk to you about a specific episode
of this show called Woodward and Bernstein.
It's also called Girl on the Milk Carton.
They never, they wavered around the title,
they never really got one.
They never nailed it down.
(laughing)
That's what's so,
this is a fascinating episode.
The main plot of it is that the young boy in the family,
the robot's brother,
- Sure.
- He's trying to do a report for school,
and if you do the best journalism report,
you win an award.
- Ah. - Huh.
- And he and his buddy make up a story
about how there's like horse meat in the kitchen.
- Mm.
- And then they get in a lot of trouble for that,
and so now they gotta redeem themselves
and come up with a better story,
and the better story is the B plot of this,
which is a new girl comes to school,
this girl Krissy.
Turns out she's a missing kid.
- Oh no.
That is me.
Why am I on a milk carton?
- Also doesn't know she's missing.
- Yes.
- I'm gonna go and ask my dad about this!
- Okay, so. - Oh.
- She's moved to this town,
and she is a missing girl.
Her dad has clearly kidnapped her,
and taken her away,
and she has never questioned it,
like why she just left her mom,
or anything like that.
This then becomes the joke
throughout the rest of the episode,
where the boys discover this milk carton on the table,
and they're like, we need a story.
Too bad there's not one right under our noses.
And then they find out that this girl's a missing child
and instead of doing anything about it,
instead of bringing it to the attention of anybody,
they're like, this is our scoop.
- They want that A.
- [Soren] They write the story about this,
bring it to school thinking,
we're gonna get a sweet award for this.
- Oh no.
- And the principal comes up to them and says,
did you make this story up too,
is this like the horse meat situation?
They say no, no, no, it's real.
They call Krissy's family,
Krissy's dad gets spooked,
and takes off with her again.
- Oh my god.
- This is pretty much how the episode ends.
(laughing)
The only saving grace is at the very end --
- [Bridgette] Why is he getting a cake?
- Oh, because they got the award.
- Nice.
- And then dad made them a cake.
- Aw.
- But I feel so bad about Krissy.
- Yeah
- Yeah, there's a kidnapped child.
- You guys are gonna feel a lot better
when you bury your face in a big piece of that cake, huh?
- Really good point.
The dad is trying to make them feel better
about the whole situation
by saying you'll feel much better
by burying your face in this cake.
Forget about that little Krissy girl.
I know you had a huge crush on her
and also it's a really tragic situation
that she has with her family,
but forget about her.
And if you look at the time code here,
we're at now 20:46 of an episode
that's only 22 minutes long.
- They've got a lot of work to do.
- Right, and so here's how they decide to resolve it.
- Terrific news, everyone.
The police found Kristy and her father,
and she's going to be reunited with mom.
- So now everyone's pumped
and they're gonna eat cake.
That's not the end of that story
by any means.
She's reunited with her mother.
That means, I mean, this is a father
that she's always known as her father,
that she's loved,
that clearly she was living with for awhile
and took her away,
he's going to jail.
Like he's going to prison for this.
- Right, so her world has been torn apart twice.
- Torn asunder, and who knows what her mom is like?
I mean that relationship clearly is fractured,
in some capacity.
But it's way, way worse now,
and this girl belongs to the system now.
The episode is just like,
you know what?
It doesn't matter,
they're all eating cake here at the end,
they're gonna smush it on each other's faces
like this is their wedding.
Oh, he gets his face smashed by the robot.
- Cause the robot doesn't -- - Smash in the cake,
and then everyone --
- Everyone's laughing, except for the creepy robot child,
cause she has no emotion.
- And then credits roll.
It's a really dark episode
that no one in the show,
clearly at any stage realized that it was a dark episode.
I mean, the actors aren't playing it like that,
the writer didn't write it like that,
the director wasn't at any point like,
okay, we're gonna have to change the tone of this
a little --
- Yeah, like up the emotion a little bit.
- And that wasn't out of the question,
that there would be sitcoms back in that time
that would handle these things very seriously.
I think it was in response to other people
who were doing very special episodes
about missing kids,
and they were like, oh yeah,
we should probably do one of those.
They did a few rails of coke,
and then they were like, uh,
let's just crank out a script.
(laughing)
- I'm not like a big fan of Small Wonder,
I'm not -- - I am, go ahead.
- I don't binge Small Wonder.
I'm not a Wonderhead, thank you.
Does she do robot stuff in the episode
that affect the story,
is she like --
- All this exclusively is tangential.
There are a lot of episodes
where they're just like,
all right, well, we already did all the robot stuff,
so now let's just do some other things.
- So they took the robot out
to give it more weight.
(laughing)
- I love the early 80s idea
of what AI is.
- Yes.
- That Elon Musk is when he finally rolls out his robot,
it's just gonna be the Small Wonder girl.
That's what we were afraid of this whole time,
was just, an 8 year old.
- All our self driving cars are,
you actually, we don't realize
that you won't be able to sit in the driver's seat
because she'll be there.
- She'll be there looking at milk cartons
being like, is this you? - (robot voice) Is this you?