We open Sapphire telling George how their bank account is down to just $2 and she asks how they are going to pay their bills. His response, "Don't worry about that until the bill collectors come after us." There's good financial planning.
A knock at the door and George sees it's the landlord, seeking the four months rent he owes. After a silly bit where he catches George sneaking out the door, he tells him if he doesn't get his rent in 3 days, they'll be evicted.
A newspaper ad gets Kingfish (I call him George when he's nice with Sapphire, Kingfish when he's scheming) into action as he reads that an employment agency sending men to work for an oil company operating in Arabia will receive $200. He learns that as soon as the man he sends gets on the boat, he will get his $200. Knowing that Andy was a welder in the war, he schemes up a way to get him to sign the necessary paper to get the money.
The scheme presents the absolute dumbest scene in this series up-and-down history. We see Andy come into George's room at the lodge, where he has a big barrel, the kind used for big raffles, and he tells Andy about the sign proclaiming a trip to Arabia, how it's a great vacation place. He goes so far as to tell him the drawing is in 3 minutes and it so happens that he only has one ticket left. Andy says he'd buy it but all his money is in the bank. As Andy is about to leave, Kingfish drops a dollar bill on the floor, so Andy can "find" it and spend it on the last ticket, which we hear is number 444.
Kingfish tells him he has to stand away and cover his eyes while he puts the ticket in the machine. He was to draw out the winning ticket to make Andy the winner (with all the other "ticket" numbers in the bin fakes, of course. Here the Kingfish is an idiot. Instead of just pretending-when Andy wasn't looking-to put his stub into the machine, and draw out any ticket and switch it with Andy's, Kingfish goes to the trouble of tying Andy's stub to a piece of string and puts it in the machine. He spins it around, causing the string Kingfish is holding, of course, to disconnect from the stub. He pulls out the string and is distressed to see it is loose.
He pulls out a number, lets Andy watch now, and of course, it's a different number. I don't know where he got all these fake stubs, but another simple way for him to do this drawing would have been to have a hundred stubs in the bin all with the same number-I've seen that done on other shows.
Instead, Kingfish declares that the rules say the winner must be in the room at the time of the drawing. Now these two men are in this little room with nobody else around. An Andy Brown half as smart as he is normally portrayed would quickly figure on hearing that rule, that there are only two possible winners. Instead, Kingfish calls out the number and even looks around, calling into the hallway and the bathroom-I guess, for the number. He proceeds to do this as he draws out stub after stub, as though someone will magically appear. When he finally gets Andy's number, the man has fallen asleep on the couch.
So Andy wins, and he doesn't care that his crooked friend uses both hands to cover a sheet of paper as he signs his name at the bottom. He buys all sorts of clothes for his pleasure cruise, although he is bothered when everyone else tells him that nobody goes to Arabia for a vacation because it's too hot.
He even swallow a dumb story about the country not being hot any more because they opened the Suez Canal at one end, and have the Polish Corridor at the other, so it's the first country in the world with "cross ventilation." Kingfish actually told him that.
After Amos tries to help, Andy calls Kingfish and tells him he wants to trade his ticket for some other destination. Kingfish tells him to come down to the lodge in an hour. When he does, Kingfish does little but tell him he'll come up with other destinations if he'll come back in a few hours. This is minor, but why did he have him come down there now, I ask.
The reason was to have him meet a woman, obviously hired by Kingfish, to pretend to be a passenger on the same ship, wanting to meet the winner of the raffle. She proceeds to tell Andy ridiculous lies about her native Arabia. She says when men get married, they get a huge sum of money from their fathers-in-law and never have to work. She says there are 10 women in Arabia for every man. So Andy is once again happy to be heading for Arabia. She even tells Andy that instead of telling him her name so he can find her on the ship, to just call out "Babalu." Who does she think he is, Ricky Ricardo? Dumb here as well.
He is only a little troubled when the ship is no luxury liner, and his "stateroom" that Kingfish leads him to is so cramped that when he lies down in bed, his feet kick right through the wall and into the hall. Only when an employee comes to check, and twice mentions "welding" does he decide to look at the papers he signed. He quickly tells Kingfish off and exits the boat.
Kingfish rushing behind him winds up running into a pipe and knocking himself out. Andy figures Kingfish is hiding, not knowing that he wound up being mistaken for Andy (the papers were left behind and Kingfish took them with him as he was chasing Andy-for reasons that defy description. The papers were only for the trip and Andy wasn't about to go now, I cannot figure out why Kingfish didn't leave them in the room when he was trying to go after Andy. So Kingfish is now doing the welding, and I guess, unseen, poor Sapphire has by now been evicted from their apartment, since nobody paid any rent.
Who in the world doesn't know how hot it is in Arabia? Andy Brown, that's who. He is so dumb in this one that he signed those papers not caring how his "friend" who often cheats him, kept him from seeing anything else on the paper.
But that whole raffle scene where they look about for someone else to claim they have the winning number just was mind-numbing stupid, including the way Kingfish made it much harder on himself by not just palming Andy's number and proclaiming it the winner right away.
I have equated this series before with elements of Green Acres and Mr. Haney. But Haney just tried to sell all sorts of junk to Oliver and others. He didn't try to trick Oliver into being stuck in a foreign country with no means to get back home. Here, that's just what Kingfish tried to do to his best "friend." I feel offended that we are supposed to somewhat like Kingfish-he's the star of the series-even though he'd do something this cruel to Andy. Thus this episode gets the rare score from me, for total stupidity in the plot AND offensive, of a one out of ten. If this had been the first episode I saw, I probably would not have ever watched a second-it was that bad.
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