Daria S1 E4
Cafe Disaffecto
The Lawndale internet cafe is broken into and, in his infinite wisdom, Mr O’Neil decides to organise a fundraiser for the new cafe and ropes Daria and the rest of the class into it. He hopes that going door to door selling things will encourage people to open their wallets, but whilst some have more luck than others, Daria finds herself in trouble when she refuses to sell chocolate to a diabetic woman. To ‘make up’ for not wanting to get slapped with a manslaughter charge, she’s tasked with reading a piece of her writing at the newly reopened cafe. In typical Daria fashion, her reading of a piece of extremist right-wing literature stirs the audience into a frenzy.
There’s a lot of talk about the internet and computers in this episode and it’s funny how views towards them have changed in the time between when this episode came out and now. Now, computers are in everything short of our food. Around me, as I’m typing this, I have my tablet, phone, laptop and several smart devices that all respond to just the sound of my voice. I have to wonder what Daria’s response to something like social media would be. If I had to make an assumption (and make an ass out of myself no doubt), I’d imagine she’d be one of the last people to join Facebook and only do so at Jane’s insistence, then ditch it the moment the lizard people took over. She’s more likely to have a strong presence over on Discord and I’m almost certain that she would live on Reddit, giving commentary in her own dry, sarcastic manner.
On the subject of rebuilding the coffeehouse, a suggestion Daria didn’t make but was misunderstood by O’Neil, I have to admit that I find it hilarious that she had to be threatened with music camp by her parents to do it. Her mother thinks that it’s a smart idea for her to do it, to pad out her prospects for college. Even though Daria is a fairly episodic show, there’s a loose sense of continuity that flows through each episode. You can see here that Helen is still thinking about her daughter’s future. As fondly as she may remember college, you can tell that she wants Daria to aim higher. There’s also a fairly funny moment when Daria and Jake share the same sentiment about the whole idea, being that it’s more important to make sure you can pay for college.
Daria pulls Jane along with the trip around the neighbourhood and there’s some pretty humorous moments where we see the various groups interact with people. Kevin and Brittany unwittingly arriving on Mr Demartino’s doorstep, Daria’s interaction with the diabetic woman with Jane’s camera at the ready and Quinn’s charisma and surprising amount of creativity in her sales pitch. It’s a slow process peeling back the layers of a character and here, we see Brittany’s deeper side starting to show when Kevin complains about learning his lines for their performance at the coffeehouse, she subtly threatens to withhold their makeout sessions from him. Kevin, on the other side, is too much of a meathead to understand what she’s driving at. As for Quinn, she charms the cash and brain cells out of her targets in a way that, shockingly, doesn’t feel creepy. She’s in control of the situation at all times and has remarkable amounts of success. On the other hand, Daria shows a moral compass that one wouldn’t expect from her. Usually, she’s one to let people do as they please regardless of it if kills them but in this case, she flat out refuses.
Something to note, Mr O’Neil has a habit of mixing up his students and during an interaction in the beginning between him and Kevin, I had to look up who was voicing them. To my shock, it was the same person, Marc Thompson! In the beginning, O’Neil speaks in a near whisper, whilst Kevin is not only louder, but noticeably more boisterous, though this will become clearer in later seasons. This episode is still very early in the show’s life cycle and thus characterisations haven’t been ironed out quite as much, with O’Neil dropping a few unusual tidbits about his time in college, the running gag about his student’s names, and him even dropping a few swears, something that would probably make the O’Neil of later seasons faint dead away.
Finally, I have to reflect back on the idea of internet cafes and such. Now people go to cafes to get away from the internet, something that would have seemed entirely backwards in the 90s when the internet was still a Wild West of unsupervised weirdness. I was literally a baby during the 90sl, but in the early 2000s, the internet could still be a very weird place where everything and anything could have a site. Whilst I stayed pretty safe, more from not knowing anywhere dangerous rather than having parents watching my every keystroke, I still saw some weird things and I watched as social media rose. Thus I pose a question to you, reader, how do you think the character’s of Daria would react to social media and the Orwellian landscape the internet has become?
