30 Rock: “Emanuelle Goes to Dinosaur Land” (4.21)

With one more episode left in 30 Rock’s somewhat rocky (ba-dum-ching!) fourth season, the show is content with doing largely the same thing it’s been doing for the past few weeks. Jack is still choosing which beautiful guest star he wants to be with and Liz is still working out her issues about settling with men. A couple new developments keep this from going stale, though, and as much as I’d like to see the show talk about something else for once, everything that wasn’t Julianne Moore’s accent was in top form throughout “Emanuelle Goes to Dinosaur Land,” an episode which is within spitting distance of having the show’s best title (which, for the record, is still “The One with the Cast of Night Court”).
Last week Elizabeth Banks’s Avery was hanging around while Jack’s mother revealed to her that he was into another girl, and she begins the episode by telling him that he needs to think about who he wants to be with while she’s gone. Simultaneous to her farewell, he also says hello to Julianne Moore’s Nancy Donovan. She’s in town to, well, seduce Jack. Which normally isn’t very hard, but for once he’s trying not to sleep with her. It’s still not particularly hard, though, and soon enough they’ve slept together for the first time. As the episode comes to a close, he tells her during Floyd’s wedding that she’s only one of the women he’s with. Then, we get a “To be continued…”
As mentioned above, a major part of the episode is weddings, with three of them happening on the same day: Grizz’s, Cerie’s and Floyd’s. The only one we see is Floyd’s, but the whole thing has Liz scrambling for a date (especially for Floyd’s) and she finds herself dialing up old boyfriends to make for an episode that, along with the appearances of Banks and Moore, can best be described as guest-starrific. Dennis is back, as are Wesley Snipes (the character) and Jon Hamm’s Dr. Drew. Each of them are also still terrible in their own, special ways and she finds herself without a date or person to settle on but, considering the candidates, she definitely makes the right choice. Oh, and Hamm’s got hooks for hands.