The Garage Door (Freaks and Geeks)

Up until this point in our Freaks and Geeks adventure, über-nerd Neal Schweiber has mostly been relegated to the background. Not to say he hasn’t contributed to the show—nay, he’s been fantastic—but the audience has mostly looked to him solely for comic relief. In fact, there’s always been something rather abrasive about Neal’s character. He’s easily the most conceited of the main characters, and while the audience may know otherwise he seems convinced that he’s some kind of hilarious super-stud. In his mind, the girls of McKinley High School are too afraid to talk to him, rather than vice-versa.

The only peek into the Schweiber household before “The Garage Door” was a brief scene which introduced us to Neal’s “cool” dad. Which episode was it? I’m too lazy to look it up right now. Anyway, this episode brings him back and sets him up to be the same, laid-back guy from before. In another scene we even get to meet Neal’s mother, who looks and feels like one of those strange wives from Goodfellas. All in all, Neal’s life seems to be squeaky-clean.

Or so we think…

One day while Sam is out microwave shopping with his mother (par-tay!), he catches a glimpse of our pal Dr. Schweiber getting awful friendly with a woman who isn’t Neal’s mother. Nothing too graphic; it’s merely a strong embrace that ends quickly when he and Sam make eye-contact. It’s hardly getting caught in the act, but it’s enough to make Sam a little worried for his friend.

As a result, the audience must sit through several scenes of typical Freaks and Geeks awkwardness, this time with some dental equipment thrown in. When Sam goes over to the Schweibers to play some Atari, he and Bill reveal to Neal what they believe to be the truth about his dad. Predictably, Neal freaks out a wee bit. After Sam sits through a dental appointment with Schweiber that seems like it could devolve into torture at any minute, Neal embarks on a bit of detective work which results in the finding of a strange garage door opener. The group then rides their bikes around town searching to find the house where Dr. Schweiber is spending his free time. (Or—as Bill calls it—his “secret love nest.”)

What makes this entire plot so remarkable is that Neal had not been really fleshed out up until this point. I mentioned in a previous post that the second half of Freaks and Geeks’ existence would primarily be spent examining secondary characters outside the Weir household. When the series comes to an end, the audience feels as if they know each and every character inside and out. This is a rare accomplishment indeed, and as a result Freaks and Geeks rightfully deserves to be called one of the greatest series of all time.

But I digress. “The Garage Door” begins to peel back the ogre-like layers that have long surrounded the character of Neal. He’s always been a positive, happy personality around his friends—and us, for that matter—but this is the first time we see him in a truly tough situation. The result is simultaneously refreshing and terrifying. He spends his entire night scouring the suburban streets, and it isn’t until long after his friends leave him that he finds the offending house… with his dad’s car in the garage. This is a crushing blow to Neal’s character from which he may never recover, which will further be explored in a later episode.

If there is an equivalent to Neal on the freak side of the equation, it is most likely Seth Rogen’s Ken. Up until “The Garage Door,” he was the go-to guy for snarky comic relief. This episode changes the game by revealing that he too is capable of normal human emotions such as, you know, love. When he discloses that he has something of a crush on a tuba-playing girl in the marching band, his friends are just as surprised as we are. Yet it excites them, and they do what they can to set him up with the girl of his teenage dreams.

Admittedly Ken’s journey is not as hard-hitting as Neal’s, but at least it gives us something relatively human out of the guy who’s usually a stoic wisecracker. In the coming episodes he will return to his usual role as the funny sidekick (with one exception in “The Little Things”) but at least here we have a chance to see him as someone who’s a bit more vulnerable.

Freaks and Geeks was a show all about what’s going on beneath the exteriors of your usual high school archetypes, and “The Garage Door” addresses problems with the series that you didn’t even know you had. It takes two characters that were previously the least interesting in the show, and fleshes them out so they become someone worth caring about. How many Neal-types and Ken-types have we seen in other high school shows? Countless. How many have gotten episodes like “The Garage Door?” Just about none of them.