The Towering Wisdom of Dr. Phil: "You can't keep a child in a closet with a bed."

The best Dr. Phil episodes focus on either hideous marriages (such as the awesome one earlier this week about the psychotically controlling husband who told his wife to “shut [her] suckhole” and regularly administered lessons on how to properly brush her teeth and shower; my long and detailed recap was tragically lost to the cruel mistress that is Blogger) or hideously behaved children. This conveniently gives Dr. Phil the opportunity to plug one of his two presumably (I have not read them) most fantastic books, Relationship Rescue and Family First. Thursday’s show fell into the hideous-child category, and how.

So there’s this scary girl, 15, who wants to kill everyone. Specifically, it seems, her weeping whale of a stepmother (see above). The girl has a “hit list” with 27 people on it, and the dad says occasionally the whale stepmom’s rank slips a few notches, but eventually she’s always back to being crazy-bitch enemy no. 1.

The parents have decided to deal with this by building what amounts to a cell in their house. As Dr. Phil explains it, speaking for the parents, “We can’t let her roam around. She’s putting chemicals in our food and drinks; she’s planning our death and demise.” The mother has taken to hiding the cleaning products the crazy daughter is fond of using as poisoning devices. And they have an alarm attached to her cell that plays, with apparently no irony whatsoever, “Pop Goes the Weasel” whenever the girl leaves her room. Pop. Goes. The. Weasel.

Only parts of the daughter’s face are shown for her taped contributions to this insanity, but she appears to have a very close-cropped white-girl Afro, which I firmly believe may have a large part to do with her mental instability. There’s also an excellent moment in which the stepmom talks about how her daughter – whom she has legally adopted – was taking the stepmom’s heart pills. “She looked right at me and said, ‘Well, if you don’t have them, then your heart’ll stop and you’ll die.’ And smiled.” There is then, in perhaps the best part of the show beyond the “Pop Goes the Weasel” revelation, an awesome cut to black-and-white close-up of said weasel’s jacked-up teeth, exposed in a vicious, step-matricidal grin. Oh, and we learn that the daughter – who is, also, naturally, A Cutter - has some disturbing hygiene problems: “She would smell so bad. She wasn’t wiping at school.” In the words of David from The Real World: Seattle: "Wow. Thank you for telling me that."

So basically Dr. Phil’s reaction to all of this is one of understandable but controlled horror. The parents blather on a bit about some syndrome called “reactive attachment,” which is apparently the cause of the girl’s issues. But Dr. Phil isn’t really interested in that. “She has planned to kill you by bashing your head in with a car part,” he helpfully reminds them. The ultimate solution seems to be to ship the girl off to a special school where she can learn to stop wanting to bash people’s heads in with car parts. Unfortunately, this school is located in Provo, Utah, so I firmly suspect it has some Mormon ties and this girl is really being served up as the future wife of a polygamist. She could single-handedly bring down that religion, come to think of it, if she can get her hands on enough car parts or Drano. Time will tell!