"It's like we say in St. Olaf, Christmas without fruitcake is like St. Sigmund's Day without the headless boy."
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Great Expectations is the fourteenth episode of the fifth season of The Golden Girls and the one-hundred and sixteenth episode overall. Directed by Terry Hughes and written by Robert Bruce and Martin Weiss, it premiered on NBC-TV on January 13th, 1990.
Blanche is scared to get physical with her boyfriend Steven, especially after he has a heart attack. Rose joins a positive-thinking group and tries to get a pessimistic Dorothy to join.
In Sicily, 1912, a beautiful young peasant girl with clear, olive skin met an exciting but penniless Spanish artist. There was an instant attraction, and after a short time, he was arrested for showing her how he can hold his palette without using his hands. He painted the girl's portrait and they made passionate love, and the peasant girl spent much of the next day in the shower with a loofah sponge scrubbing his fingerprints off her body. But when she saw the portrait, she was insulted as it looked nothing like her, and stormed out of his home. The peasant girl was Sophia, and the painter was Pablo Picasso.
Back in St. Olaf...[]
Rose tells Dorothy about St. Olaf's greatest explorer, Hans Gluckenflunken, who set out for Florida in search of the Fountain of Intelligence. Unfortunately, when he got to Duluth, he took a left instead of a right and wound up back in St. Olaf in the dead of winter -- which was how he earned his nickname "Wrong Way Gluckenflunken". Tired and hungry, and but still clinging to hope, Hans saw water trickling out of the ground and drank it, believing he'd found the FOuntain of Intelligence. Unfortunately, it was a broken sewer main and he died of cholera two days later. When Dorothy angrily asks what the point of this was, Rose reiterates that Hans was positive he'd found the Fountain of Intelligence -- in fact, Hans's dying words were "I think I've learned something from this."
The title of the episode is a reference to the Charles Dickens novel of the same name.
Dorothy tells Blanche and Sophia that she should look up one of her old flames and Sophia tells her not Stan. Dorothy does start seeing Stan again in Season 6. Before getting back together with Stan, she dated Glen O'Brien in "Cheaters". He previously appeared in season one. After calling off her wedding with Stan, Dorothy, in "What a Difference a Date Makes", briefly dated John Noretti, a former classmate who stood her up in high school.
Goofs[]
Sophia mentions that Dorothy got knocked up at nineteen. In other episodes, she says Dorothy was seventeen.
At about 10:58, after Blanche gets the phone call telling her that Steven's had a heart attack, she & the girls go into the kitchen from the living room. Each time the door swings open as they walk into the kitchen, you can see that there's suddenly no furniture in the living room behind them. For some reason the set appears to be empty as all the furniture is gone.
Sophia's story about the artist who can hold his painting with "no hands" takes place in 1912. Sophia is presumably in her mid-eighties, so that would make her around seven years old when she "hooked up" with the artist.
↑The Golden Girls, Season 5, Episode 14, “Great Expectations”. Weiss, Martin and Bruce, Robert (writers) & Hughes, Terry (director) (January 13th, 1990)
