“Break In,” the eighth episode of The Golden Girls’ first season, begins inauspiciously, with the roommates returning home from a Madonna concert. After some cursory jokes—Sophia calls her a “slut,” while Dorothy remarks “She did things on that stage I never did with my husband!”—they’re shaken to find the house was burgled in their absence.
Dorothy takes charge while the rest of the girls cower, deepening her voice and bellowing her best Dirty Harry threats. Satisfied the hoodlums have long since skedaddled, Sophia heads off to her bedroom. Blanche and Rose try to stop her, with Rose exclaiming “You can’t. It could be dangerous!”
“Please, I’m eighty,” Sophia replies. “Bathtubs are dangerous!” As Rose anxiously babbles to herself in the living room, Blanche and Dorothy check on their valuables. Dorothy’s stole, a gift from Stan, was taken, and Blanche has an announcement of her own upon exiting the kitchen, her face and blouse covered in flour.
Blanche: They got my jewels.
Dorothy: But I see they didn’t get your cocaine.
Rose: Oh, my God! Blanche has cocaine?
Her jewels were hidden in the flour jar, Blanche explains. (That wouldn’t work at my house—my absentminded spouse would accidentally bake our baubles. Not that I own many, having misplaced my My Girl-inspired mood ring sometime in the ’90s.) “My mama’s jewels. I can never replace them!” she cries, saying the burglars tore the kitchen apart.
Rose: They were probably looking for drugs.
Dorothy: We have Maalox and estrogen. Now, how many junkies have gas and hot flashes?
Sophia emerges from her room, not missing anything but already conspiring to pull an insurance scam. As Blanche fixates on her untouched Chinese vase, which sits to the side of the front door (it will be important later), Rose is more focused on the fear that will soon consume her sanity.
Rose: You know why this happened? Because we’re without men. I don’t know what happens or why. All I know is, when I had a husband, I didn’t worry. Maybe nothing happened to me because I had a husband, and maybe not. All I know is, when the lights went out at night, I wasn’t afraid.
Blanche, every bit as selfish as she was in “Transplant,” thinks karma is to blame. “Some people give out an energy that attracts misfortune,” she theorizes. “They become victims. Well, it must’ve been one of you. I certainly don’t have that kind of energy. ‘Course, I lost my mama’s jewels because of somebody else’s energy.”
Before retiring to her bedroom, Dorothy says they’re both wrong: “Look, we were robbed, and now it’s over. It has nothing to do with energy. It has nothing to do with being single. It has to do with a lousy lock on a sliding door and massive unemployment.”
This is where I’ll pause, as a practical sort, to say that I don’t like living in homes with sliding glass doors; even with standard locks, they’re invitations to burglary. There are measures you can take to make them a bit safer—I’ve used both a security bar (which can be defeated, unfortunately, if one is so inclined) and a lock pin (which must be installed carefully), while others might prefer noise deterrents—but I’d rather not have one at all.
In the aftermath of the break-in Blanche continues to stew, voicing her disgust for criminals despite being a tax cheat herself (as revealed in S5E09’s “Comedy of Errors”). She demands justice in the form of “a whippin'” and “a hangin'”, vowing “Nobody takes my mama’s jewels without swingin’ for it!” Her theatrical outrage isn’t the only mania that’s seized the household, as the girls comically explore home security options.
First, an alarm company salesman (played by Christian Clemenson) tries to frighten them with a sleazy sales pitch, saying that one out of every three people falls victim to a violent crime—and noting that there are four of them. Blanche’s preference for “something that electrocutes an intruder” is ignored by Dorothy, who opts for a basic package. As the salesman’s rhetoric heats up, Dorothy kicks him out, but not before threatening to turn him into a statistic.
It is a missed opportunity that Ring, Simplisafe and similar home monitoring systems didn’t exist in 1985; imagine the hijinks that would’ve ensued if there were cameras all over the house sending video clips to the girls’ phones. Instead, we move on to wackiness involving the guard dog Rose has temporarily installed in the kitchen, which she is unable to enter due to a fear of dogs that is, of course, absent from subsequent episodes.
Rose anxiously circles back to how much safer she felt as a married woman, earnestly noting “I was never once robbed or murdered when I was with Charles.” This clears the way for a deranged tale of lust from Blanche, one of several moments in “Break In” (including a comic pratfall) that earns Rue McClanahan this episode’s MVP award.
Blanche: With George, when I’d hear a noise, I’d wake him up, and then he’d take out his gun. Then he’d have to find the bullets, because I’d always hide the bullets. And then, when he found the bullets, we’d make love.
As is the case in many Golden Girls episodes, we next move on to a bit of racially insensitive humor. This time it’s courtesy of Rose (not Sophia, the usual suspect), who rushes in the next day, apologizing for setting off the new alarm; she was attempting to evade “a swarthy man with a weapon.” Dorothy gets up to investigate, yelling a friendly greeting to the gardener, Fernando, from the door.
On the couch, Blanche is melodramatically recovering from having accidentally maced herself at the police station with what she thought was Rose’s hairspray.
Blanche: I almost died. I fell to the floor blinded, writhing in pain. Couldn’t move for 20 minutes.
Rose: Well, what do you know? It works!
Blanche: Works? They thought I was on angel dust.
As Blanche grows increasingly hysterical, Dorothy brings down the hammer on Rose, telling her “This is it. We have had it! No mace, no tear gas, no grenades!”
Rose cheerfully declares “I won’t be needing mace. I just bought a gun.” Removing yarn from a shopping bag, she produces a folded paper target from her practice session at the shooting range. (That’s right, mild-mannered Minnesotan Rose Nylund was a gun-toting maniac in Florida years before it was the norm.)
Blanche: Honey, there are no holes in it.
Rose: I know!
Dorothy: That’s because they’re all in your head.
Ignoring Blanche’s bloodlust-fueled encouragement of Rose’s latest self-defense plan, Dorothy advises her to find a psychiatrist. They attend a session as a group, offscreen, and while Dorothy feels better afterward, and Blanche fosters hopes of sleeping with the doctor, Rose finds no relief and continues sleeping all day and staying up with her gun all night.
“Break In,” for all its wonderfully zany energy, ends with more of a whimper than a bang, though a startled Rose provides a bang, all right, when she hears a noise outside and opens fire in the dark. She narrowly misses Blanche and her date, Lester, but shatters the Chinese vase and finally causes Sophia to lose her cool. “I manage to live 80, 81 years,” she rants. “I survive pneumonia, two operations, a stroke. One night, I’ll belch and Stable Mable here will blow my head off!”
We next cut to a sequence as clunky as the opening scene, which finds Rose in a parking garage, frightened as a man follows her. “Oh, dear God!” she says, running toward daylight as his footsteps continue. And then she’s back on the lanai with the girls, recounting a confrontation with the man, and how she “Dropped him like a sack of potatoes! He lay on the ground, and he was writhing and groaning and screaming in agony”—before realizing he was the parking attendant, returning her keys.
Uncertain whether he’ll press charges, she is nevertheless jubilant at having regained her sense of security. Blanche reenters from the kitchen, having found her mother’s jewelry in the freezer, and we’re left to ponder one of our strangest “All’s well that ends well” forays into Rose’s psyche, though it doesn’t quite top her addiction to painkillers, which is casually revealed in S4E20’s “High Anxiety.”
More screenshots from this episode are available on Instagram.
Introduction: Thank You for Being a Friend
Previous Episode: “The Competition”
Next Episode: “Blanche and the Younger Man”
Where to watch
All seven seasons of The Golden Girls are available on DVD. You can also stream it at Hulu and Fubo with subscriptions, or buy it by the season (or episode) on platforms like Amazon and YouTube.
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Cranky Lesbian is a disgruntled homosexual with too much time on her hands. Click for film reviews or to follow on Instagram.
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