Enter Jeremy. Nicotine is his drug of choice. Gambling is his addiction. "Ass" is his favourite insult (or "bitch" for variety). He has a problem with authority and a bruise over his eye. He pushes all the wrong buttons. A disinterested primary care giver doesn't faze him. He has a flip-top phone and drives a fancy automobile. He even holds his cutlery the right way. This is the Mini-Me Special Edition that Nick's been waiting for.

Even his mother agrees. Aunt Liz thinks that Jeremy could benefit from the male influence of a guy like Nick - obviously she's not been reading the papers lately. Perhaps she thinks that "zany hi-jinks" means some kind of harmless prep school prank. But as it turns out, her instincts were right. Nick has been studying up on how to be a role model (he knows it will impress Lulu, now that she's graduated to having her picture up front in the credits). A couple of threats, a harsh glare, a stern word, and soon Nick has Jeremy ordering salad with his fries. From petty thief to eating his greens in two days - amazing!

Nick undergoes his own journey of self-discovery, too: he learns how to hug - a useful skill in certain social situations. I see it like this: you feed him, you put in a good mood. He's in a good mood, he hugs. And for once he is spared from saying "I'm sorry" to his child-of-the-week. (He does that a lot, have you noticed?) In fact, this time he is expressly not sorry at all. He sees in Jeremy what he might have become, if he hadn't had a mother who cared. So he gives his bratty cousin the benefit of his experience, and warns him not to screw things up. Considering that Nick's relationship with Anne was vastly different from Jeremy's relationship with Liz, and that he doesn't appear to have any regrets over his own behaviour when Anne died, I would assume that he did not behave like a spoilt child, did walk out of it a stronger person, and did not screw it up. (This last he saved for later, as we all know.)

In another one of those lovely but superfluous scenes that exists only to make us feel warm inside (see Barbara's happy dance), he smiles at a picture of his mother, age 12 - just smiles at it over a chorus of ahhhhhh's from living room couches across the globe. Meanwhile, behind him, Burton tries to figure out how come Liz looks almost the same age as Anne in the picture yet was only a teenager when 40-year-old Anne divorced him. It's that screwy rupture in the space–time continuum again... There are no weekends or Christmases in Guardianland. You can arrange for your client a hearing in court on the same day he walks through your door in Guardianland. You can be born in 1940, yet be 59 years old in 2001 in Guardianland. So you can most certainly be a teenager in 1980 and over 50 years old in 2002 in Guardianland. I really don't like it when they do this to us.

And that wasn't the only thing that bugged me. I have a lingering sense of unease and disappointment about this episode - not because it wasn't good, but because it could have been better if a little more care was taken. Liz has melanoma which she says is "no big deal", yet everyone immediately assumes she's at death's door. I googled this disease and discovered that surgical removal cures the patient in most cases. This is hardly cause for Liz to get upset over whether or not she's going to be around next summer while Jeremy is working off the $6000 he owes her. The ensuing drama was moderately affecting, but couldn't they have given Aunt Liz something a little more... lethal? (Confirming that it had spread to her lymph would have sufficed.) I really don't plan to get my emotions all stewed up for nothing.

Then there's Jeremy's expulsion from school. It is implausible that his mother wouldn't know about this. The school acts as Jeremy's guardian during the semester and they would be legally unable to throw him out without informing Liz and physically handing him back to her.

But let's not be too picky. It may take me a little longer to recover from the devastating collapse of the Nick Fix than it took Nick to fallin away the unwanted information about his mother's pill habit into a forgotten corner of his mind, but overall this episode was okay. It was great to see Burton engaging his own emotions with someone other than his frustrating son, and the Nick/Jeremy scenes were superb. Jeremy responds well to Nick's timely male influence - the lawyerly questioning, the impatient interjections, the no-holds-barred description of the consequences of cancer treatment and the almost complete absence of overt compassion - though my guess is that stumbling upon this successful method was more by accident than design; and by the final scene Jeremy seems to have accepted that he'd better just be a man about it.

If you're wondering what the other 51% of the episode was about... well, there was an angry penguin, there was horsing around, there was an undercutting of Jake's authority, there was Uncle Joe and a 62-pound heroin suitcase (something is wrong when you can splice out James's storyline and create an entirely new show, and not have anyone notice). But there was no Alvin, there was no Lulu, and Hunter has been excised from the opening credits - a great shame. Not that I lament the loss of the Mini-Me prototype specifically, but at least he helped make the title of the show seem relevant. And call me sentimental (if you dare), but our guardian angel with a child hanging off him has just a little more emotional impact than a rather ugly pan of Pittsburgh shot out the back window of a bus.

I will be nicer about the next one, I promise.

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* Hugs Aunt Liz on the second opportunity.

* Never tells Liz that Jeremy stole stuff from around the office.

* Calls an ambulance after Jeremy's accident, which miraculously arrives 36 seconds later.

* Gives Jeremy some quasi-sympathetic words of wisdom concerning Liz's illness.

• Jeremy and Nick don't recognise each other and Aunt Liz hasn't seen Nick in many years, even though they live in Pittsburgh.
• Aunt Liz's company is the top advertisting agency in Pittsburgh and bills $2 million a year.
• Jeremy's prep school smells like cow dung.
• Aunt Liz likes wine and figure skating.
• Jeremy sees his mom twice a year.
• Nick's mom was a "pill freak" and was unfaithful. She drove Burton away.
• Burton tried to get custody of Nick after the divorce.
• Burton went back to Anne after she got sick and nursed her, for which she was grateful and loving. This was apparently not enough to make Nick forgive him for the divorce.
• Liz and Burton flirted with each other when Liz was young, though Liz thinks it was more serious than "horsing around".
• Nick talks to himself while he's working alone.

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