Second Look: Clone High ‘Litter Kills: Literally’ – Neat Little Piles

‘Litter Kills; Literally’ (aired 1/19/2003)

When Clone High is at its very best, it’s able to pile trope on top of trope, until it has this Escher-like contraption of story and parody that feeds into every facet of the plot. It’s not quite the case with ‘Litter Kills’, but when its focused on JFK, it’s one of the most touching episodes of the series. In a nutshell, ‘Litter Kills’ is a very special episode about death, wrapped in a very special episode about environmental concerns, wrapped in a very special episode about how a community heals together; and when it’s running at full-tilt, it’s quite an impressive contraption.

Ponce de Leon’s death shouldn’t be something that affects the audience: we’re told he’s going to die before we even meet him, and he only spends a few scenes with JFK before he dies a gruesome death, a victim of his own littering (he gets stabbed in the neck by a juice box, sliced up by whipping candy wrappers, and chokes on his own blood after a bag falls on his head, he trips on a banana peel, and cracks his head on an empty soda bottle… oh yeah, and he’s handcuffed by plastic soda rings). But ‘Litter Kills’ does a lot with those scenes, not only establishing him as the coolest kid in school (everyone wants to litter like him), but a angst-ridden teenage kid rebelling against his father (who is the school’s janitor, the man who cleans up the trash) and trying to make sense of the world around him.

Read the full review at Sound on Sight