"Family Secrets" is the sixth episode of season one of Raising Hope and the show's sixth episode overall. It originally aired on October 26, 2010 on Fox.
Synopsis[]
Hope receives the belongings of her mother, and Jimmy discovers the truth about his grandmother.
Recap[]
After her execution, the Chances have received Lucy's belongings for Hope. In one of the boxes there is a videotape, and on it Lucy explains to Hope how to survive in the dangerous world of a prison.
Virginia advises Jimmy to protect his daughter from the truth about her mother, but Jimmy tells her he is not lying to Hope, to which Virginia responds that lying is part of the job of being a parent. Jimmy then asks if she and Burt ever lied to him, and Burt tells him that Virginia did. Jimmy asks what she lied about, and Virginia reluctantly tells him the truth about several lies over the course of his life, like his supposed allergy to fruits.
Jimmy wants Hope to know the truth about Lucy, and Virginia tells him that this is one of those horrible secrets a parent can never tell their child, which leads Jimmy to ask if there's an even bigger secret that she's not telling him.
Virginia insists that there's not, but Jimmy does not believe her and is determined to find out what the secret is, so he tries to get it out of Burt and eventually learns that the lie was about his grandmother. To understand how his grandmother Louise died, he tries questioning Maw Maw during one of her brief moments of lucidity. At first he thinks he's getting somewhere, but then Maw Maw tells him that his mother lied to him for a reason and to stop digging around.
Virginia finally admits that her mother was "killed by a duck". According to her, Louise died after falling and hitting her head on a duck figurine when she struggled to breathe after trying to harvest honey from a beehive under the eave of the house with a plastic bag on her head.
However, Sabrina finds out from an online search that Jimmy's grandmother is still alive. Shocked, Jimmy goes to Louise's house and discovers that his grandmother is indeed very much alive, but never wanted a child and intended to put Virginia up for adoption, but Maw Maw wanted her to keep her, so Louise told her to raise her herself but make up a story so Virginia wouldn't come looking for her, thus the story about the duck.
Jimmy later realizes his parents lied to protect him, so he decides to do the same with Hope and edits the violence out of Lucy's video tape to protect his daughter.
Quotes[]
Trivia[]
Cast[]
- Lucas Neff as Jimmy Chance
- Martha Plimpton as Virginia Chance
- Garret Dillahunt as Burt Chance
- Shannon Woodward as Sabrina Collins
- Cloris Leachman as Barbara June "Maw Maw" Thompson
- Bijou Phillips as Lucy Carlyle
- Linda Gehringer as Louise Thompson
- E.J. Callahan as Vandy
- Niko Posey as Crystal
- Alisa Hensley as Young Louise (credited as Alisa Hensley Lane)
- Luke Davis as Young Jimmy (uncredited)
- Brad Grunberg Gary (uncredited)
- Kelly Heyer as Teenage Virginia (uncredited)