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One one hand, to call any episode of iCarly either “dark” or “polit­i­cal” would prob­a­bly be over­do­ing it a lit­tle. On the other hand, it’s all rel­a­tive, and iSell Penny Tees is prob­a­bly both the dark­est and most polit­i­cal episode of iCarly. The set-up is that the iCarly crew auc­tions off some of the items fea­tured on their web­show, and the item that sells for the high­est amount is a t-shirt known as a Penny Tee (from what I under­stand, the real-life wardrobe per­son who makes these shirts is named Penny, and she fash­ions actual pen­nies on the sleeves as her trade­mark), a t-shirt with a zany, ran­dom, two-word phrase (in this case, “Uncle Female”) printed on the front. Real­iz­ing the high demand for these t-shirts (which, in the con­text of the fic­tion, are home­made), Carly and Fred­die agrees to Sam’s plan to make and sell them on iCarly.com.

The con­flict comes when, after Carly and Fred­die work hard to make some shirts, Sam shows up with boxes full. She then leads them to the apart­ment building’s base­ment and reveals to them her secret for mass pro­duc­tion: a sweat shop staffed by chil­dren (dubbed “Mama’s Lit­tle Helpers” and “T-Shirt Mon­keys”) from a nearby Catholic school. I’d say that’s pretty dark, wouldn’t you? She feeds them dumpster-sandwiches and “Chunk Meat,” which “strength­ens hooves” and “may con­tain meat.” She pays them each $5 a day, which she says is plenty reim­burse­ment, allow­ing the chil­dren to buy “treats and such.”

Nat­u­rally, Carly and Fred­die are out­raged. They take half the chil­dren from Sam and give them excel­lent ben­e­fits, includ­ing blue tea, Mochi ice cream, a fun envi­ron­ment in which to work, and a full month’s pay­ment (over twice what Sam was pay­ing) in advance.

Mean­while, Spencer has fallen in “love” with Crus­tacea, a beau­ti­ful young woman from Uzbek­istan, who only speaks Uzbek. In spite of the fact that they can’t under­stand a word that the other says, the do go out on three dates, and on the third date, Spencer kisses her up (to bor­row one of my favorite Gibby-isms). Things seem to be going well, even as they strug­gle to com­mu­ni­cate on the fourth date at The Groovy Smoothie (I crack up when Spencer prac­ti­cally yells, “Is drink­ing your smoothie a good time!?”). Gibby is also at “The Smoothie,” approaches the table, and tells Spencer that his bus dri­ver is from Uzbek­istan and speaks per­fect Uzbek. He agrees to have his bus dri­ver meet the two of them, pre­sum­ably to trans­late, much to Spencer’s delight.

Obvi­ously, every­thing falls apart. Carly’s and Freddie’s work­ers get bored and leave after mak­ing only a cou­ple dozen shirts, with­out return­ing the pay­ment they received. Sam’s work­ers per­ceive the cans of Chunk Meat to be the final straw and walk out angrily. Gibby’s bus dri­ver does speak per­fect Uzbek, but not a word of Eng­lish, and Crus­tacea leaves with him, never giv­ing Spencer a sec­ond thought (and the funny part is that the bus driver’s brother speaks both Eng­lish and Uzbek, which is how Gibby invited the bus dri­ver, but Gibby never thought to invite the bus driver’s brother). When Carly, Sam, and Fred­die try to rec­on­cile with the chil­dren, they learn that the chil­dren have started their own Penny Tee com­pany and have already flooded the mar­ket. They have no fear of ret­ri­bu­tion because, after all, they’re ten years old.

Obvi­ously, this episode explores the con­cept of human value, and in every case, humans are val­ued in a way that is strictly util­i­tar­ian. Is that the log­i­cal end of a capitalist-consumeristic world­view? Sam’s work envi­ron­ment was the essence of a dereg­u­lated dystopian night­mare, while Carly’s employ­ees fit into the fan­tasies we have of bankers shortly before our econ­omy plunged into reces­sion, tak­ing money they didn’t earn and thumb­ing their nose at prin­ci­ple. On a more per­sonal level, Spencer and Crus­tacea seem to be mutu­ally objec­ti­fy­ing each other, and, for Spencer, the bus dri­ver is only a means to an end. There is a moral, here, too, because when these gen­er­ally decent peo­ple sur­ren­der devalue other peo­ple and sur­ren­der to the temp­ta­tion of self­ish­ness, the result is misery.