Malcolm in the Middle

Reese, as soon as he lands on the Afghanistan, panics and deserts the army. He dresses as an local tribe woman to help him get away, accidentally getting married in the process. Lois, having recovered from her mental breakdown and on a mission to find him, and travels to Kabul, selling the family car to afford the trip and hiring locals for the help. Meanwhile, Malcolm volunteers at a veterans’ hospital as a way to make up for his guilt of making Reese leave, but Dewey makes him realize he shouldn’t do good things to honor Reese, but that, instead, he should cause the sort mayhem Reese always caused.

After learning that Dewey will be leaving their class, the Buseys run away and hide in the trees near his house, forcing Dewey to look after their needs. Unemployed Hal becomes the leader of a group of dimwitted body builders, eventually learning them basic things, and they making favours for him. Meanwhile, Lois punishes Reese and Malcolm for their firework fiasco in the movie theatre. This causes both of them to believe Dewey told on them and tries to entrap him, but ends up being punished even more.

When Hal and the garbageman get into a trash-dumping war (which benefits Dewey because the house ends up with a big pile of trash, which means Dewey can’t get to school and imagining the trash as snow), he enlists Reese’s help to steal his garbage truck. Meanwhile, Lois gets her job back at Lucky Aide (on probation), and fights against Malcolm in order to take down an offensive store display of a smiling black janitor holding a mop and a 6-pack of malt liquor. Soon it’s an all-out war between mom and son - until Lois encounters a fellow employee who offends her even more than the display does. After Lois decides to keep the display up, Malcolm is revealed to hate it as much as she does, but wants to dispose of it without feeling his mom is in control. He decides to leave it to chance by flipping a coin, but ends up landing on its side, hinting that Lois will forever control him.

Jessica (Hayden Panettiere), Malcolm and Reese’s teenaged neighbor, tricks each of them into believing the other is gay. Meanwhile, Hal, tired of competing with a neighbor who always outdoes his Christmas decorations, decides to create his own "holiday" to decorate his house for Pearl Harbor Day. Meanwhile, Dewey is doing a report on Hal being his hero, but when Hal rips his report because Dewey lied about him, Dewey quits his report on Hal and decides to do his report on Lois, which makes Hal heartbroken and saying things like this "I certainly liked it when the father was stabbed in the back by his son."

Kitty (Merrin Dungey) returns after having done everything imaginable and wants to return to her family, to Lois’s dismay. Francis comes home and puts Dewey through the torturous "Brotherhood Initiation", then teaches Dewey about a fool-proof way to get out of trouble from his parents. Malcolm helps Stevie write an acceptance speech for his etiquette award, and Reese gets a full-body sunburn so he can peel his entire body at once. But when nobody cares about Reese shedding, he decides to mess up Stevie’s speech which ends with him punished by Lois.

Hal and Lois are strapped for cash as Christmas approaches, and things are made even worse when the now unemployed Francis and Piama (due to some shenanigan where all of Otto’s checks ended up in a fake ATM and a threat to sue Francis) decide to come home for the holiday, and Lois got into a car-crashing war with a woman (because she hit her car door on Lois’ car and wouldn’t apologize). As a result, they decide that the Christmas gifts will have to be homemade this year. When the family makes much better gifts than Hal, he promises them that he’s going to take them somewhere wonderful and drives around aimlessly looking for somewhere that’s as amazing as he claims, open on Christmas Day and is free. However, just as things are looking their bleakest, the family discover where Malcolm really got his ’home-made’ gifts from. Meanwhile, Malcolm feels excluded when Reese and Dewey do fun stuff together.

Hal gets so stressed out over finding a 20th anniversary present for Lois that he starts losing sleep, which prompts Reese to try to brainwash his semiconscious father late at night for ridiculous things, but realizes Hal chose Reese because he was more normal than the other boys (even Jamie). A school bully nominates two of Dewey’s classmates for student body president, and Dewey nominates him (because it would be shameful to lose to a Busey), sparking a bizarre three-way election battle. Malcolm takes up the electric guitar despite Lois’ warnings that he will fail at it, (because he gets a letter to tour Europe and feels he should do something to balance it out.) and writes a song to the tune of the Meow Mix jingle without realizing it.

Lois begins to think she is losing her touch when Jamie seems too much for her to handle. When Hal realizes that Lois is losing her confidence, he brings Francis home in order for him to explain to Lois how was she able to have confidence as a mother, but when she regains her confidence, Lois finds out that Reese has been putting 4 cans of Kapow soda every day, causing him to go berserk. Meanwhile, the other boys bring home a diving board and Reese tries to think up the craziest possible stunt to pull with it, eventually going crazy. Reese finally admits that he feels that he is not into stunts again, that is why he wants to do the craziest stunt.

When Malcolm spots a decrepit 1968 Plymouth Barracuda V8 in his neighborhood on sale, he instantly falls in love with it and purchases the car. But he gets so caught up in the difficult task of restoring it that he blows off Stevie as well as Reese who needs him for an illegal betting scheme of his, during which Reese wins 11.500 dollars which he cannot pick up since Malcolm refuses to help him. Hal, on the other hand, is having success when he stumbles upon his hidden talent; hairstyling. Lois doesn’t have time to worry about Malcolm or Hal, as she is caught up in scandal between Craig and their Lucky Aide boss Fred. Craig says he is taking time off to tutor Fred’s wife in golf, but Lois finds out he is actually having an affair with her.

When Lois catches the boys vandalizing a trashy billboard for a strip club, Malcolm alters the vandalism into a women’s rights protest to avoid a punishment, which sparks a colossal media circus. In no time, feminists, conservative religious groups and national news reporters descend on the scene. After Hal grants a TV interview, a woman from his past turns up at the faux protest; and Reese, inspired by the giant billboard stripper who comes to life in his dreams, gives an impassioned speech about the objectification of women, while Lois tries to find a way to get the boys down without creating a wrath in front of the media.

When Lois buys a brand-new king-sized bed, Hal thinks that her motive is to put more distance between them and refuses to sleep in it. Moved to tears by an opera he sees on television (and then beaten up by the brothers), Dewey is inspired to write his own operatic masterpiece, "The Marriage Bed," which is based on his parents’ fight and turned into a school production. Meanwhile, Malcolm and Reese build their own street luge board and Malcolm gets into a feud with a mystery rider who keeps forcing him off the road. When he makes a bet against the mysterious street luger, he’s horrified to learn it’s Stevie and loses his bet.

Hal is named executor of his neighbor’s living will and must decide whether to keep him on life support or pull the plug. However, Hal has long had a particularly difficult time being decisive. The stress of making this life-or-death decision induces a psychosomatic paralysis of his upper body. However, Lois snaps Hal out of it when she reminds him that he made a good decision once by marrying her instead of Susan. Meanwhile, Craig asks Malcolm, Reese, and Dewey to teach him how to fight dirty since a bully from his childhood is coming back to town, which is revealed to be his own father.

When Hal and Lois realize how little time they spend together, Hal turns the garage into a private tiki lounge where he and Lois can retreat. Things go smoothly until they feud over philosophical beliefs, eventually stressing out in the lounge. Meanwhile, Mr. Herkabe cons Malcolm into joining the Booster Club, where he learns a lesson about taking one for the team.

During Grandma Ida’s unwelcome visit with the family, she loses her leg while saving Dewey from a moving truck. Consumed with guilt, Dewey is determined to find Ida’s leg and give it the proper burial. Francis, on the other hand, begrudgingly becomes the caretaker for his stubborn, cranky grandmother at Lois’ admonition. He soon learns that not only he and Ida both despises Lois, but she was responsible for leaving him at his grandmother’s house. Meanwhile, Malcolm and Reese get a new idea for a prank that forces them to stay awake for days on end to avoid the embarrassment of having their faces glued to the floor (which causes them to glue themselves in the floor anyway).

After Hal forbids Dewey from inviting his peculiar classmate Chad over for a sleepover, Dewey asks Lois instead. Meanwhile, Malcolm and Reese find out that they are not as popular as they once thought (because there was a Ditch Day, and no one told them), then plot "revenge" on their classmates, as Lois searches for the warranty papers on her 10-year-old blender. As she searches for it, Chad places an envelope at the end of Lois’s papers containing a pornographic photo of a sleeping Lois taken by a drunk Hal.

When Francis and Piama choose to celebrate Francis’ 21st birthday at the house, Hal is reminded of a promise he made to his son as a young child after missing his son’s play, involving a motorcycle trip that Lois quickly forbids. Hal and Francis have no choice but to sneak off for their wild adventure, leaving their women behind (also with Hal promising Dewey a great gift for his 21’s birthday in the same fashion as he did to Francis). Meanwhile Malcolm, Dewey, and Reese are held captive in their own home by a bully, but later discover he was at the wrong house, to Malcolm’s dismay because Reese and Dewey got beat up because they didn’t want to hide and worry, and beat up Malcolm because he didn’t get beat up.

Malcolm discovers a man, Norm, living in the Lucky Aide. He agrees to keep Norm’s secret as long as he provides Malcolm with tidbits on his new crush, a fellow Lucky Aide employee, until Lois finds out. Meanwhile, when Reese takes a job as an exterminator, he quickly learns that to drum up business he must infest the neighbors’ lawns with caterpillars. But instead of spreading the pests, he has a change of heart and begins to nurture them, only to be overwhelmed when they turn into butterflies and swarm on him. Malcolm’s try to impress his crush gets wrong when he reveals too much information, making her think that he is stalking her.

Lois goes over to visit Ida, but gets unpleasantly surprised by the St. Grotus Day festival from "the old country", where Ida and her elderly friends make Lois miserable and force her to bake a huge and complicated tart (and bringing one of their own just to piss her off). Malcolm fails a music appreciation course, and reluctantly goes to Dewey for some tutoring, who enjoys the situation but then, Malcolm causes them both to get deaf. Reese and Hal secretly watch scary movies while Lois is not around, but it ends up revealing some unexpected secrets about both Reese and Hal.

Reese begins hanging out with a pack of dogs who think of him as their new alpha leader, and in the end, the police catches him doing the most unbelievable thing (on a local farm). Dewey gets in trouble with Lois, after she finds out that he is seeing another mom, and attempts to get her back with a huge tattoo on his chest, which deeply moves Lois, but also causes her to get angry, and Hal accidentally becomes a motivational speaker with his co-workers when the real motivational speaker made everyone but him upset because he wasn’t listening, but drops it when he motivates a man into taking over his job.

After Lois and Hal are reminded of the tight budget they must uphold, Hal discovers one of his boys has been dialing a 900 number. His attempt to explain the error to the hotline’s billing department turns awry when he forgets to hang up the phone one evening and finds out about it in the morning, incurring a whopping $800 charge. Meanwhile, Reese takes a job at a research clinic that pays him to pop experimental pills, leading to absolute misery and a ride on police horse, and a reluctant Malcolm takes on a mortifying job at the Lucky Aide as a costumed Uncle Sam on stilts. Finally, Dewey discovers Jamie is finding old things Francis hid from Lois, but when they turn out to be stolen, it becomes clear Francis pawned them off.

When Hal decides to attend his first annual Neighborhood Association meeting with Malcolm, he is strongly encouraged to take on the role of President. Being his dad’s right-hand man, Malcolm sees a perfect opportunity to add some excitement to the community, while Hal’s agenda is a little bit different (Ex: giving people tickets for not hugging their children). Meanwhile, Francis takes on a new job as a camp activities coordinator and turns to Dewey for his input on some creative new games... for kids like the Buseys. While Dewey revels in his afternoon of fun, his fed-up classmates take their teacher, principal and janitor hostage. Dewey and Francis teams up and bring order back to the school when they learn that the principal and Mr. Flerch has been using them as slaves in their own get rich quick scheme.

Unbeknownst to Lois, the boys enter her in the Mrs. Tri-County Pageant as a joke. When they overhear the other contestants remarking that Lois doesn’t have a chance of winning, they plot to help their mother take the county crown. Meanwhile, Malcolm is blackmailed into delivering love notes to a contestant for Herkabe, and Reese discovers that, according to the Mrs. Tri-County Pageant manual’s scientific formula, he is beautiful, but he can’t participate, as the formula only applies to middle-aged women.