Recap / Titus

The following is an episode list and summary of all the episodes of the FOX sitcom Titus, a semi-autobiographical look at the life of Christopher Titus.

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Season One

1. "Dad's Dead": Christopher Titus and his brother, Dave (along with Titus' girlfriend, Erin, and Titus' sane, wimpy friend, Tommy) worry that Ken Titus (Christopher's hard-drinking, chain-smoking, serial-marrying, wussy-hating father) may be dead when Dave tells Titus that Ken hasn't been out of his room in three days — not even to get a beer.
2. "Sex with Pudding": Titus thinks Erin is cheating on him with someone from her job after finding a love letter addressed to her by someone named "Pudding."
3. "Dave Moves Out": Dave is arrested after trying to move out of Ken's house — and things get worse when Ken has Titus put in jail when Titus admits that he encouraged Dave to be a man and move out on his own.
4. "The Break-Up": Titus and Erin temporarily break up, but it may become permanent when each of them discover that they slept with other people during the short time apart.
5. "Titus Integritous": Titus refuses, on principle, to add a racing wing to a custom hot rod, while Tommy, Dave, Erin, and Ken try to change his mind after seeing the money that can be made for the tacky addition.
6. "Red Asphalt": During a drive to a restaurant on Ken's birthday, Titus, Erin, Dave, and Tommy are targeted by a gun-toting motorist who won't stop until all of them are Swiss cheese.
7. "Mom's Not Nuts": Juanita, Titus's beautiful, talented, and charming mother (who, unfortunately, is an alcoholic paranoid schizophrenic^note even though the real Juanita Holmes-Titus was a manic depressive schizophrenic, according to Christopher Titus' stand-up special "Norman Rockwell is Bleeding" notorious for her violent attacks and manipulative ways), comes over to cook dinner and announce that she's out of the mental hospital and on medication. While everyone is impressed at her improvement, Titus fears that Juanita will snap again (as it's happened before when he was a child).
8. "Intervention": Titus and company stage an intervention for Ken, whose sobriety has made him a boring, miserable, old man.
9. "Episode Eleven": Titus is forced to care for his father who is in the hospital for having a heart attack while driving after Ken tells him that the heart attack was his son's fault, but when a police officer reveals that Ken's accident wasn't Titus's fault, Titus and Dave pull a prank on Ken – and ends up causing his father's latest heart attack.

Season Two

1. "Titus is Dead": Following the prank at the end of "Episode Eleven," Christopher tries to reconcile with his father, who disowns him. Things get worse when Titus hires a bitchy nurse named Kathy (who was the receptionist on the previous episode) and Ken falls for her.
2. "The Test": In the wake of Ken's heart attack, Titus wrangles everyone into donating blood – but he and Erin face bigger problems when they both confess to not using protection when they cheated on each other and Titus fears he may have AIDS.
3. "The Surprise Party": A surprise party to welcome Kathy into the family ends with Dave being kicked out of the house in order to make room for Ken's latest girlfriend.
4. "What's Up, Hollywood?": Titus becomes suspicious when his father congratulates him for doing a good job on detailing his truck, but everyone else convinces him that Ken does love Titus underneath the self-esteem crushing insults — at least until Ken ends up on the news during a live report about the new drunk-driving checkpoints.
5. "Locking Up Mom": Following the events of "Mom's Not Nuts", Christopher and the gang attend Juanita's competency hearing at the mental hospital so they can convince the board that she's not fit to re-enter society, but when everyone else backs out, it's up to Titus...until he learns why Juanita never contacted him.
6. "The Perfect Thanksgiving": A Thanksgiving dinner between the Tituses and the Fitzpatricks turns into a brawl that ends with the two families in the hospital and Erin having doubts about being together with Christopher.
7. "Tommy Girlfriend: Nicole Sullivan (from MADtv (1995)) guest stars as Tommy's old girlfriend who accuses him of sexual assault in high school when he surprised her in her house naked, but the current accidental hostage situation reveals that Tommy's girlfriend never officially broke it off with Tommy.
8. "The Reconciliation": Titus and the gang celebrate Juanita's sanity with a dinner party, and Titus thinks Ken and Juanita are falling in love with each other again — until Juanita announces that the psychiatrist who has been treating her is her new boyfriend.
9. "The Last Noelle": Titus attends the funeral of his first girlfriend, Noelle. While Erin thinks Noelle was the best love Titus ever had, Titus remembers her more as a psycho-bitch who beat him up for little or no reason and kept him in the relationship with sex.
10. "Sunday! Sunday! Sunday!": At a car show, Titus takes credit for Tommy and Dave's work, leading to a fight that threatens the future of Titus's shop.
11. "When I Say, 'Jump'": Titus and his friends go bridge-jumping, which Erin objects to — until she experiences the thrill of it for herself.
12. "Episode 27": Ken asks Christopher to be the best man at his wedding to Kathy, but when Kathy pushes Christopher too far at the rehearsal dinner, Christopher retaliates – by showing her Ken's drunk driving video from "What's Up, Hollywood."
13. "The Smell of Success": After his antics at a national car show are published in Street Rodder magazine, Christopher finds his shop losing customers and revenue — and when Ken refuses to bail his son out, Christopher turns to the bottle and Erin returns to her parents.
14. "Deprogramming Erin": After losing his shop and his girlfriend, Titus quits drinking and decides to win Erin back, but Erin's dysfunctional family (most of which were last seen in "The Perfect Thanksgiving") will not let their daughter go without a fight.
15. "NASCAR": Erin tricks Christopher into taking his father with him on his trip to North Carolina to deliver a NASCAR stock car by saying that Ken is dying of cancer.
16. "Life Forward": David Hyde-Pierce (Niles Crane on Frasier) guest stars as a motivational speaker who tries (and fails) at raising Titus's spirits so he can work again.
17. "Gift of the Car Guy": Christopher sells Erin's car without telling her to buy a drag racing funny car to revive his dead car shop, but soon learns that Erin has been working as a strip club waitress to support herself and Titus following the closing of Titus's business.
18. "Tommy's Girlfriend II": Tiffany, the waitress Christopher slept with in "The Break Up", begins dating Tommy – but Christopher thinks the date is a ruse to get closer to him.
19. "Hard Ass": Erin and Titus' parenting skills are put to the test when Amy (Erin's delinquent niece) is sent to live with them after beating Erin's brother, Michael, with a skateboard.
20. "Private Dave": Titus tries to save his brother from committing suicide ^note (after Dave finds a "Dear John" letter from his girlfriend, Nancy) at the bus station, but Titus discovers something worse: Dave has enlisted in the U.S. Army, which everyone else thinks is a perfect chance for Dave to turn his life around.
21. "Three Strikes": After coming home to find his house burglarized and his girlfriend laid up on the couch with a broken leg, Titus accuses Erin's degenerate brother, Michael, of the crime and has him arrested (who will be sent to prison for life under California's "three strikes" law) – only to regret his decision when the actual burglar returns to the scene of the crime.
22. "The Pit": Part one of two. To get his shop's reputation back, Christopher begins drag racing against Jay Leno (appearing as himself) to get his name back into the car world. After an argument with his father, Christopher ends up clinging to life when his car crashes.
23. "The Pendulum": Conclusion. With Titus in a coma following his accident from "The Pit", Ken (who is narrating from the Neutral Space) and Erin must decide whether to let Titus come out of the coma or pull the plug.
24. "The Wedding": While at the church to make preparations for their wedding, Christopher and Erin spontaneously decide to get married to avoid having to deal with their dysfunctional families. But when Tommy blows their cover, Titus and Erin struggle to go through with the ceremony — and things get worse when Juanita's second husband punches her in the face and Juanita handles the situation the only way she knows how — by shooting him in the head.

Season Three

1. "Racing in the Streets": To help pay for Erin's grad school tuition, Titus gets involved in illegal street-racing – despite that he has not fully recovered from his car accident from last season.
2. "Amy's Birthday": Erin plans a sixteenth birthday party for Amy, but everything goes to downhill when Amy's mother passes out on the cake in a drugged-out stupor, Tommy calls Social Services after seeing Amy's squalid apartment, and Amy's abusive alcoholic stepfather comes home.
3. "Tommy's Not Gay": Tommy severs ties with his father, Perry, after Perry comes out of the closet and Tommy comes to the realization that he has been copying his father's effeminate mannerisms (which, in turn, makes everyone think Tommy is gay). But when Perry is beaten up by Titus's homophobic friends, Tommy must choose whether or not to defend his father.
4. "Shannon's Song": Elizabeth Berkeley (Jessie on Saved by the Bell and Nomi on the notoriously sleazy Showgirls) guest stars as Titus's too-perfect half-sister, Shannon, who stops by at the reopening of Titus's auto body shop. But Shannon's perfect life comes crashing down when her snooty, Swedish boyfriend, Stefan, dumps her after she announces that she's pregnant and she stopped taking her birth control pills without consulting Stefan about it.
5. "Grad School": Erin finds herself in over her head when she visits a foster home filled with troubled teens as part of her grad school work — and Titus admits why he doesn't want her to be a social worker.
6. "Houseboat": Ken learns the true meaning of Christmas after Titus and the gang trick him into thinking that his friend Bob (played by Dave Carradine) fell off the houseboat Titus rented, but when Bob resurfaces alive, well, and with a fish in his pants, Titus and the others fear that Ken is planning Yuletide revenge on all of them.
7. "The Trial": Juanita stands trial for shooting her abusive second husband in the head during Titus and Erin's wedding — and things get worse when Christopher acts as her lawyer and gets her acquitted on all charges.
8. "Grandma Titus": Titus, Dave, and Tommy are called into the local high school to stop one of Titus' insane female family members from wreaking havoc, but Titus gets a surprise when the woman in question isn't Juanita, but Ken Titus' abusive mother (whom Titus thought died years ago), whose insanity may be the end result of Alzheimer's disease.
9. "Errr": After rescuing Amy from attempting suicide (by drinking vodka and pills she found in Ken's "earthquake kit") over being jilted by a lover named "Charlie", Titus tells Amy the story of how he fell in love with Erin and how Titus attempted suicide after Erin rejected him.
10. "Tommy's Crush": Picking up where "Shannon's Song" left off, Titus finds Tommy in bed with his sister (who is still single following Stefan leaving her) and Tommy wants to give Shannon the love she never got with Stefan, but a miscarriage and Stefan returning for his wife may complicate things.
11. "Into Thin Air": On a ski trip, Dave loses himself down a dangerous hill after discovering that his girlfriend, Nancy, is cheating on him with the ski instructor, and Titus plummets down to rescue his brother by telling him to rescue himself.
12. "Too Damn Good": A young car executive (played by Malcolm in the Middle's Frankie Muniz) seeks a new design from Titus, who turns to Ken for inspiration when he hits a creative block.
13. "Bachelor Party": In this episode as told by Erin in Titus's Neutral Space^note the black and white room where Titus tells his stories, Titus, Dave, Ken, and Tommy help a single, pregnant woman (Alex Borstein from Family Guy, Gilmore Girls, and MADtv (1995)) deliver her baby at a roadside diner.
14. "Hot Streak": To earn his father's love and respect, Christopher takes him to the Bahamas, where Ken spends most of his time at the casino rather than in the tropical paradise. While Ken soon begins to treat Christopher like a buddy, he suffers another heart attack – and Christopher must decide whether to save his father or keep his friend.
15. "The Session": As an exercise for her psychology class, Erin takes the Titus family to group therapy, where Titus opens up about his emotional problems and discovers that his breakdown is being studied by Erin's class.
16. "Same Courtesy": Titus plans an elaborate revenge on Erin and his family after being embarrassed during their mock therapy session by pitting family members against each other on Erin's birthday over an heirloom model cannon.
17. "After Mrs. Shafter": Titus and Tommy's friendship is put to the ultimate test when Ken begins dating Tommy's mom. Titus assures Tommy that, being Ken, the relationship will not last — until Ken reveals that he's truly in love with Tommy's mother, but never expressed it, as she was married to Perry (Tommy's closet gay father as seen in "Tommy's Not Gay").
18. "The Visit": Titus and Erin's plans to formally adopt Amy are thrown for a loop when Titus' insane mother Juanita unexpectedly shows up at the house, coming to seek Titus' forgiveness. Everyone thinks it's Juanita back to her old tricks and set up a plan to take her down once and for all, but a phone call from Missouri reveals a bizarre truth: Juanita was found dead in her trailer from a suicide four hours ago.
19. "Insanity Genetic": In part one of this two-part Series Finale, Titus suffers a mental breakdown while flying home from Juanita's funeral — and the gang learns the hard way that, thanks to the 9/11 attacks, a mental breakdown (along with wearing a towel turban and robe and screaming "à la, à la, à la king" while trying to correct a flight attendant who keeps referring to your dish as "chicken king") is grounds for getting busted on conspiracy to commit a terrorist attack on an airplane.
20. "Insanity Genetic": In the conclusion to this two-part Series Finale, the FBI questions, Ken, Erin, Tommy, and Dave about Titus' mental health and offer a deal: either everyone goes to jail for 20 years or Titus is put in a mental hospital for three months and everyone else is off the hook.
21. "The Protector": In this (once)-Banned Episode, Titus and Erin are called into school when Amy gets in trouble for beating up a boy who sexually harasses her, but when the boy's father arrives, Amy freaks out because the boy's father is also the male babysitter who molested her as a child while her parents were in jail. But is Amy telling the truth or is she trying to ruin a good man's reputation with a wild accusation?