Reverend Jim: A Space Odyssey

This was the 3rd episode in the Second season of Taxi.

The cab drivers are hanging out at Mario's when Christopher Lloyd as Reverend Jim Ignatowski wanders in. They recognize him but he doesn't recognize them, even though they remind him he performed a wedding for Latka 8 months earlier. But when Latka started talking to him in his gibberish language, Jim remembered.

The cabbies want to get Jim to have a job, make something of himself, but what can he do with no skills and no education? Drive a cab. At first Louie will not hear of it, until Rev Jim slips a tranquilizer into Louie's coffee. Louie becomes mellow, starts singing show tunes in the garage, and gladly accepts Jim.

The big hurdle of course was to have Jim pass the driver's test. They go down to the DPS office with him, help him fill out forms, his name, his weight and height, color of eyes. Finally one of them says, "OK, Jim, now you are ready to take the test." "What?", says Jim, "I thought that was the test."

All of the characters in Taxi are memorable, but Christopher Lloyd as Reverend Jim Ignatowski became my favorite. But this episode has a mistake of sorts, Jim is asked what his father's last name is (for the forms) and he says "Ignatowski", but in a later episode we find out that in fact is NOT his real last name. Ignatowski is a name Jim, a flower child of the 60s, picked "because it is flower child spelled backwards."