What do Batman, James Bond, 35 girlfriends, a fake kidnapping and a severed hand have in common?

Apparently, nobody involved knows how to do anything the easy way.

Episode 17 of Certified Bad Example starts with Jameel Mayers and August Black debating men who live double lives — Christian Bale and Robert Pattinson as Batman, Daniel Craig as James Bond — before accidentally stumbling into an episode almost entirely populated by people taking that concept much, much too far.

First: a Japanese man accused of dating more than 30 women at the same time and allegedly giving them different fake birthdays so he could keep collecting birthday gifts.

Bruce Wayne has Batman. James Bond has 007. This man apparently had an entire birthday cinematic universe.

Jameel and August get into the surprisingly complicated question underneath it: when does lying to someone you’re dating cross from being spectacularly shady into actual fraud?

Then we meet an Arkansas mother accused of staging the kidnapping of her adult daughter to teach her about the dangers of meeting strangers online.

Because apparently “we need to talk about internet safety” wasn’t dramatic enough.

The case turns into a much more serious discussion about disability, vulnerability, online safety, fear-based parenting and whether traumatizing someone can actually teach the lesson you intended.

And finally: Slovenia.

A woman and her boyfriend were convicted in an insurance fraud scheme involving deliberately severing her hand with a circular saw in an attempt to collect insurance money for permanent disability.

We have officially traveled from “fake birthday” to “WHERE IS YOUR HAND?”

Jameel and August discuss the scheme, the prison sentences and the financial question nobody should ever need to ask: exactly how much money would someone have to offer before you’d even consider losing a body part?

The answer is not whatever they were offering.

The episode closes with August’s daughter announcing that she doesn’t want to go to school because it’s “all rhyming,” before Jameel and August talk about yelling, stressful mornings and the responsibility parents have for setting the emotional tone their kids carry into the day.

So what actually connects Episode 17?

Secret identities. Elaborate schemes. Questionable parenting. Terrible risk assessment. And an alarming number of adults who could have saved themselves a lot of trouble by choosing literally the second idea.

Certified Bad Example is hosted by Jameel Mayers and August Black.

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