Dylan McDermott And Dermot Mulroney Finally Meet On ‘LA To Vegas’

Fox

A few thoughts on tonight’s LA to Vegas — which finally created the Dylan McDermott/Dermot Mulroney singularity we’ve all hoped for — coming up just as soon as I marry an internet catalog model…

I already said plenty about LA to Vegas a few weeks ago, but “Two and a Half Pilots” was by far my favorite episode, primarily for the long-awaited meeting of the Derbels McDillet.

(*) The best instance of this came a few years ago when McDermott starred in a serialized hostage crisis drama called Hostage in the same season where Mulroney starred in a serialized hostage crisis drama called Crisis. Second-best, as cited in the SNL sketch linked to above: Mulroney once played a character named Kit McDermott in a movie called Staying Together. At TCA earlier this month, McDermott said they are actually now friends, but that early in his career, his agent, the legendary Sue Mengers, tried to get him to change his name to end the confusion once and for all.

Just having them together after 30 years of their bizarre parallel careers(*) would honestly have been enough, but what made the episode so much fun is how it set up Captain Steve to be Captain Dave’s doppelganger, too: similar hair and mustache, similar walk, attitude, everything. He’s just the more successful version of the guy Dave fancies himself as, down to flying the “international” route (which is technically true, since Canada is another country). I’m not sure whether Mulroney or McDermott is the real-life Captain Steve, but it worked as both a meta joke and an opportunity for the two of them to mirror each other’s performance, even as Steve ultimately revealed himself to be a much bigger jerk than Dave has been thus far.

I was also glad to have Ronnie and Bernard more involved with Dave rather than the passengers this time, both to establish that the plane keeps flying back and forth all weekend while Colin and the others are staying in Vegas, and to give us some distance for now from the Ronnie/Colin romance, which felt more obligatory than interesting in the first two episodes.

Like I said in the initial review, this show has some learning to do, but even if it never improves from here, it gave us this.

What did everybody else think?

Alan Sepinwall may be reached at sepinwall@uproxx.com. He discusses television weekly on the TV Avalanche podcast. His new book, Breaking Bad 101, is on sale now.

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