A quick review of last night's “Louie” coming up just as soon as I tell you that rape is a financial thing…
I was on vacation for last week's episode, which opened with a “Midnight Run” reference (Charles Grodin again demonstrating that he knows how to say hello in many languages), closed with a song about diarrhea, and in between presented a macabre parade of nightmares for Louie to suffer. As challenging as it would be to try analyzing all of that, there's a part of me that's relieved I get to return to a much more straightforward episode like “Sleepover.”
Filled with a Woody Allen-ish jazz score, “Sleepover” gave us another collection of vignettes about Louie trying to relate to the women in his life, and having mixed success.
The sequence about taking Lilly to a Broadway play (with an all-star cast featuring Matthew Broderick, Glenn Close, John Lithgow and Michael Cera) had Louie, as he did at the cooking supply store, making an assumption about a younger woman's shallowness and being proven incorrect. By Googling the play as she's watching it, Lilly's missing certain nuances of performance (the look on Cera's face as he talks about wanting to die), but she's trying to engage with the material on a much deeper level than Louie gives her credit for, and is so mature that she's willing to give up her phone anyway even though she's clearly won the argument. (That, or she's now mature and clever enough to recognize the power she'll now hold over her dad thanks to that gesture.)
Jane's sleepover cleaves neatly into two halves, involving interruptions from Pamela and Bobby. I wasn't sure if we would see Pamela again after she harshly dumped him following their gender role reversal, and for Louie's sake hoped that he could stay away from her. But their interaction here showed him taking the assertive role for a change – insisting on speaking rather than texting, initiating phone sex, getting her to admit that she misses him – when so many of their prior interactions involved her simply walking all over him. I suspect things will eventually descend back into the usual emotional toxicity – especially since the last time she was so eager to connect with Louie was when he was involved with someone else – but the fact that she felt compelled to reach out to him while in the middle of a date with another guy is at least a step in the right direction, and that scene was a reminder of the strong rapport CK and Adlon have as performers (as well as being creative collaborators on the episode and series).
The girls invading the precinct house like a pack of wild animals was a delight (reminiscent of Louie being repeatedly bumped by gibberish-speaking millennials at the coffee shop from a few years ago), where Louie got to take a thing he couldn't control and turn it to his advantage to get Bobby out of jail.
Surreal comedy (including the black-and-white version of the goat story Bobby told the girls), tender romance and thoughtful parent-child interaction, all in one episode? Not bad at all, and I slept better after this one than I did after last week's. Now if only I can get the diarrhea song out of my head…
What did everybody else think?