If it wasn’t clear already, over the course of season five’s first two episodes, one fact has been made irrefutable: We do not deserve Catherine O’Hara. She is a pure delight and we are but garbage humans in comparison. Honestly, has anyone in the history of the world had as much fun as she seems to be having while playing Moira Rose hopped up on a double dose of a Bosnian upper that has kept her awake for three straight days? It’s not a rhetorical question, the answer is no.
Moira bursts into her room at the Rosebud Motel at 3:30 a.m. (or noon, Bosnian Mountain Time), fresh from her time filming The Crows Have Eyes 3. She is wide-eyed and wired, both from the excellent work experience — “the local Bosnians are calling it a stunning reinvigoration of The Crows Have Eyes franchise†— and the drugs. She arrives home with very little fanfare … as is to be expected when one makes an early entrance at this time in the morning. No one seems to care that she’s home, nor that she had to fly through a swarm of locusts to be there. But thanks to her drugs, she hardly seems to notice that her kids barely register her return. How anyone made it through filming this episode without laughing at O’Hara playing up Moira’s mania the entire time is truly a miracle.
Moira can’t seem to come down even a little bit — she figures she might as well power through the day to make it an even four without sleep — which of course leads her into a little bit of trouble. She finds some love letters Johnny’s been keeping from a mysterious woman. They are very racy and extremely traumatizing for someone like, say, her daughter Alexis to read. No daughter needs to know that her father once had a “predilection for boom-boom girls.†Especially not one who currently doesn’t have a therapist!
The sexy letters send her reeling. You guys, it is fairly obvious that the letters are ones Moira wrote to Johnny back in the day (Johnny only has eyes for Moira, after all), but that doesn’t make it any less fun to watch it play out. Especially when Moira ends up at Jocelyn’s — another woman dealing with sleep deprivation, although hers is due to her baby — and brings herself to tears singing a traditional Bosnian love song. Jocelyn tries to talk Moira out of a full-on meltdown, but is immediately distracted by how hot those letters are. Who knew Johnny Rose was a regular ol’ Christian Grey? Not surprisingly, Jocelyn’s deeming the letters “50 Shades of Johnny Rose†does not help the spiraling Moira.
This is Schitt’s Creek, so word of Johnny’s sexual prowess gets around pretty quickly until finally it reaches Johnny himself. It doesn’t take him long to mercifully reveal to his wife that she was the author of those letters. He pulled them out because he missed her so much, the big softy. The handwriting doesn’t look like hers because she was writing left-handed —she was kept in a full body cast for a week because of a storyline on Sunset Bay which saw her character thrown upward through a skylight. Of course! In all fairness, it would make sense for Moira to have no recollection of these letters: being the method actress she is, she requested to be put on painkillers at the time to really understand what her character was going through. In the end, all is well with Johnny and Moira, she can finally sleep (which she does sitting up in a booth at the café), and their children are appropriately grossed out.
Catherine O’Hara easily steals this episode. It’s not that the Alexis and David storylines aren’t good, they just don’t pack the hilariously outrageous punch that Moira’s does. Still, the sight of Twyla wearing literally all of the jewelry she “swapped†with Alexis in order for Alexis to get back a locket Ted had given her that she then regifted to Twyla is a great gag.
The scene I’ll be replaying the most, though, is David and Stevie getting held up at Rose Apothecary. What a joy to see these two best friends getting into trouble again. This time, they’re alone at the store when a masked robber comes in and demands money. Unfortunately, the cash register is empty at the moment, so instead David and Stevie set out to appease the guy by offering him some bottles of wine (does he prefer red or white?), some cheese, and the perfect tapenade to go with all of it. He walks out of the store with two cloth tote bags full of goodies. Immediately, they know they’ve done something wrong.
There’s nothing better than watching David and Stevie try to explain to a police officer and Patrick that of course they didn’t get a good look at the weapon because it was “concealed,†and if they had seen it, well, then it wouldn’t have been a concealed weapon. It becomes abundantly clear that the robber had no weapon, they weren’t in any real danger, and they definitely could’ve handled the situation a little better. As Patrick notes, the masked man sounds less like a robber and more like a lucky customer. They are the world’s worst robbery victims, and we reap the benefits of that.
The Wig Wall
• One of my favorite running jokes on the show is that the Roses don’t know names for certain everyday objects. In this episode, Alexis swears she’s kept some gifts that Ted gave her during their first go-around, including “an empty book,†or, you know, a journal.
• “One time I did a book report on David’s diary and it was very dark.†What a glorious document to imagine.
• I wouldn’t totally discount David as a strong eyewitness. He was able to recall that the thief was wearing a “low-end poly blend†sweatshirt in what he “could only describe as an aubergine color.†None of that information is helpful, but it is very detailed.
• Despite multiple texts the night before and that morning, Alexis forgets she’s supposed to be going on a run with Ted. She shows up at his place in sky-high heels and Ted remarks that she won’t be able to run in those. Her response: “Tell that to me at 21, escaping the Yakuza.†We need an Alexis Rose biography like, yesterday.
• Moira’s ability to make any conversation about her is truly a thing to behold. When Jocelyn brings up the new child she had just months ago, Moira doesn’t miss a beat and pivots the conversation back to her with possibly the greatest conversational transition I’ve ever witnessed: “I’ve had bit of a rebirth myself in Bosnia.â€
• Can you imagine Moira trying to get through airport security in that outfit?