Joe is brokenhearted. He’s considering stepping in front of a car just so Love will look at him. Everything about him hurts without Love! He is APPALLED that she has gotten curtains. (I, for one, am glad the writers of this show have a sense of humor about our No. 1 critique of Beck’s apartment.) Love, who recently found out the guy she thought she “wolfed†(ugh) was lying to her about his identity and who knows what else, is handling this in a perfectly healthy and, frankly, admirable way: rebound sex with someone hot.
The guy is Milo. He’s basically a knockoff Hemsworth who is rich (his dad owns Patagonia) and has a history with the Quinn family. He’s the former best friend of James (Love’s late husband) who, according to Forty, has been all about Love forever. After James died, Forty reports, Milo “went down on her every night,†and to this I write, WHY DOES FORTY KNOW THIS?! THESE SIBLINGS NEED BOUNDARIES. Later, Milo will yell something to the same effect, but of course it will be the end of his involvement in their codependent siblingship. But we have a whole episode to get through before that particular blowup. For now, Forty tells Joe not to sweat it: Love “gets a little basic†when she’s hurting — I admit, I LOL’d — and encourages Joe to just get back out there and date, to get Love’s attention and also to have fun. Joe says he doesn’t think Love is the jealous type and Forty retorts: “Did the two of you share a womb?â€
Calvin and Forty run through the dating-app options in this alternate universe, which includes one that specializes in “kittenfishing thirst traps.†My favorite part is when Calvin says if someone texts you “whaT’s up,†with a capital T, “the T is for Tina, which means meth.â€
Back at the apartment, Ellie the balcony sprite swings by to tell Joe she is disgusted that he can’t “rebound on Flinger like a normal person†and to please stop hooking up with Delilah. Delilah reminds Joe to pay his fucking rent. This is ALL good advice and, as tends to happen with good advice on this show, no one shall heed it, and their failure to do so will ruin all their lives.
Joe wishes he could time travel to an early Taylor Swift song and ride a horse for a thousand hours so he can barely glance at a girl in a tower, I guess? But instead, he will settle for Sonnet2Me, an app for word nerds. We get a classic super-cut of shitty dates: the vapid narcissist, the one who doesn’t even read, the one who seems promising because she knows exactly what a guy like Joe wants to hear (Hemingway quotes and Norman Mailer references; and Joe thinks Love is basic? Sigh), but turns out to be, as those interests might suggest, a straight-up alcoholic. I just want to say that, if his entire profile is made up of those selfies he took in his apartment, no way did he get three dates so quickly. Also, who posts Instagrams about first dates? That’s an actual psychopath move, like almost as crazy as all the other psycho shit Joe generally gets into (kidnapping, manslaughter). Meanwhile, Milo’s whole profile is artsy, intimate portraits of Love.
Joe decides the only rational thing to do here is to stalk Milo. It’s just like the time he ran after Peach, although Milo is in phenomenal shape and Joe actually cannot keep up. Instead, he runs into Gabe, who knows exactly what is up — well, not that Joe has a plexiglass prison in a secret storage facility where he recently held a man hostage, but just that Joe is tailing Milo — and intervenes. Just as I am thinking that Gabe is on the right side of history here, he says he thinks there’s still hope for Joe and Love. UGH, GABE, NO! He advises Joe to work on himself, as Milo did; I guess in a previous life, he was less Hemsworth-y. This is good counsel, I must say. But Gabe takes it to a very L.A. place, and does this kind of acupuncture with a chest crystal that is also flashback-inducing? He gets Joe to speak his truth, which is just another flashback that tells us Joe remembers his mom as a lying slut who hated books and therefore was a Bad Person. Joe is uncontrollably sobbing. He has figured out what self-love is. Gabe says this takes practice, and for some reason involves doing a “quick seven-day cleanse,†which for the record is PURE HOT NONSENSE.
Joe is drinking celery juice, and I am confident this will blow up in his face. In the meantime, it gives Ellie the balcony sprite something to mock him for when she swings by to hustle her way to a job as Joe and Forty’s intern for their Beck movie. Later at the apartment, Delilah comes over to Joe’s place (no no nooooo) to say she wrote a first-person essay about her Henderson experience and that it’s going to be published in Variety. Joe responds by projectile vomiting all over her. Meanwhile, Milo is falling in love with Love. Like, cancel-a-trip-to-Bali love. Love says she can’t do it because she has a Spidey sense that Forty is about to relapse. Milo says that it’s time for Love to get “honest with how codependent you are with him,†and this is, of course, a sign that Milo is not long for Love’s world. Our girl loves the truth, except for when anyone is honest with her about what is clearly the biggest issue in her life!
Joe regains consciousness to Delilah ordering burgers and shakes. He says her essay is “incredible,†and I throw things at my television. DELILAH, GET OUT. DO NOT PASS GO. DO NOT COLLECT $200. But what happens instead? They go out and get flirty and sloshed and I write, He vomited on you, like, two hours ago. You cannot want to put your mouth on his mouth so soon after that. But she does! They get caught having sex outside and wind up in jail, where Joe panics that his fingerprints will out him as not-Will. Fincher, Delilah’s hookup-buddy cop, refuses to help her out. (ALSO, it is important to note, as I neglected to do earlier in these recaps, that Fincher is the same cop who stopped Joe at 4 a.m. the night of the Henderson murder to swipe those expensive headphones out of the trash bag of homicide evidence.) So Joe calls Forty, who pulls some rich-guy strings to get them both out.
They get home as the sun is coming up, and Ellie spots them hugging and rails at her sister for leaving her alone all night to “be such a slut.†Rude, but I feel her pain. Delilah says they should stick to friendship. Will they, though??
At Anavrin, Milo shows up with red roses for Love. Forty and Joe are all, Love hates roses. But I thought she got basic in her rebound mode, no? Red roses are the most basic. Bachelor basic. Anyway, Forty is a dick, and Milo does his best “can’t we all be adults and get along here?†Things escalate, with Milo calling Forty “a fucking albatross†and eventually punching him. Love FLIPS out, even though there’s no way she isn’t getting off on all this attention. Then Milo drops this: “Maybe if you’d paid less attention to your idiot brother and more to what’s right in front of you, you would’ve known sooner that James was sick.†OOoooOOooh. Okay, I’m intrigued.
Fincher calls Delilah to tip her off to Joe. He’s suspicious: The headphones were wildly expensive, and Hendy was a spokesperson for them, so how did Joe even get a pair and why would he be throwing them away? Delilah says she thinks this is just an ego issue, but she is clearly unsettled by this information: She breaks into Joe’s place and finds the key to the storage unit. I scream at my computer: CALL FINCHER BEFORE YOU GO, YOU IMPOSSIBLE, IMPULSIVE DOOMED SOUL.
She gets pictures of all the evidence and sends it nowhere. She goes inside the glass prison. Alone! I’m not saying anyone deserves to be kidnapped by their tenant who has been using a false identity to hide his long history of homicides, but like … girl, take precautions. I shout: BITCH, DROP A PIN. She does not hear. They never hear!
And, of course: Joe corners her. He got a nanny cam in his apartment after the Candace break-in. He was going to ask Delilah to dinner tonight! (So I guess either way she was going to wind up in here?) She begs Joe to think of Ellie, and Joe insists he’s not going to hurt her; he just has to “make some arrangements†and then everything will be fine. All she has to do is trust him. How hard could that be?