The Other Two
Is it just me or is this season of The Other Two getting a little repetitive? It’s not like there aren’t a ton of great jokes — and who among us has never wanted to chloroform Ben Platt? — but it seems like we’ve known where the seasons were going since the first episode, so I just wish it would get there already.
In the first recap of the season, I wrote, “Just wait for his role in Windweaver, the fantasy show he filmed in Croatia for eight months, to really take off in about four episodes and for him to be excited but also pissed he’s now famous for being an elf with no lines.†I was absolutely right about this, except it happened in episode eight rather than episode five. And the fallout from him being an asshole to Curtis this whole time? Yeah, we didn’t need a Magic Eight Ball or the incredibly good palm reader who would saunter into the Boiler Room on Friday nights to tell us that.
And we all knew that Brooke wouldn’t be able to do any good in the industry because we already saw Cary fail when he tried to do it with Globby, who was just hired to be the new Mucinex mascot. (Congrats, Globby!) Oh, and poor, poor Molly Shannon. She’s been stuck with this story line about not being able to be normal again only for her to realize, duh, that she can’t be normal at all anymore.
That we can see where everything is going means that the show is well structured and knows its characters so intimately that everything seems inevitable. There’s either that charitable reading or one that suggests it’s become a little too predictable. I can hear you all saying right now, like one of Curtis’s friends, “Drag her, Vulture!†But I don’t want to drag. I’m still having fun; I’m just not as shocked and surprised by the show as I was in previous seasons.
In the first episode we are examining today, Pam and Chase decide they are going to break up after 18 days, which means Pam has to watch an introductory video to New Beginnings, a comfortable farm upstate where all family pets and women who break up with pop stars go to die. They got Ann Dowd to star in the video, which makes it absolutely terrifying. This is the woman who starred in The Leftovers, Hereditary, and The Handmaid’s Tale. If there is one thing that pop culture has taught me, it is this: Never follow Ann Dowd to a second location.
Now that Brooke is doing good, she doesn’t want Pam to have to live in obscurity or have her house set on fire by Twitter stans, so she tries to make Chase into a bad boy. She keeps failing no matter how many times they dye his hair, give him tattoos of titted-out Winnie the Pooh characters, or show off his now-mature armpits. (Thank the gay Jesus that Chase is 18, because when I saw him shirtless, my fangs came out and I had a feeling south of the border usually reserved for Lance in his boxer briefs.)
Eventually, Brooke does the one thing she can think of to make him completely undesirable to all women: She turns him into a Christian with a girlfriend named Everleigh. That’s the second time I’ve seen that name this week, and I’d never heard it before. Can there really be that many Everleighs in the world? In 2021, one out of every 666* girls born in America was named Everleigh. (*It’s really 664, but that’s not as funny.) There were 3.66 million babies born in the U.S. in 2021, so let’s assume half of those are girls. If we do the math, that means in that year about 2,700 girls named Everleigh joined the planet. That means (1) I think I just passed AP Calculus and (B) by 2078, the majority of all Americans will be named Everleigh.
Anyway, it works, and now everyone is #TeamPam, but they hate Chase, a musical act so bad that Shuli had to make the Capitol insurrection happen just so no one would listen to his new album. But good for her. I can’t wait until everyone on the QAnon boards finds out that their missing savior is actually a liberal Black lesbian.
Cary is going through his own torture. He has Sheila, the crazy sound lady, who keeps showing up to record his ADR (or “additional dialogue recording†to those who are invisible to industry people like Brooke). It’s for Windweaver, and she tells him that the show is a giant mess and they have redone the whole thing in post-production. Meanwhile, she says that Curtis’s new show Girlies is a dream. Rotten Tomatoes backs her up, and the show is 100 percent fresh based on the one review.
When that happens, Cary cancels going to Curtis’s watch party for his dinner plans because he can’t stand to see his friend succeed. However, when the rest of the reviews roll in, they’re all horrible, and the show tanks. Then Cary shows up at Curtis’s door without a six-pack of White Claws, a seven-layer dip, or even a half-used bottle of Double Scorpio. Curtis immediately figures out what happened: Cary canceled when he thought the show was a success and then showed up when he knew that Curtis would still be beneath him.
Curtis, a true hero of the community, takes Cary into the kitchen to, as the title of the episode suggests, hand his ass to him. (I was really hoping he was going to have a prosthetic ass that he forgot somewhere, and then someone would have to hand it to him later.) Curtis tells Cary he’s not really supportive because he is only helpful when Curtis is inferior to him. Thank you for finally telling him. Yes, the characters on the show have always been unlikeable, but they’ve turned Cary into the absolute worst. I mean, we’re talking worse than Marjorie Taylor Greene singing “Friday†while eating a Hostess Sno-Ball and wearing a pair of camouflage Crocs. (Oops. I forgot Crocs are cool again.)
Speaking of dinner, that was the best part of the episode. Simu Liu, who is Pat’s boyfriend and who everyone keeps insisting is in a Marvel movie even though I only know him as one of Crishell’s clients on Selling Sunset, wants to give her the best gift. All she wants is to eat at an Applebee’s like she is back in Ohio with no security. Since that is impossible, they hire a bunch of actors, put an Applebee’s set on a soundstage, get her family involved, and basically do a whole episode of The Rehearsal, but she has no idea that it’s fake.
Along with Cary’s boyfriend, Lucas, being in character as a gay serial killer the whole time, this is my favorite part of the episode. Oh, and if any of you need to know the actual definition of gaslighting, it’s what they do to Pat when she’s in a fake fast-casual restaurant and they tell her it’s real; it’s not just when someone tells you their opinion and you don’t like it. That’s just called “dealing with people.â€
Pat discovers the truth when she tucks into her steak and it is actually delicious. It turns out it’s Peter Luger, but didn’t the writers know that restaurant lost its Michelin star? Pat is fed up with the charade, her security, not being able to do anything normal, and Simu Liu’s poor cunnilingus skills. (Crishelle was on to something, which explains why she didn’t date him.)
As we move on, I would personally like to thank all of the gays who work on this show for making sure we have at least one hot, shirtless guy every episode. In the last one, it was Chase. In this one, we get to see Streeter in the half-buff with his off-center belly-button tattoo that looks like he got it done to be part of an NSYNC-esque boy band. He takes his top off because they need to distract Ben Platt, so he decides that no gay man can resist a daddy like him, and, as a fellow slightly doughy 45-year-old gentleman, I am happy to report that is entirely accurate.
This episode, “Brooke Hosts a Night of Undeniable Good,†felt disjointed. On the one hand, you have Brooke and Chase throwing a telethon for mental health, and on the other hand, you have both Cary and Pat returning to Ohio to measure their new lives against the old ones. It’s like two of the characters were on a parallel journey, and here is Brooke with some assistant named Melanie who I don’t think I have ever seen before.
Brooke thinks she did some good last episode by saving Pam from an Ann Dowd–ification, but she ruined Chase’s reputation. When he confesses to her and Shuli that he has anxiety and depression from the mean tweets he’s getting, they make him a spokesperson for mental health, the trendiest but most nebulous of all charities. She finds out that doing good is harder than you think because she has to lock the COVID marshal in the broom closet so that she can get a Parkland survivor on television. (Wait, didn’t I just see this same thing on The Idol?) Then when the CEO of the company pledging $100 million finds out that Ben Platt is performing, he threatens to take his money back because he doesn’t want a gay person performing at his benefit. Okay, okay, okay. I can totally see not wanting to listen to Ben Platt singing (just like I can really understand not wanting to hear Lin-Manuel Miranda rapping), but that’s because he’s bad, not because he’s gay. (Sorry to you, Ben Platt, my fellow member of the LGBTQIA+ rainbow.)
Brooke learns there is a bad price to pay for doing good, even more so when she finally leaves the (somewhat) successful taping and sees that her ex, my loveable imaginary husband Lance, has been named the Sexiest Man Alive by People for being one of the COVID heroes. Well, they’re not wrong. He is really fucking sexy!
As for the Ohio story lines, Cary finally finds out that Windweaver is the No. 1 show on Netflix and that when book five of the series comes out, it’s his character, the wordless elf, who is the one who can weave the wind. (Personally, I’d settle for a Merritt Wever, but whatever.) His show has been picked up for three years, and he’s been made a series regular. With all of that good fortune, he decides to show up to his high-school reunion to bask in winning everything.
Along the way, he encounters a number of other gays doing the same thing, all of them wearing diapers so they can drive through the night to make it in time to rub their success in their straight former tormenters’ faces. But after a night of triumph, Cary ends up naked, scrubbing piss out of his eyes following a diaper accident. (How I wish I had made any part of that sentence up.) While one of the other gays figures out that you need friends and loved ones to help you enjoy this success, Cary heads back to his small town to hang out with all of the losers he used to look up to in high school. Face down in a yellow diaper in a gas-station bathroom should have been Cary’s rock bottom, but it looks like his fame addiction will get even worse.
The best story line of this episode, again, is Pat’s. She goes back to Ohio to be with her old friends. She goes shopping at the store for a $9 jean jacket emblazoned with pearls. She goes to see her friend’s brand-new bee-themed kitchen. They get shitty Mexican food made by a guy named Mike. She thinks this is the fun, normal life she wants back.
But when she texts Streeter that night, she says she hates the life she used to have. She finds the clothes hideous, the houses ugly, the conversations mind-numbing, and the jokes not funny. The show, especially this season, has always been about the cost of fame and how notoriety warps the brain. You can say the same thing about Pat in this moment, but I think that’s unfair. I think it’s true of any of us who have left our shitty hometowns and moved to the city. We have a different level of taste; we have the availability of the best restaurants, the best stores, and the best Mexican food made by Chinese people. It’s not a declaration of contempt but a treatise about how we always grow out of our old selves, becoming something new and authentic, even if that new form is something that sheds its skin like a snake or a gay man with a leaky diaper on an all-night reunion drive. Yes, when we finally get to the point, it is poignant and beautiful. If only everything else didn’t feel just a little bit obvious.