Another hilarious episode. All of our characters are some combination of making moves and being miserable, and as usual, the dynamics between them are golden (a few spoilers for the season premiere.)
After Dawn got out of prison, Mo gave her an on-paper job at his new studio, but when her parole officer shows up, she has to pretend that she works there for real. This poses enough of a challenge without the added wrinkle of Mo shaking up their relationship in a major way. Blair, having literally escaped death, is the new GOP golden boy but has one final endorsement he needs to cement. And Keith’s efforts to prove himself worthy to be a genuine Lehman Brother has him questioning what he really wants out of life.
That last point is shaping up to be the major theme of the show this season. All the characters are in such vastly different places than they were at the start of the show, and while they’re still in one another’s orbits to an extent, they’re playing in different venues now and reassessing their priorities. It’s probably the most overt in this episode with Keith’s storyline, as he’s confronted with a blast from his past and comes to a bit of a crossroads, but it holds true for all of them.
Take Mo and Dawn. Last week, Mo was ready to make a big move, but Dawn proved a hard target to pin down. This week, he reveals a bold step that blows up their 15-year-long game of relationship chicken, and it throws both Dawn and him for a loop. As she scrambles to duck and weave with her P.O. (I love everything about her pretending she works for Mo’s record label,) she’s also dealing with the massive bomb he’s just dropped on her and trying to process it.
It’s a really funny episode for Blair. The last major lobby he has to seal up in his domination of D.C. is the NRA, which he thinks is completely unfair (after all, “[he] got shot and didn’t blame the gun!”, why would they not already love him?), and that offers up some spectacular NRA jokes. He also gets to deliver the fabulous line, “I’m basically like Jesus, but with more manageable hair” (it makes weird sense in context, I swear,) taunt an old enemy, and flail chaotically in the most entertaining way.
It’s also a really interesting episode for him. As I said, Blair has recently been through a near-death experience/assassination attempt, and while an earlier attempt to get him to reflect on his ways didn’t really take, it’s finally starting to hit him how badly he’s effed up. In the season premiere, I commented that, the better Blair appears to be doing externally, the more he’s probably a shitshow in reality, and we see a good corollary to that here: the better he actually is doing professionally, the more he’s a mess internally. He has one really strong scene in this episode with Keith and another with Dawn, and in both, Andrew Rannells knocks it out of the park. He does such a great job of keeping Blair a riotously-funny character while also balancing his darkness and depth. The mountain Blair has been climbing is in some ways also a deep hole, and he’s not sure whether he’ll be able to get back out. I’m excited to see where this season takes all the characters, but I’m most interested in what direction his story takes.
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