*Season 3 premise spoilers.*
Girls5eva has moved to Netflix now, which is convenient for me (although I will be picking up Peacock again later this month—season 2 of We Are Lady Parts is finally coming!!!) This season marks a new chapter in Girls5eva’s revival, and this episode is an entertaining one.
This season, Girls5eva is attempting to get a tour off the ground, and their next concert is in Bomont (yes, the town from Footloose.) Gloria is dismayed at the thought of being stuck in a “boob desert” with no other queer women, while Dawn feuds with a state senator over intrusive reproductive laws. And Summer attempts to figure out who she is apart from the men in her life.
Gloria’s plot is okay. She loves encountering other queer women on the tour, for both the groupie possibilities and the affirming anthem she performs onstage. But the prospect of being somewhere without that community bums her out, and her hookup app shows an absolute dearth of lesbians. She spirals a bit and tries to throw herself into distractions to cope.
Dawn’s storyline is more interesting. She found out she was pregnant just before the tour started, and she’s now far enough along to learn the sex of the baby. That’s where she encounters the state senator, who serves as a mandated “fetal advocate” at the OBGYN’s office. “I’m just here to give a voice to the voiceless,” he explains, adding for the fetus, “‘Keep me safe, Mama!’” While the depiction is over-the-top in kind of a hammy way, it’s a decent commentary on life for pregnant people in red states post-Roe. And I really like seeing the normally conflict-avoidant Dawn trying to figure out how to stand up to the senator, especially when doing so might threaten their tour—three guesses as to how a Mike Pence-ish state senator would react to a girl group singing about “Big Pussy Energy” in his town.
Oh yeah, and we get the line, “I declare a Footloose!”, which is great.
Summer’s plot kicks off when Dawn discovers that she still calls Kev to approve her outfits, even though they’re divorced. She follows Dawn’s advice to cut ties with him but immediately gloms onto a new “love of her life” to model her personality and aesthetic around. The storyline is over-the-top and goofy, but it ultimately comes to her realizing that she’s always defined herself in relation to men and needs to figure out who she really is.
Andrew Rannells appears at the start of this storyline in a quick Facetime cameo where he gives Summer a fit check. I laughed at him enthusiastically describing Summer’s outfit as looking “like Easter Bunny’s trophy wife!” And when Dawn bursts in and realizes what’s going on, Summer tells Kev to put on some “hold music” while she and Dawn talk—he blithely approves, humming happily to himself. Hee!
According to IMDb, this is Rannells’s only appearance this season, which tracks. If Summer is intentionally breaking away from Kev, it makes sense that he wouldn’t have much of a presence on the show anymore.
Rannells has been in a few movies recently, but none of them are on streaming yet. In that case, it’s time to pivot back to Tony Leung Chiu-wai for my weekly actor reviews. I’ll be diving into another one of his TV series from the ‘80s, The New Heaven Sword and Dragon Sabre!
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