*Spoilers for the pilot and series 1 finale*
Series 2 of White Van Man, woohoo! Now-me is posting all these reviews consecutively, but past-me took a pause between seasons to watch a few different Joel Fry projects, for reasons that are too autistic to readily explain. I mostly had a great time watching that other stuff, but I’m so glad to be back to this show! I loved series 1 so much more than I thought I would, and I’m excited to be getting back into it—especially since the finale ended with some major cliffhangers!
At the end of series 1, several major things happened. Joanne, a former client who thought Ollie was the father of her unborn baby, went into labor (in fact, Darren’s the actual father.) Ollie finally realized that Liz’s flirting with him is more than just jokes and banter. Tony, who’d retired in the first place because of health issues, had a heart attack. As we kick off the new season, all three of those need to be addressed, alongside a delightful farce of Ollie desperately trying to repair an inadvertently trashed children’s home with one day to work and almost no money for supplies.
We’ll start with the main episode plot first, about the children’s home. When Ollie transfers their job schedule from paper-and-pen to an app, he gets his wires crossed and accidentally tears down the kitchen cabinets when he’s supposed to be building bunk beds. The mayor and the papers are going to be showing up tomorrow for the ribbon-cutting ceremony on the new home, so Ollie needs to fix things fast. But in true White Van Man fashion, he’s met with obstacles at every turn. This involves a home improvement store whose charitable discounts include 50% off for cats but only 7% off for orphans, dumpster diving, and a surprisingly apt use of the line, “What’s this? Muppet Treasure Island?” The whole storyline is great and had me laughing endlessly, and the resolution is terrific!
As for picking up on the big cliffhangers, it’s not quite what I would’ve expected following a major season ending like we just had. We don’t dive back in with Joanne and Darren being raced to the hospital, Emma realizing that Tony just collapsed, or Ollie reckoning with the fact that he didn’t realize he was in a love triangle. Instead, we jump forward a bit, and it’s not immediately apparent how most of these developments shook out. Emma and Liz very definitely don’t like each other but are begrudgingly forced to interact at the cafe—when Liz musters up a semi-civil, “It’s nice to see you,” Emma flatly replies, “No, it isn’t.” And other characters’ remarks about the offscreen Tony hint at his outcome.
Side note: in talking about Darren, I’m going to spoil a gag that’s revealed early in the episode.
Darren’s plot from the finale gets the most screentime here, although there’s still some stuff we don’t know. First, let me explain a little about Joanne. Way back in the pilot, Ollie got called to a job that turned out to be a ruse—Joanne got pregnant after hooking up with a handyman, but she didn’t remember who, so her dad had been calling handymen to the house to see if anyone jogged her memory (or just beat up any handyman that he thinks might have done it.) At the end of the pilot, it comes out that Darren slept with Joanne, and we’re left to infer that he’s probably the father of her baby. In the finale, we learn that Tony sent Darren to talk to Joanne, but he chickened out. When confronted about it, he admitted to Ollie that he was a coward, scared to deal with the fact that he’d fathered a child.
Whatever happened between seasons, Darren is now all in on wanting to be a good dad. It isn’t clear if he and Joanne have gotten together or they’re just coparenting, but he wants to show that he can do this, even if he still has a lot of learning to do. In the opening scene, he’s wearing a baby carrier, although it’s quickly revealed that this isn’t his actual child—it’s one of those robot babies that teens practice with during sex ed. Mostly, he uses it as an excuse to avoid doing any work, and he occasionally swings it around by its head when he’s bored. But when it’s crying and Ollie urges him to take out the batteries, Darren refuses, insisting, “I have to play by the rules or else Joanne will kill me.” Of course, he then begs it to shut up, but you know, baby steps.
In between taking care of his robot baby and trying to come up with a middle name for his real one, Darren (sort of) helps Ollie with the children’s home fiasco. There are ways that he makes it worse, and when he realizes how badly Ollie has screwed up, he just smiles and says, “Brilliant,” but he does keep brainstorming solutions for how to get the supplies they need, even if Ollie doesn’t like most of them. This is admittedly one of Darren’s skills, albeit a somewhat underhanded one. Ollie doesn’t get much further than “buy a new kitchen set” and, when they don’t have the money for that, “see if the hardware store will spot us the parts to build our own.” Once those options are exhausted, he’s kind of stuck. Darren, though, keeps coming up with ideas for how to get a kitchen and/or money to pay for a kitchen. Are all his ideas feasible or ethical? No, but he flails less than Ollie because he thinks much more outside the box.
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