Oh no, guys! Could the bromance be over? Are George and Jonathan really broken up? Does the whole situation remind you of some lame Entourage plot? Why do we need to labor over such shitty cliffhangers, Bored to Death? It might be because this episode was a pretty lackluster affair and needed something interesting to happen (aside from Ray having sex with Olympia Dukakis, which…I’ll get to in a minute). But either way I don’t particularly care for it. We all know that George and Jonathan will be bonded at the hip again soon enough, so why bother with this shit?
The wedge driven between them was especially contrived – we have to suffer through another episode that keeps the gang apart, but this time Jonathan gets paired with Emily so she can annoy him instead of her father. It’s very frustrating to see Halley Feiffer languish in this role and show us glimpses of what a charming actress she can be. But Emily is such a cartoonish fool, the glimpses stay just that and mostly she’s going on about being a plushie and her plums and on and on and on.
Jonathan is enlisted by George to go out and show her a fun youthful time, but George for some reason fails to mention that Emily is in AA. When she ends up drinking and getting punched in the face by a friendly gay man in a tiger suit, George blames Jonathan and tells him he’s disappointed and wants to go on a break, and it all just feels a little forced. Bored to Death rarely gets too dramatic, so any such attempt is just jarring, no matter how muted the argument.
I will say, however, that I very much enjoyed Brett Gelman as Jonathan’s double in the mystery of the week, a creepy mirror image Jonathan whose every line delivery was a little unsettling (a specialty of Mr. Gelman’s). Here’s a guy who decided to become an unlicensed snoop not for the romantic, noir-y feeling but because he’s a sex-obsessed weirdo who likes spying on people. It was a gentle poke at the inherently unreal premise of the show and Gelman was perfect casting, nailing every perverted twist on a Hammett or Chandler line, which was basically all of his dialogue.
While all that’s going on, George runs into his nemesis Richard Antrem (Oliver Platt) who is running a copycat restaurant to try and take down George’s and has employed Louis Green as a busboy. Platt and Danson bounce off each other well, as usual, but since this episode is following Jonathan’s escapade with Louis, it feels like a retread. Plus, the rivals’ restaurants warring to be more local than the other is a bit of a simplistic gag, and the idea that one specific restaurant would be put out of business by the other in New York City is ridiculous, unless they’re next door to each other.