Loot hit that comedy sweet spot for me from the very beginning. It has the exact right amount of silly + biting + heartfelt to always keep it interesting and smart while still letting us root for some endearing characters. I like rooting for my comedy characters; get off my back! While not every beat in “Vengeance Falls” hits, it easily shows off why this formula is so winning. We’re laughing out loud and getting meaningful character development? We’re watching character pairings both new and old progress and Maya Rudolph and Joel Kim Booster scream “okay” at each other in a way that is so absurd it changed me as a human being? Sign me up for all of it.
In the back half of Loot’s first season, Molly misses Nicholas’s stage debut because of billionaire shenanigans, and in the end, promises her assistant/codependent friend/son sort of? that she’ll never miss another one of his plays. She wants to be there for him. And here she is, making good on that promise. Not only is Molly going to be in the front row when the curtain on Vengeance Falls comes up, but she’s rehearsing lines with the guy. It’s a moment to show us Molly really making an effort with Nicholas and to show us these two saying lines like “I can’t get the taste of you out of my mouth” and “Don’t you fucking fall in love with me” with such passion that I, too, believed Nicholas was really “a former gigolo who got into city planning.”
Molly takes her promise to be there for Nicholas one step further. A step too far, some might say. Nicholas has invited everyone in his life to come see the show — “my gym friends, my yoga frenemies, my lesbian dentist, my stalkers, and the people I’m stalking” — everyone except his own parents. He tells Molly it’s because they live in the middle of Indiana and it would be “too much of a hassle” for them. Anyone who has even a modicum of ability to pick up on normal human emotions would realize Nicholas isn’t exactly being truthful here; Molly does not realize this, not one little bit! Instead, she secretly invites Nicholas’s parents to the show and ambushes him with them moments before the play begins.
Nicholas’s parents are about as midwestern vanilla as it gets. You can see they have zero understanding of their son’s life in Los Angeles or acting in general, and mostly his dad just stands there and describes the route he took to drive from Indiana to L.A. before there’s an awkward silence and they leave to sit down. Molly doesn’t get why Nicholas is so upset with her, but what’s not to get about inviting his super-conservative parents to a play in which “there are only, like, three scenes that are not sex scenes.”
Suddenly, Nicholas is onstage changing lines like “How about we kill him with this dagger that I’m holding and then fuck for the rest of our lives?” to things more like “I can’t get last night out of my head, you and me watching Everybody Loves Raymond on the couch and then I went home alone!” It is a disaster. Dinner back at Molly’s doesn’t get any better. While Molly is trying to hype up Nicholas and applaud his work, his parents immediately revert back to stories of the aunt of some girl named Kayla they ran into at the local Kroger and their new tractor. Apparently, Nicholas was a wiz with the tractor back in the day: “Of course I was good at tilling; I’m good at everything,” he says. He knows this whole conversation is just a very repressed way for his parents to express their desire to have their son back home in Indiana. As Nicholas later explains to Molly, they’re midwestern, he’s midwestern and Asian: “It’s like a repression Olympics.”
Once Nicholas gets his parents out of there, he finally has it out with Molly. He’s tried with his parents! He’s tired of trying! So, instead, he has vowed to stick to topics they’re comfortable with: “Kroger, Kayla, and who has cancer.” And this is where the real impasse between Molly and Nicholas arises. Nicholas finds it really rich (pun intended) to have Molly advise him on being vulnerable and putting in the work to grow (she’s been on a real SJ, or “spiritual journey.” as of late) when the woman literally cannot do one thing on her own. She wouldn’t last a night without any of her staff.
You can guess what happens next: Molly dismisses her house staff, her kitchen staff, and her aquarium staff and attempts to keep herself alive for the evening. The whole sequence of Molly succeeding at doing basic tasks (she can vacuum! she can hang up her own clothes!) and then being felled by a beeping smoke alarm until she winds up accidentally getting locked in her panic room is full of fun Maya Rudolph stuff, but it does feel like a long-winded way to get to the point. Also, was anyone else just yelling at her to toss that smoke alarm in one of her five pools? Molly’s no dummy, just obliviously living in her billionaire bubble. This felt like a stretch. But it does lead to a lovely little conclusion: Nicholas comes to rescue Molly, and while she feels like a failure, he commends her for simply trying and also for not being a boring, well-adjusted person; the horror, honestly! And while Molly promises to never give Nicholas advice on his parents again, she does give him a big hug and tells him that she’ll always be there for him. It’s very sweet!
And, inadvertently, Molly does sort of show Nicholas the way: She reminds him that trying is half the battle. Nicholas winds up going to see his parents again. He wants to tell them about his audition for a Lipitor commercial, and he gives them very detailed directions to dinner — he’s speaking midwestern. And you know what? His parents know people who take Lipitor; they would love to hear about it. Everybody is trying.
The other story line in the episode is like Molly with her smoke alarm. It is a bit of a stretch, but it has a nice emotional payoff, too. Thanks to some suspicious moves and even more suspicious days off, Howard thinks that Sofia is secretly a Swiftie. She, of course, denies this. She is a serious person. She only listens to “podcasts about systemic racism and urban decay.” But Howard — a huge Swiftie himself — just can’t shake it off. (Howard is full of the Taylor lyric puns, so don’t you groan at me.) He goes so far as to make a PowerPoint presentation running through the evidence instead of the actual presentation he was supposed to give for his job. But when Sofia stands firm in her non-Swiftie position and explains she won’t be at work the day of the Taylor Swift concert because she’s helping her sick great-aunt through a dicey surgery, Howard feels like he’s crossed a line.
He goes to Sofia’s place that night to apologize and to explain why he wouldn’t drop it. He really looks up to Sofia and thinks it would be special to have something in common like that. Howard remains a complete sweetheart, albeit a terrible DIY Edible Arrangement artist.
And then he’s vindicated. He finds Taylor Swift albums hidden in the jackets of Sofia’s record collection. That’s not a Marvin Gaye album in there; it’s a collector’s edition of Evermore. When Sofia is caught, even her motive for wanting to keep her Swiftie status secret is more meaningful than you’d assume: As a young Afro-Latina woman, she’s had to fight hard to be taken even a little bit seriously in her work, so she thought outing herself as an enormous Taylor Swift fan might hinder that. Howard promises to keep her secret … as long as the two of them can hang out and talk Taylor theories. It might be the greatest day of Howard’s life.
At face value, every story line in this episode feels like it could easily veer into mushy, eye-rolling territory — but that’s where that winning Loot formula comes in. Could you imagine how treacly and earnest those stories would end up without the creative team behind Loot (this episode is written by Emily Spivey and directed by Alan Yang) and this all-star cast doing their thing? That razor-sharp comedy with just enough heart tossed in, oh baby, that’s the good stuff right there.
Notes From a Group Talk Session
• “What is healthy? I train like an Avenger, but I’m functionally addicted to ketamine; the word healthy is meaningless to me.”
• “No one has a great-aunt, they only exist when someone wants to get out of work or a term paper.”
• I forgot how much I love the fact that Molly’s dogs are named Mary-Kate and Ashley.
By Maggie Fremont , 2024-04-10 15:00:43
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