After the massive shoulder-shrug that greeted my question about whether we should continue covering Entourage at The A.V. Club, I pretty much decided that if you didn’t care and I didn’t care, then there was really no sense in us getting together every week. There was a mini outpouring of support (that’s right, TWO @joshmodell tweets saying, “Don’t quit, Josh!”), and a few comments on other threads after I skipped last week, which made me rethink the possibility slightly. And then there was last week’s episode—the one I skipped—which was actually (gasp!) pretty decent. Especially the relationship between Ari and Gary Cole’s character, whose name I can’t remember right this second. I also remembered that the Internet is full of inane shit written by people who don’t care much about their subject, so this lil’ weekly recap is bound to float at least slightly above that. Let’s see if we can keep it together for another ten weeks! (I’m not guaranteeing anything.)
But hey, things are looking up! Last week’s episode was fairly solid, as was this week’s. Eric is beginning to have a life outside of Vince, and he’s dating the annoying (?) or awesome (?) but hot (!) Alexis Dziena, who horny dudes will recognize from her extremely naked part in Jim Jarmusch’s Broken Flowers. Bow Wow is back as his client, a plot thread that seemed to have been dropped about a hundred years ago. When things go bad for Bow Wow (a.k.a. Charlie), Eric turns to the devil who might have some good advice: Ari. In an actually fairly funny moment, Ari advises Eric to shout “racism!” when Charlie is removed from the sitcom that he wrote and that Eric is producing. (Surprisingly, it doesn’t work.) A great line from Ari and Eric’s scene—one of those inside-Hollywood lines that Entourage used to have a lot of—was this: “Produce 100 episodes of even mediocre television and you can buy him a Gulfstream to cry on.”
Meanwhile, Turtle is having an identity crisis of the sort that either signals he’s a) growing up or b) the producers have run out of shit for him to do. After receiving TWO Ferraris for his 30th birthday—one from his rich friend Vince, the other from his rich girlfriend Meadow Soprano—Turtle feels like a loser, and he wants to do his own thing. Who does he turn to for advice? Ari, of course, who somehow backs off from being a colossal asshole for a few minutes. (It suits him.) The upshot of all this? Turtle is going back to school. Sounds like a dead fucking end to me, or worse, a spin-off. We’ll find out!
In other Turtle news, he talks to his mean mom and the gay mobster from The Sopranos. (Has that dude been on the show before?) It’s all leading up to some kind of business plan for Turtle. Maybe he’ll turn out to be richer than all the rest of ‘em when the show finally comes to an end.
And that’s it, really. A pretty lightweight episode, but fun enough. I realize that’s damnation with faint praise, but this week and last week’s episodes are probably as good as Entourage is ever going to get from here on out. If that sounds horrible, maybe it’s time to jump off the train. I’ll probably stick around a while longer. Will you?
Grade: C+
Stray observations
— the “Two Coreys” line was pretty good.
— the whole “Lloyd is super subservient” subplot is just an excuse to leave Rex Lee’s character completely unchanged for another season. Which I guess is fine…