Welcome back to what this week can be described as a literal trip on Broad City. After a one-week hiatus, the girls are back and higher than ever, which made for an extremely colorful rendition of what has become a perennial tradition, namely including animation and/or mythical creatures in at least one episode per season. It began with the introduction of Abbi’s stuffed toy, Bingo Bronson, coming to life and accompanying her on a jaunt around the city while she was still high after her wisdom tooth surgery in season two. Bingo Bronson makes an appearance here, too, but this episode goes even higher. The entire first half is animated.
We open on Abbi and Ilana making a gourmet mushroom salad that includes every kind of mushroom, most of them culinary. Then they add the most enormous pile of shrooms ever to this salad and each take a huge, yogurt-y bite.
The girls have a plan this day. They will eat shrooms, pack their day packs, and wander around the city, for friendship and fun. This is precisely what they do, and their walk through the city is visually overwhelming (for the un-high viewer, at least) but very, very colorful.
Along the way, Abbi and Ilana marvel that mothers are literal superheroes and turn into flying breastfeeding human-growers. They encounter an underpass and hold each other. Their fear soon turns to fascination with more color bursts, and they spot the cartoon head of Lincoln and the aforementioned Bingo Bronson. They muse endlessly that love is, like, SO cool. They are having the best Saturday, completely unaware of the very funny moments in which other people (also animated) seem very annoyed and/or confused by them.
But then Abbi gets a text from Wanda Sykes aka Dara, her boss, asking her to pick up 100 macarons for her wife’s birthday party that night. Wanda’s face pops out of the phone screen to say she knows it’s Saturday but she really needs this because she didn’t get the hint from her wife and will be in trouble if she doesn’t deliver her favorite dessert.
Abbi panics, but Ilana assures her that they can definitely handle it, so as they turn into cucumbers. Ilana wonders about pickles being the trans people of the vegetable community, and they walk calmly down the street to the French bakery.
They manage to procure the macarons, which honestly I’m not sure how, and somehow make it to Dara’s house. At this point, the episode has shifted into live action again, except for Abbi and Ilana’s eyes, which remain animated. They’re coming down, but they’re still tripping.
Dara lets them in and thanks them, inviting them to stay at the party, mingle, and eat. Ilana immediately spots Fig from Orange is the New Black in the corner and her eyes pop out in that googly-eye way. She heads over to talk to her, and Fig (whose character is never named, so Fig she will remain) immediately proposes a threesome with her partner Dean, who is across the room and looking smolderingly in their direction. Ilana is very into this idea, of course.
Meanwhile, Abbi is artistically stacking macarons in the kitchen when Dara approaches her and tells her that she’s looked at Abbi’s website and admires her artwork. She’d like to talk more about Abbi taking on a more creative role at work, and Abbi is very excited about this. They make a plan to have a meeting about it on Monday.
As both Abbi and Ilana dip further down from their high (their eyes are back to normal now), they sneak into another room to smoke some weed so they don’t lose it completely before the end of the night. Abbi wishes Ilana godspeed on her threesome adventure and decides to stay in the room alone for a while and not freak out. When Ilana leaves, Abbi sees a cat trying to get outside, so she lets the cat out. I think we can all see where this will end.
When Abbi decides to go back to the party, she can’t open the door and thinks she’s locked in, leading to a minor freak-out. Dara knocks on the door and Abbi lets her in, proving that she was not in fact locked in at all, and confesses that she is on a bad trip. Dara is very understanding and says it was her fault for calling her on a Saturday. We’ve all had bad trips. But things never end this well for Abbi.
Sure enough, Dara opens the door to the outside to let some air in, and her dead cat falls into the room. It is very unclear what killed Amanda the cat, but since Abbi let her out, she’s fired.
Meanwhile, Ilana can’t get into the mood with Fig and Dean because she’s so distracted by Lincoln’s animated head, which speaks to her from a toothbrush and a suitcase. So the three of them call it off.
The next day, Abbi and Ilana are in Ilana’s bed, because of course they are, and Ilana takes out her rainbow-cased phone and her laptop. After clicking through many, many photos of Lincoln and his new girlfriend on his social media pages, she unfriends/unfollows him on everything. She lets out a cathartic scream, and commiserates with Abbi about the dead cat.
I give this episode 3.5/5 Whole Foods 365 brand white cheddar popcorn bags. Because munchies.
Until next week, queens!
