Each week Joe and Terry discuss the most recent episodes of HBO Max’s Search Party, alternating between our respective sites.

Spoilers follow for Episodes 4-6: “Home Again, Home Again, Jiggity-Jig”, “Doctor Mindbender”, and “The Thoughtless Woman”

TERRY

One of the things that I’ve loved from the very beginning of Search Party is the way it deftly balances some very dark thematic moments with the more lighthearted and comedic throughline. The way in Season 3, for instance, Chip (Cole Escola) covered Portia (Meredith Hagner) in honey with the intent to have hungry rats chew through her body followed up by Portia screaming about being honeyed as the twink ran away. The combination of what is actually a deeply troubling attack and the way the characters react to it in gloriously over-the-top fashion never ceased to make me giggle.

And I think, Joe, if I were to have a single complaint about Season 4 it’s that that deft hand is missing.

These middle episodes feel very serious and the humor is completely divorced from the drama. The main story is about Chip recapturing Dory (Alia Shawkat) after her brush with freedom at the end of “Escape to Nowhere” and subsequently brainwashing her to believe that she isn’t a murderer. It’s dark and oppressive, leaning hard into the psychological horror aspects we discussed in our previous recap. Chip takes Dory to an incredibly horrific mindset that makes for a very upsetting viewing experience. The only moments of levity in this particular storyline come from Ann Dowd’s very brief stint as Chip’s nosy and passive aggressive neighbor Paula Jo. Even then, unfortunately, the humor is relegated to the Boomer vs. Millennial conflict that the series has mined much more effectively in earlier seasons and plotlines.

After being recaptured, Dory is stuck in the backseat of the car while Chip and Paula Jo argue about Christmas decorations. When Dory tries to gasp out “help me” and “police,” Chip dramatically pushes over the ladder Paula Jo is on and she ends up in the Pee-Wee Playhouse dungeon with Dory. At this point, Dory is completely broken down and while Paula Jo yells about not understanding her generation (“snap out of it!” she yells at one point), Dory crawls around the floor to pick up tossed pieces of food. As this happens, Chip berates her, shouting, “Do you see, Dory? Do you see what happens when you betray me? Things get complicated!”

Even Paula Jo’s complicated dietary requirements and her constant beratement don’t bother Dory, who tells Paula Jo she’s happy she’s here because she hasn’t talked to anyone in months. More telling, she says that it’s starting to feel like one long day, “...and I’m starting to wonder if I’m ever going to get out of here. Or if I should kill myself.”

It’s bleak.

And this is before she gets brainwashed into a weird version of a Stepford Wife/Best Friend. The humor, meanwhile, is relegated to the side stories involving Elliott (John Early) and his upcoming promotion at a Fox News-like proxy and Portia’s performance as Dory in Savage: The Dory Sief Story. Portia’s story still remains my favorite in this episode as we’re quickly introduced to the actors cast to play the gang in the film. There’s Donna (Busy Phillips!) playing Portia, Nate (Benito Skinner) playing “The GBF” Elliott, as well as the gorgeous Charlotte (Bregje Heinen) hilariously playing Chantal. And then there’s Freddy (Justin Marcel McManus), who plays Drew (John Reynolds). When Portia realizes they’ve cast a Black man as the very white Drew, she stumbles over her words, saying, “I think it’s so cool that they did that.”

“You’re playing an Iraqi-American woman,” is his response to the also very white Portia...and I about died of laughter.

It’s a brief moment of hyper-real humor that Search Party excels at and, when confronted with the ugly and upsetting storyline involving Dory, it further cements the fact that the humor and drama are so far removed this season.

So I’m curious how you feel about these middle three episodes, Joe. What are your thoughts about the way this season is coming together as an inverse of Season 1 where Dory is now the object of the search party? What do you think about the way these three episodes balance the horror and the humor? And now that we are in the midst of the search party, do you like the progression that leads “The Gang” to Ennis (Andre Hyland) and eventually to Richard (Griffin Dunne) and Gertrude (Deborah Rush) Wreck and a big corporation called Lil’ Stickies?

JOE

Yeah it’s odd, Terry, because reviewing my notes, there are plenty of moments that made me chuckle, but overall the dread feels so all encompassing that it’s hard for the lighter, monarch butterfly moments to truly land.

This is particularly evident in episode 5 “Doctor Mindbender”. Half of the episode focuses on the gang in a pointless farce of a search. The other half is Chip mentally breaking Dory down using a Get Out method that includes a new mid-sized diorama, his amazingly detailed dolls and a record that plays a portion of the Search Party theme song ‘Obedear’ by Purity Ring.

Credit to director John Lee for finding an innovative way of capturing Dory’s increasingly fractured psyche in this sequence. The Montreal kitchen of season one is recreated like a film set, while the surrounding space from which Dory emerges is an inky black maw (it reminded me of Under The Skin). Watching Dory struggle to process Chip’s commands to swap the taser to a different hand, and then change it out completely for a pear was fascinating and really worked.

But it wasn’t funny.
It was fucked up.

You can see writers Matt Kriete and Andrew Flemming trying to contrast Dory’s incredibly grim predicament with her three bozo friends assaulting the wrong twink on a houseboat, then having their car stolen, and then being left in their underwear in the middle of the woods...but it just doesn’t land strongly enough to balance out Dory’s storyline. The further Search Party goes down this route with its lead character (Sidebar: has Shawkat ever been better?), the harder it is to find the funny in the cartoony antics of Drew, Portia and Elliot.

Which isn’t to say it isn’t working. I was loving the meta-bullshit of Portia’s time on Savage and was legitimately bummed to see her canned after a single scene. Sadly, it’s reflective of the show’s tendency to lose interest in storylines without giving them enough time to come together; here it smacks of easy target practice where the characters are the jokes (a supermodel! Busy Phillips! Diversity casting!) Once the fish in the barrel have been shot, though, the show moves on. It’s such a missed opportunity!

Enter Richard and Gertrude. This one really didn’t land for me because it seemed so obvious that they’re Chip’s parents, but I couldn’t tell if Search Party knew that we know or whether the joke is simply on Drew, Portia and Elliot. The extended bit about Mickey (John Lagioia), the old timey radio show and Gertrude’s inability to take a photo felt too much like a drawn-out SNL bit. We know that the trio are pretty daft, but come on…

But then I swing back to the small, utterly hilarious and ridiculous moments in these three episodes: Elliot’s Guns, which are “always loaded, no safety”; Charlie Reeny (Chloe Fineman) randomly getting beaned in the head by a book that falls out of the sky; Early’s line delivery of “We’re not going to say you’re attractive. You’re fishing” and even the shuttered ice cream store’s sign: “67 years of servicing this town, we’ve decided to stop.”

It’s funny stuff, Terry! But you’re right that the balance is...off. It’s as if the writers didn’t realize that the Dory stuff isn’t darkly comedic; it’s just plain dark. And that weighs everything else down to the point that the funny comes across as inappropriate compared to Dory’s psychological torture.

I’ll throw it back to you here: what did you think of Marc (Jeffrey Self)’s discovery of Dory in Babyfoot, Massachusetts? Do you think Drew’s Merry Merry Land girlfriend, Cindy (Rebecca Robles) will take the red eye to New York? And have we seen the last of Savage?

TERRY

I don’t think we’ve seen the last of Savage, Joe. I’m curious whether Portia was really canned or not. I took the “take a week and come back” to be a get-out-of-jail card of narrative convenience for Portia to go on this search party...but I would love to see her come back to discover she’s been replaced.

I love this whole sequence of Portia trying to find some concept of closure and pathos to the character while the annoyed (and very funny...and hilariously named) director Lassie Kaazar (Tami Sagher) just wants to do for Dory what she did for Einstein in Miami. People just want to see Einstein...in Miami. So I’m hopeful we’ll come back to this exceedingly funny riff on our obsession with true crime.

I’m similarly hopeful that Cindy does take that red eye to New York and forces Drew to come to terms with his feelings for Dory. You mentioned in our previous recap that Cindy is the fairytale ideal that Drew wants, not the messiness that people really are and I have to think that that’s one of the reasons they introduced her this season. So hopefully she helps bring resolution to the characters.

In the same way, while it was a bit too convenient that Marc happens to get his Christmas tree in Babyfoot, I was happy to see him return as a way of bringing a resolution to his character arc.

And I say resolution because I’m getting the feeling, Joe, that this might be the final season. I think we’ll know for sure as we move into the final four episodes, but the narrative seems so razor-focused on resolutions and punishment, particularly in reference to our obsession with Dory. Late last season, prosecutor Polly Danzinger (Michaela Watkins) pulls Dory aside after the Not Guilty verdict to tell her that she’s been a practicing Buddhist for years. Polly brings up the concept of karma and that Dory will eventually get what’s coming to her.

The theme this season, so far, seems to be enacting that karmic punishment as Dory has been forced through gauntlet after grueling gauntlet. She’s been broken down, given a ghost of a chance at escape, was made the “reason” for Paula Jo’s death and has now been brainwashed. At one point this season, Chip even tells her how great it is that the truth has set her free. He reminds her that she could have been in prison right now...but instead by telling “the truth” she’s now in a madhouse of her own making.

It feels very retributive, Joe. And on one hand...it makes sense. We’ve been following this character for four seasons now as she’s made terrible decision after horrible decision, morphed into her own version of a femme fatale and has seemingly gotten away with a double homicide. So I understand this desire to poke holes in this idea of what Dory is (in the same way You pokes holes in people’s obsession with Joe, its main character).

On the other hand, this is a character we’ve all grown to love. Seeing the horrors dispensed on her isn’t entertaining. It’s depressing.

So I’m curious what you think. We’re almost 2/3 through this potentially final season and the creators appear to have introduced Dory’s perfect foil in Chip, a character who is a prime example of white privilege and no repercussions. “If anything’s wrong with me, it’s that I was given too many options growing up,” he says at one point…”that’s the pressure of true privilege.” Do you see them as flip sides of the same coin: obsessed with their idea of truth, regardless of the facts? Do you think the show is trying to punish us for cheering for Dory for three seasons? And honestly Chip gives me such Psycho vibes that I gotta ask...where, exactly, is Aunt Lila?

JOE

That last one is the $64K question, isn’t it, Terry? Episode six ends with the suggestion that there’s something to be concerned about with Aunt Lila (Gertrude looks displeased to learn that Chip has left the expensive hotel they put him up at and gone to stay with Richard’s sister). I wouldn’t be surprised to learn that Chip has his dear old Aunt in a rocking chair up in the attic, though considering Search Party’s track record for dekeing left and then going right when it comes to expectations, she could just as easily be revealed on vacation somewhere - maybe with April in Fiji!

But back to your larger morality questions about Dory, our sympathy for her and whether this is a punishment for us both...I have to think yes? I’m flashing back to our conversations about the thread (and even in the first recap of this season) where we actively celebrating Dory’s turn to villainy as a femme fatale. Now obviously we weren’t condoning the murder of Keith, but there is something to be said for a satirical show like Search Party doing its damndest to take a character on this dark journey, make us most interested in her by positioning her as the lead, and the smacking us in the head with the ramifications of her actions.

Does Dory deserve the punishment that Chip inflicts on her? No.
Should she be in jail? Yes.
Is there something both traumatizing and cathartic about the moment that she breaks down and admits that she hates herself for being a killer, and lying, and getting away with it?

...also yes?

One of the most laudable elements of this series is the fact that it is never content to play it safe. Obviously some will quibble and say that it doesn’t always work and sometimes the storylines flop (and flop hard), but you have to admire a property like this that isn’t afraid to make its characters despicable, while still acknowledging their humanity...and finding some genuinely hilarious satire in there, as well.

So I’m with you that this three episode run isn’t my favourite. But damn if I don’t respect the series for putting Dory on trial as it (maybe) creeps towards its series finale.

And that’s where we’re headed next. We have one more block of four episodes. Presumably Chip will be discovered and dealt with (my guess: locked up in jail...possibly along with Dory). I, like you, Terry, hope we’ll see some version of Savage: The Dory Sief Story, either filming or on screen. Drew will maybe admit that he either still has feelings for Dory or isn’t the nice guy that he thinks/pretends to be.

And Elliot? I’m unsure of what a satisfying end would be for what is debatably the show’s second worst character. Sending him back to his humble backwater roots seems the likeliest option, but it’s also too cliché and predictable. He’s been failing up all season, so maybe he’ll wind up a success (finally - after all of his failed ventures). Maybe he’ll become the new spokesperson for Lil’ Stickies!

That would be genuinely surprising.

We’ll find out when we hop back to QueerHorrorMovies for the final (ever?) episodes.