If you've got conflicted feelings about getting older, and suicide is in your family history, then perhaps "Louie" isn't the best show for you. What's billed as a sitcom about Louis C.K.'s semi-fictional life generally ends up being a circumstantially hilarious lesson in the inevitable compromise and disappointment of middle age, and while largely brilliant in execution, the show certainly won't serve as a motivational inflation of hope for those dredging about on the borderline.
Louis C.K.'s FX series continues to grow ever-more unsettlingly relatable as the first season reaches double digits, though the latest episode ("Dentist/Tarese") features a few predicaments most of us wouldn't be caught dead in. It's clear from the opening standup routine - centering on a molester's inevitable need to kill a kid after raping them - that this is gong to be a difficult episode.
Confirmation arrives in the next segment as we find Louie squirming uncomfortably in a dentist's chair. The dentist happens to be the amazing Stephen Root, who simply oozes creepiness as he attempts to calm Louie's jittery nerves with a new method that involves immensely close contact (see header pic) and what amounts to pillow talk for dentists. Then comes the nitrous gas...
While Louie is under, he dreams of finding Osama bin Laden and friends in the desert (let's just hope the horribly loose tarp setting backdrop was an intentional gag), and proceeds to scold him for 9/11 in a way more befitting of a frat brother taking the other to task for sleeping with his ex-girlfriend than for ushering in a new era of mass paranoia and worldwide "freedom" crusades.
"You totally shouldn't have done 9/11," he tells the world's most hunted man - after taking a cellphone pic with him first, of course. "Would you want anybody to do a 9/11-y thing to you?"
"Basically, you're saying we're assholes," bin Laden responds.
"I don't mean to offend you," Louie says, "but I think you're an asshole." As we attempt to register how bizarre this exchange is, bin Laden actually starts to regret being a terrorist, saying that he never saw it from the perspective Louie gave him. Just as the ludicrous begins to flirt with outright stupid, Louie is transported to the dentist-feeding-me-an-unpeeled-banana stage. We've all been there, right? With a medical professional guiding you through hallucinogenic fellatio with gentle, caressing words?
That's right - a very bad thing happened in our favorite ginger's mouth. Our friendly dentist was zipping up his pants in a hurry as Louie came out of his medically-induced haze.
We move from traumatically bizarre and possible sexual violation to five-alarm awkwardness when our hero's luck with women continues its downward spiral, as he stumbles all over himself while trying to talk to the checkout girl at his local grocer. She rejects the flowers he bought from her just to give her, resulting in a scolding from the twentysomething store manager.
Hearts plummet into stomachs as we later see Louie waiting outside as Tarese gets off work, and turn to brain-boiling vicarious humiliation as he follows her home on the subway, striking up unwelcome conversation. He continues to dig himself deeper into a no-chance hole, explaining how he didn't really mean for it to sound like his money can make up for his racially inferior manhood, until she finally cuts him off with a curt "Eat a dick, son!"
Amazingly, he's undeterred.
He exits the subway and uber-creepily walks her to her doorstep, where the cute cashier tells Louie that his interracial sex fantasy just ain't gonna happen. Sometimes you don't get what you want. Moments after she disappears into her building, a Precious doppleganger emerges, and her eyes light up as she scopes the pale caucasian fare loitering on her front porch.
Looks like Louie got what he wanted after all.
