Review: Looking, Season 2, Episode 3

Looking Top to Bottom


A pair of douches

Patrick and Kevin continue their puppy-dog love affair this episode, with the pair finally making plans to spend a full weekend together while Kevin’s boyfriend is away on business. Kevin pushes Patrick to spend some time with his friends; Patrick relents but is more concerned about the quality of the prolonged sex session they will have. Thus, Patrick gets Agustin to give him the 411 on douching his “self-cleaning oven.” In one of the episode’s driest moments of comedy, Patrick sits awkwardly — ass up, face down — in his bathroom with his new douche and proclaims the act to be “so sexy.” There was an opportunity for much more comedy with the perils of first-time douching, but sadly, this opportunity was flushed away.

Patrick and Kevin’s day date goes off without a hitch, and at the end they make sweet love, the kind of sexy times where Patrick gets to be the top and they look each other in the eyes. But at the end of it all, Kevin sneaks away to call his boyfriend and cover for his unexplained absence as Patrick pretends to be sleeping. At this point, Patrick would be an idiot to continue things any longer, so something tells me this storyline has a few more episodes in it at most.

Tackling a spoiled brat

Dom’s high point in this episode comes when he plays his first game as part of a local gay rugby team. In what surely is the network debut of the notion of a gay rugby team, Dom plays a rough-and-tumble match while his friends cheer him on from the sidelines. Looking finally gets its first glimpse of cock thanks to a titillating but obvious post-game locker-room scene. In the showers, a teammate tells Dom congrats because he’s heard that Dom’s boyfriend Lynn hooked him up with a sweet management gig at a local restaurant. Dom is still eager to chase his restaurant-ownership dreams despite no specific resources and investors who only want him to manage their restaurants, and this pisses him right off. Dom immediately storms out of the locker room and confronts Lynn, insisting that Lynn doesn’t support his dreams. Considering that Lynn was the one who paid for his pop-up restaurant last season and seems likely to be the only person helping him now, this whole scene makes Dom seem like a spoiled little prick. Reality check: you can chase your dreams while also taking on a better job than you already have, especially if you’re depending on others to finance said dreams.

Say sorry with salsa

 

Agustin takes it upon himself to apologize to Patrick’s ex Richie for being a dick to him when he was with Patrick and to thank him for rescuing his GHB-overdosing ass last episode. Agustin does this by showing up at Richie’s barber shop with a surprise offering of racially appropriate food and an order of his half-baked charm. Richie accepts the apology and offers Agustin a free beard trim. If this scene is a precursor to a future fling between the pair, shoot me now. There has to be a better way to keep him on the show than subjecting his character to that.

Pro: The locker-room scene — as cliché as they are — did feature some hunky-looking dudes. It’s also the first time I can recall seeing fit, hairy guys with back hair shown as sexually appealing on television.

Con: Patrick’s naive nature knows no end. He brags in the drugstore about being bravely sex-positive and proclaims to the whole store that he is buying two douches and is not having a colonoscopy. The woman behind him delivers a line that could be applied to the main problem with Patrick’s character on the show: dismissing his faux-radical posturing with a laugh she says, “Honey, don’t you know where you live?”

Best line: “I don’t know if I’ll be able to have sex with him on a bed without bedbugs and cum stains.” — Patrick on getting to finally spend quality time with Kevin

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