‘Looking’ Recap, Season Two Episode One: “Looking For The Promised Land”

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For the past month or so, on buses, in subway stations, and on telephone booths across the city, the three protagonists of HBO's Looking, their two love interests, and one hag have been mugging for the camera, looking in different directions like they're in The Brady Bunch opening credits and, depending on how you felt about Season One, either promising or threatening: "There's more out there."

And we get really out there in Season Two's first episode. We open on the boys cruising in Dom's car, winding their way to Russian River upstate. Patrick, our doe-eyed protagonist, is rattling off facts about nature at Jerry Maguire Kid speed: "Did you know there's a tree around here that's over 1,400 years old? Did you know the human head weighs eight pounds? Did you know that bees and dogs can smell fear?"

"It'll be fun," he promises, "and educational." Just what everyone wants from a weekend away. When Agustín suggests a clothing-optional pool party as an alternative, Patrick clutches his pearls in the backseat and declares there "are not enough antibiotics in the world to get me in that water." Ew! Gay guys! I only go swimming at the gym in my office, where I design video games, which is totally not a stereotypical gay career.

Patrick's blatant (and sometimes not-so-blatant) homophobia has always read a bit like a way for non-gay or "not that kind of gay" viewers to access Looking. His naiveté about nearly every aspect of "gay life," at least as presented in the show, can serve as a stand-in for viewers' naiveté. Never seen an uncut latin cock? Don't worry, neither has Patrick! Scared you could get cooties by getting in a pool with some naked homos? So is he! But, regardless, he's in the car, going into the woods with his friends, and holding onto a deep dark secret, just waiting for the most inopportune moment to let it out.

They get to Lynn's cabin and, almost immediately, Lynn (who is now Dom's boyfriend) is on the phone barking instructions to Dom. The phone, of course, is an ancient cordless phone, because, remember, Lynn is old. Like, really old. So old he has an un-ironic portrait of himself hanging on the wall, which Agustín and Patrick ridicule. Never mind the fact that this portrait is significantly better than Agustín's unicorn-made-out-of-dicks art project that we saw last year. And never mind the fact that this guy was generous enough to offer up his cabin for the weekend.

It should be mentioned that Agustín's inclusion in this little getaway confirms that he did not, in the off season, die and/or suffer a major medical episode á la The Diving Bell and the Butterfly that rendered him unable to speak and only able to communicate by blinking his eyes, much to the chagrin of nearly every viewer of this show. He is still very much alive, treating this weekend as his own personal version of Carrie Bradshaw's Mexicoma, with more booze, drugs, and anonymous sex.

Though not if Patrick has anything to say about it. He thinks chill pills are preferable to actual pills this weekend (one gets the feeling Patrick loved D.A.R.E.), and, while we're at it, how about everyone cools it on the booze, too? By everyone he means Agustín, who has apparently taken his break-up with Frank (the charming O.T. Fagbenle who, I guarantee, had a rougher time on his grade school playground than you did) pretty hard. He's worried this weekend is an "inter-fucking-vention" (Looking's version of that other HBO show's "abso-fucking-lutely"). The conversation devolves until all three are talking over each other like they're in an episode of Parenthood. Agustín, like the evil trickster he is, flips the conversation to Patrick's obsession with Richie, whom he apparently hasn't spoken to since they broke up in last season's finale.

"You do know that getting drunk and getting some cock slapped around your face isn't the worst thing in the world," (Around your face?!) crows Agustín, and Patrick runs off into the woods, rocking and giggling back and forth in front of a 1,400-year-old tree until he has enough composure to call his mom to come pick him up. He thought he was ready for sleepaway camp, but he was wrong.

Patrick takes Agustín's provocation as an opportunity to almost tell the others his deep, dark secret, but instead decides to be evasive and coy because this is an episode of television and we are building toward a revelation, people.

Patrick somehow convinces the others to join him on a hike where he continues to spout facts at a breakneck pace, solidifying his role as That Guy You Definitely Want With You During a Relaxing Weekend Away, until he gets to the aforementioned 1,400-year-old tree, hugs it, and kisses it. That's right. The first action we get from Looking Season Two is some serious man-on-tree business. They warned us! If you let the gays get married…

And you get the feeling that most of this episode is shaped by complaints about Season One. People complained of that season's meandering pace, and this episode feels like a sprint. There were complaints (one I still maintain) that these characters never really felt like they were actual friends, and here we have an episode dedicated almost entirely to their friendship. People were upset at the tameness/severe lack of hot gay sex. Hold on, we're getting there.

Later, back at the cabin, Patrick walks in on Dom looking through Lynn's old photo albums and searching frantically for his diary. He wants to get to know Lynn better, and he's decided that this is a better route than, say, engaging in a conversation with him. They hint at a previous partner that Lynn lost to AIDS, a momentary acknowledgment of the cultural history that makes a show like Looking possible, but soon manage to find a way to make it about them again. Patrick quotes Walt Whitman (you get the feeling that he was really good friends with his high school A.P. English teacher), almost confesses his Big Secret but doesn't, and leaves to go bird watching. (Yes, really).

The next day the boys are rowing a metaphor down the river. ("I'm turning the boat around!" "So why are we going backwards?" "I really think we should just stop." "We're just going to go forward.") They come across a gay beach and are quickly approached by the witch from next door who commands them to go to the woods and find the cow as white as milk … oh, wait, no, it's just a bear inviting them to a party that night, promising that faeries will guide them. (Were the Radical Faeries among the groups of people extremely vocal about their exclusion from Season One?). After a bit of fat-shaming ("He's calling me chunky?"), they head back home.

Patrick wants to just stay home and play Monopoly, but Doris arrives and puts an end to that. Lauren Weedman continues to be the rush of molly (or is it X?) that this show so desperately needs. Her character is a caricature, yes, but she chews on that scenery until you're worried it's going to collapse, and she is a total joy to watch. They find their way to the faerie party, and Agustín pulls out some molly. Patrick can't believe it! Molly! But I thought we were going to be good and play Clue! But he quickly takes it and spends the next hour as The Person You Never, Ever Want To Do Molly With, constantly asking when he's going to feel it, the amateur user's version of "Are we there yet?" ("Promise you'll take care of me if I have a heart attack or get gang-raped or something," he implores them on bended knee.)

They stumble upon the party and we go into slow motion, which is how you know it's the real deal. Agustín immediately finds the bear from the beach earlier, perhaps because he is Damien from Mean Girls (incognito as "Eddie"), the only famous person at this party. Later, Agustín finds Patrick to dump some real talk on him: "I deal with feeling like a shitty person by being bad. You do it by being good." Patrick, who has never let an assessment of him, even by a crazy person, go unincorporated, decides then and there to Be Bad.

Badness presents itself in a boy in a baseball cap, who we are almost certainly led to believe is Richie, or The Idea of Richie, but he turns out to just be someone we've never seen before who is unimportant to this storyline. The night ends thus: Dom takes some guy back to Lynn's cabin and, mid-blow job, has a conversation about the parameters of their relationship (open); Patrick shakes that guy in the cap, sneaks off the in the woods to call someone (Surprise! It's Kevin! His boss! His Big Secret is that he is sleeping with his boss! And it's been happening for a while! All over the office! He "tossed [Patrick] off in the conference room"! British! Tee hee!) who makes the two-and-a-half hour drive from San Francisco to come and have sex with him against that really old tree, then drives home to his live-in boyfriend; Agustín goes skinny dipping with Damien from Mean Girls, who is pretending to be a person who refers to himself as "Saint Eddie, the Hairy-Ass Mother of the Mission," who works at a homeless center for gay and trans teens and who we learn is HIV-positive ("Oh!" says Patrick, moments before fainting); and Doris rides off into the night, topless, on the back of a lesbian's jet ski.

The next morning, sipping coffee and watching the sunrise, Patrick decides to reveal his Big Secret to Dom and Agustín, and he does so in which is one of the best lines of this television season: "I called him and he came up and he fucked me in the butt against a tree." (Last night was a big night for Butt Stuff on HBO.) They're like, "that's crazy!" But then they want to get back to talking about themselves. Patrick then asks, "Can we all just watch the sunrise and pretend that everything's going to turn out fine," which I almost certainly asked my BFFs when I was sixteen and we were going through some serious drama within the group. They agreed that we could; Dom and Agustín did, too, and the first episode of Season Two panned up onto some really old trees, one of which Patrick may have had some serious HBO-level pushing-the-envelope sex up against.

Stray observations:

- We learn that Agustin moved back in with Patrick and is still not paying rent, calling into question, "How much money do level designers make?" Real estate in San Francisco is insanely expensive and no one could possibly like Agustín that much.

- Is "maybe it's the Molly, but I can feel it in my toes" a great line or a terrible one?

- While skinny-dipping, Agustín admits to "Eddie" that he was a mediocre artist (and that he has given it up! Sayonara, dick unicorn!) in his first instance of showing even a shred of self-awareness.

- Every single one of us has had the "Should I call Richie? Should I text Richie? Should I Instagram Richie?" conversation/internal monologue. Deny it, I dare you.

- Are Dom and Patrick going to sleep together this season? That scene of them laying on the bed!

- "I was working, then everybody died, and now I get to get fucked up."

- They made a serious attempt to humanize Agustín in "The Promised Land" scene; I understand it, and I applaud it, but I still wish he wasn't a character I had to spend time with every week.

- What is that disco ball in the middle of the woods hanging from?

Brett Barbour is a writer who lives in Brooklyn and is prone to binge-watching.

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Photos: HBO

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