Luckily this episode gives us a faster start than the previous one, with sharp digs at America’s history of failures in Afghanistan and Iran. Seriously.
The writers had fun exploiting CIA and military stereotypes throughout the episode, especially when Captain Maggie Quinn reveals she has a friends-with-benefits in the CIA coming to visit. I was thrilled Danny Pudi made a reference to Fantasy Suites on The Bachelor franchise, but bummed they didn’t mention the infamous and very Dutch windmill sex from a few Bachelor seasons ago.
This tame sex joke set up some increasingly racy ones which I was genuinely surprised made it past any censors. I’m a fallen Catholic from the Midwest and thus some of these prompted a sustained eyebrow raise from me:
1. Private Anthony “BA” Chapman can’t fit into his formal wear for a gala event because apparently the BA in his name stands for Briefs Anaconda. The women in the cast are tasked with objectifying Private Chapman, played by Dempsey Bryk and eventually solve the penis vs. pants problem with a kilt (which did make me smile).
I guess I was surprised a huge weiner plotline was approved for Thursdays at 9:30 p.m. in God’s Country, Eastern and Pacific. Would I be uncomfortable watching this around my parents? Not sure.
2. Maggie circumvents her dad’s orders by sneaking her CIA FWB into the laundry department, where she has been ordered to stay for the entirety of her boyfriend’s visit. They end up having sex on a large pile of dirty laundry and afterward the boyfriend shares a naughty plan to remove Denis Leary from the base. Maggie misinterprets his allusions to the naughty plan, saying she was up for anything and, “Peggy is actually a nickname for Margaret”.
I am just imagining watching this with my parents. What if I laughed? What if they laughed? The executives approving this script must be 90 years old or asleep.
As someone who watches a lot more YouTube than network TV, the discrepancy between what makes it to traditional television vs. what content creators can say to stay monetized feels huge. This was an unexpected realization from my experiment watching network TV.
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