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Search Party

Exodus
Season 5 Episode 2
Editor’s Rating 4 stars

Search Party

Exodus
Season 5 Episode 2
Editor’s Rating 4 stars
Photo: Jon Pack/HBOMax

Okay, first thing’s first: The message is love? That’s so dumb. “Love” isn’t the hard-to-sell concept Dory and her new hippie friends seem to think it is. And “ego death” is so vague as to be meaningless. It’s very fitting that, even as Dory finds an audience for her message, that message is essentially hollow.

Here’s how Dor has processed her near-death experience: Dying allowed her to merge all the sides of herself, experience ego death, and come back with ancient wisdom. We saw this merge moment in the season-four finale when the various Dories in meaningful costumes all Voltroned into each other. Thing is, were Dory’s different “selves” ever all that different? And how is reconciling your different selves really reconciling with ego death? Arguably, your ego is even stronger now since all the selves have unionized. It is cool that death taught her how to pick locks, though.

Fed up with not being able to spread her message, Dory escapes from the mental institution. She somehow manages to bake banana bread dosed with sleeping pills, then steals an orderly’s keys. The jailbreak is almost undone by her squeaky shoes. But why is she in real shoes, anyway, and not grippy socks? This is a terrible hospital. Dory busts out and goes on live on the orderly’s purloined phone. The people are feeling the message. Well, almost everyone.

Enter Tunnel Quinn. Played by Jeff Goldblum, he seems to basically be this world’s Elon Musk. If Elon Musk was a deeply Jeff Goldblum–y character. Tunnel does a front-facing video explaining to his followers that he doesn’t buy what Dory’s selling. He thinks it’s a further manifestation of her psychosis. He’s making points. Nevertheless, Dory invites him to do some reflection and maybe try love.

Elliott interrupts Portia and Drew’s coitus to let them know Dory has escaped and did a front-facing manifesto. Portia and Drew are still keeping their … whatever … from Elliott. But he’s too wrapped up in himself to figure out the truth, even when it’s echoing in his ears. The gang reconvenes at Portia’s, where Dory has already broken in. Apparently, enlightenment makes you a big fan of breaking and entering. The three let Dory take them to a late lunch at a nearby café because (as Elliott points out) they’re too scared of her not to go.

At the café, the gang is having difficulty swallowing Dory’s latest transformation. She’s asking the universe what we, as humans, did to deserve pasta. She’s ministering to a day drunk. It’s too much, too soon for them. After lunch, Dory demands they spend the day together because each moment is precious or some shit. I guess Dor had access to lots of philosophy and spirituality books in the hospital, but one of them wasn’t McMindfulness.

Would you believe that, for Dory, cherishing each precious moment involves breaking into yet another apartment? This time it’s the one that she and Drew shared at the start of the series. It’s been completely transformed by its new “yuppie” owners, as Elliott remarks. Imagine Elliott not seeing himself as a yuppie. Utter delusion. Anyhoo, Dory love-bombs them into dancing to a fave banger from their college days, Usher’s “DJ Got Us Fallin’ in Love.” Living in the moment is temporarily interrupted when the current occupants of Dory and Drew’s old place return to find their home invaded.

The quartet is drinking in the park at sunset, and almost everybody has been charmed by Dor. Portia is 100 percent converted. Elliott is either mostly on board or faking it (and honestly, what’s the difference with Elliott?). Dory says that she’s never offered herself compassion until now, which is fucking rich. But she does offer what seems like a genuine apology for the past few years of insanity. Drew is still on the fence. He’s been burned too many times to believe this particular reinvention, and who could possibly blame him for that? He does get one gesture of good faith from Dor: She admits to killing April, as well as taking some culpability for killing Keith.

This is huge. Dory has always shied away from all the murders, going into such a state of denial during the trial that it was terrifying for those around her. Maybe what Dory means by being able to offer compassion to herself is that she’s finally able to accept the awful things she’s done. Before, Dory ran away from her misdeeds; now, she’s just kinda over them. Shouldn’t there be some middle step, besides 37 seconds of flatlining?

Dory is staying with Portia now, apparently. They’ve gone from best friends to enemies to sharing a toothbrush. Portia swears fealty to Dory and admits to her relationship with Drew. Guru Dory is all about free love, so that’s all good. She checks social media before bed, only to find that Tunnel Quinn is inviting her to collab. Big yikes.

Earlier in the episode, Dory seems to indicate that she wants to help people “die” and that will help them all come to enlightenment and learn to lock-pick like her. Whether she means this death spiritually or literally is worryingly unclear. With a techbro billionaire as a partner, literal mass death feels very, very possible.

Stray Pages From the Book of Dory

• The bad sex Drew and Portia have. Wow. Every time you think these two can’t get sadder, they get sadder.

• What app is Dory using to get her message out? It looks like Instagram, which would be fitting for a show about millennials. But every piece of media you see on her phone is a front-facing video, which feels more TikTok? Is Dory using Reels? Lemme know in the comments.

• Speaking of Dory’s phone (which she stole from the orderly), it’s an iPhone. If Rian Johnson is right, and Apple won’t let their products be used by villains, maybe that indicates Dory’s transformation is real this time?

• Creepy Kid Watch: Aspen glues Elliott into his shoes, drinks an entire carton of whole milk, and seems likely to electrocute Marc in the bath. They should sue John Waters for shoddy merchandise.

• And my “Dr. Lombardo is a hallucination” theory will never be proven or disproven now that Dory’s out of the hospital. Oh well!

• Shout-out to one-scene wonders Constance Shulman and Brian O’Neill as the former radicals who take in Dory after she busts out of the hospital. They say they were members of the West Village 11, which I’m guessing is some Weather Underground/Chicago 7 corollary. I hope they come back and blow something up later.

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