RIP Dr. Benny. I kind of expected her to get up and start running around and biting people, 28 Days Later style. Alas, no: She just yeeted herself out of a building and onto a vehicle, Matrix Resurrections style. Either way, she went out with style.
Thanks to the duchess’s documentarian family, Dr. Benny’s unliving moment was broadcast all over the British telly. Tunnel demands that Dory leave the building as he’s kicking her off the project. She agrees to walk out with him, and I really thought she would go back to her old murderous ways and push Jeff Goldblum down the stairs. Instead, she just lets him leave the building first and locks the door. Not the grandest of schemes, but it works.
Dory has the acolytes duct-tape Mummy, Grandmummy, their cameraman (incredibly named Vernon Ankles), and Drew. Drew is still trying to convince Dory that her drawing is evidence that she is not a prophet but merely crazy. And Dory doesn’t have room for that kind of negativity in her life right now. The plan is to make something lethal out of the chemical library as a bargaining chip and hopefully make the enlightenment pills that “worked” on Gemini the rat. But the hostage negotiator cuts the power, which significantly hampers their pill-making abilities.
Let’s talk about this hostage negotiator. He sucks. All he does is neg and shit on Dory. Isn’t her pathology kind of famous at this point? Pushing Dory, telling her that she’s small or bad at things, is going to get you nowhere. Much better to appeal to her narcissism, as Tunnel did. Do they teach you nothing at Quantico?
Outside, Tunnel is trying to spin the whole shebang for the press. He tries to portray Dr. Benny as a woman with many (thousands?) of paramours. And he claims the emergency board meeting convened to discuss his ouster is routine. The company is a family, he says, and what family doesn’t consider patricide on a weekly basis? The press doesn’t seem to be buying it, however. Nor am I buying those teeny glasses. Not to pull another Simpsons reference so soon in the recap, but they make him look like the girl with glasses at Springfield elementary.
Ooh, and we get a little aside with Liquorice and Chantal. Liquorice has been teaching Chantal to shoot, and she’s really good. That’s ominous. I can’t think of someone I’d less want to have a deadly weapon. Maybe Aspen? Desperate to find out how these two will meet up with the main story.
As the cult sweats it out, Elliott finally finds out that everyone but him is fucking everyone but him. How could this not create a complex in you? Immediately, a huge chunk of his energy is devoted to getting one of his friends to sleep with him. He tells Dory, “I would hate it if you ever felt that I was someone you couldn’t have sex with.” Dory and Portia also squash their “you poisoned me” beef because, honestly, those two will never be free of each other. What’s a little poisoning between pals, after all the murder and being a witness for the prosecution and getting fired from playing each other?
Ritchie figures out that they could make the pills into jellybeans without power, which … okay. They’d be so sticky. Jellybeans are covered in some sort of powder, I want to say a corn derivative, to keep the sticky insides from getting everywhere. That process, in theory, could be done by hand, but honestly, jellybeaning demands more electricity than just taking powdered solutions and putting them in capsules. Compound pharmacists do that all the time and did so before electricity. But making the enlightenment pills into jellybeans has thematic resonance, so I will stop Cinema Sinning myself out of a good time. Like Dory, I am perfect and everyone should learn from my example.
Meanwhile, the hostages need to piss. Dory relents and has Marty and Winnie escort them to the bathroom. Not before Vernon has already let go on himself, which I respect. You tie me up when I have to pee, you deal with the consequences on your furniture. The aristos try to overpower Marty by hitting him with part of a toilet, but an octogenarian doesn’t have the strength to knock anyone out. Marty is startled, and he squirts poor camera guy Vernon with sulfuric acid.
Drew takes this moment to steal Dory away, Bachelorette style. He does a good job of expressing his exhaustion with the Dory train. But Dory puts up a good counterargument: There will never be a breaking point where she’s too “bad” for him to fuck with. Dory says this is because she isn’t really bad, but it could also be argued that Drew’s gaping need is stronger than his morality. When Dory was hidden away in the mental hospital, Drew started working for the worst real-estate vultures to ever exist. If he has good intentions, he has too weak a will to ever live by those intentions. Dory says that Drew needs to come back fully or disappear forever.
The jellybeans are done, and a getaway is planned. Dory will release the hostages in exchange for a ’90s-style school bus and a plane on an undisclosed runway. An impromptu suicide-bomber vest is constructed out of pastel duct tape, and Ritchie puts two explosive chemicals in it. If the snipers go for Dory, everyone will explode.
The cult leaves Tunnel Industries (no longer run by Tunnel, whose work family eventually decided to overthrow him, apparently) and gets on the school bus. Drew is let go with the hostages, so it would seem that he decided to get away forever. Then the bus blows up. Oops! The show’s over, I guess. Weird that there are still three more episodes left. Presumably, the remaining episodes will just be a blank screen, or possibly everyone but Drew in hell.
Stray Pages From the Book of Dory
• So everyone but Drew is dead? Nahhh, no way. Unless …
• Where is Gemini? That little guy is still running around Tunnel Industries, no?
• It was so funny that Dory’s whole plan boiled down to “lock the door.” Echoes of Mr. Burns in “Burns’ Heir.”
• When Vernon Ankles says, “I just wanna go out to get drinks and hang out for the rest of my life,” I felt that.
• Also, when Drew says he has never been held hostage before, but he feels like he has, I felt that.
