Warner Bros. Discovery synergy has reached new heights. The second episode of the second season of The Sex Lives of College Girls on HBO Max is the last place I expected to hear the needle drop on Doja Cat’s original song from the motion picture Elvis, but here we are! Not only that, but it drops on our four main characters getting a lap dance from the very boys who threw sports balls and beverages at them not one episode earlier. College, am I right?
The girls are still figuring out what to do with their evenings now that they’ve been banned from frat parties. What are they going to do, go to boring old house parties? Make friends? Chat up townies? Study? Have regular monogamous sex with someone they intended to be a casual hookup? Not these girls! (Okay, the last thing was just about Bela and Eric. They’re not exclusive … at least, not as long as Bela has other places to be.) Their first solution is to host their own party … which nobody comes to. Their dorm room is big compared to what I was used to in college, but, like, not that big. Even the RA doesn’t bust them for having alcohol because he feels sorry for them.
This is not shaping up to be a good semester for Whitney. Without soccer, she’s spiraling pretty quickly. In the first episode, she felt insecure about her lack of a plan, and in this one she’s insecure about her relationship with Canaan. Whitney is jealous of a new Sips employee named Zoe with mad technology skills who seems to have great chemistry with Canaan. It doesn’t hurt that Kimberly is also obsessed with her. Zoe seems to have a lot going on, which happens to be the one thing Whitney is sensitive about at the moment.
Whitney gets to ’gram stalking and makes one of the social-media age’s most time-honored and embarrassing mistakes: likes a post that’s way too far down (like June of 2014 far down). Bela proposes quite possibly the most genius solution I’ve ever heard. She quickly changes Whitney’s profile pic and username to a made-up brand and puts her account on private. Now it looks like a random brand was creeping on her page, not the girlfriend of Zoe’s co-worker. Whitney would have gotten away with it, too, if Canaan wasn’t a good boyfriend who tags her in selfies. But, guess what? They communicate! She even mentions what she overheard him say about her in the previous episode and he apologizes! Most adult TV characters aren’t this mature.
Kimberly, meanwhile, is still on a quest to raise money for tuition. She gets super-close to telling her mother that she lost her scholarship, but then her mother reveals that she and her father just spent a lot of money on dog surgery and that they’ve both picked up side gigs to pay for it. Yeesh! These two know how to lay on the guilt without even trying. Kimberly then gets an idea to ask a professor to co-sign her loan. This professor likes her, is taking in students, and hosts dinner parties at her house. But then her professor’s husband Craig (David Wain) hits on her, like, blatantly. So, even though this would be a convenient way for her to get her loan co-signed and put off telling her parents that she messed up, she can’t do it.
Leighton hooks up with the girl she met in the premiere, but quickly breaks it off after discovering that she’s weirdly into PDA. Leighton still has some issues with being openly queer in public, but it’s not just her: Even Bela thinks it was a lot. But at the end of the episode, she learns that being out on campus means that a lot of girls know she’s available and are super into her. All of a sudden, she notices girls noticing her — in person! Not on an app! Things are looking up.
Finally, Bela organizes a strip-show fundraiser (for climate change) to get Theta back in the school’s good graces and, more importantly, the girls back to getting wasted at frat parties. “Who knows where fantasies come from,” Bela says, Seth Meyers poster visible in the background. She even starts dressing like Jada Pinkett Smith in Magic Mike XXL to MC.
The guys are apparently naturally good at choreography and lap dancing and put on a show. It’s like The Full Monty, or that one episode of Playing House, but the guys are conventionally attractive and, as Kimberly observes, almost always shirtless anyway. They even convince Dean Rachael Harris, who rides in on a wave of feminism I’ve never heard of and tries to shut them down, that it’s a worthwhile venture. How can she complain, when the last episode literally introduced a school-sanctioned event where students ran through the snow in their underwear? Unclear! Jackson the climate refugee from Kansas even helps out by sharing his sad story of the “Wizard of Oz–style tornado” that decimated his school. Also they raised 11 thousand dollars. Looks like the girls are heading back to frat parties!
But while all the roommates’ social-life problems are solved forever (or so they think), Kimberly is still in financial trouble. Her professor tells her that she can’t co-sign the loan after all and Kimberly, thinking this is about the creepy husband, comes clean about everything and apologizes. But the professor’s concern was over credit scores, not her husband hitting on students, so Kimberly accidentally exposed his icky attempted infidelity. Kimberly did nothing wrong, obviously, but it’s still awkward and she’s back to square one.
Electives
• The way Kimberly’s professor left her students alone with her husband at her party, I thought for sure she was in on her husband’s behavior and maybe even facilitating it.
• Anyone else notice how, so far this season, Leighton is mostly tagging along? She bopped into Kimberly’s story line in the last episode and Bela’s in this one. Time for her to have a protagonist moment, please!
• Another HBO crossover? Whitney’s teammate Willow saying that she would die for Shiv Roy. Shameless Succession plug, but … I’ll allow it.
• In a blink-and-you-miss-it moment, Bela calls Leonardo DiCaprio “Climate Daddy.” She’s on notice for that one.
• I’m definitely looking forward to Lila’s comedy career on this show. Her overpronunciation of “Malala” sent me. The specificity of the supporting characters on this show is really, really good.
