By Peter Lawrence Kane
Visual Highlights: a cordless phone with a big antenna(!), Dom’s sexy legs, a glittery Faerie in butterfly regalia, lots of redwoods with a huge disco ball suspended from them, and a great cross-section of Bay Area party people.
Best Line: “It’s like 1994!” (Doris, upon taking MDMA.)
Spoiler alert: Season Two of Looking opens with a shot of Dom’s Volvo station wagon slaloming down River Road towards Guerneville for a weekend adventure. And right out of the gate, Patrick cheekily trolls the critics who called Looking boring: “I really think that this weekend should be about the three of us hanging out together, not us and 200 naked homos crammed in a pool.” Um, what? Do you really?
This is the first episode set entirely outside of San Francisco, and the most beautiful one yet. Not since the Forest Moon of Endor in Return of the Jedi has Sonoma County shined like this onscreen. I wonder how much the Ewok Village Film Board shelled out in tax breaks to woo the crew to the Russian River?
Anyhoo, the three main characters (Patrick, Dom and Agustín) are spending the weekend among the redwoods, at Dom’s erstwhile business partner/smooch buddy Lynn’s house — a sweet pad complete with a giant, tacky portrait of Lynn with curly hair like a Roman emperor. Patrick’s attempt at enforcing sobriety on his friends blows up immediately, as Agustín defends himself against this kind of intervention: “You do know that getting drunk and slapping some cock around your face isn’t the worst thing in the world?” he says. PREACH IT, SISTER.
During an afternoon canoe ride, they stumble upon a nude gay beach, where a party bear greets them, “Come party with the big boys.” Patrick’s insistence on a board game weekend dies completely when the irrepressible Doris, a nurse, turns up: “I was working, and then everybody died!” She’s already broken into Lynn’s liquor cabinet by the time the boys see her, sealing her status as America’s sweetheart.
That night, lured by pulsing bass, the crew hikes through the woods where a Radical Faerie guides them to The Promised Land, a spontaneous pansexual rave. Agustín hands out MDMA. Patrick is reliably uncool about it, but joins in anyway. And this party has everything: flag dancers, Hercules & Love Affair, big fat drag queens, several of my real-life friends and lovers, and Yarnesses. Rolling hard, the main characters dance their asses off and hug it out.
Agustín and Party Bear go skinny-dipping in the Russian River. Dom takes a guy home and blows him. Patrick, meanwhile, sneaks off to call Kevin (Russell Tovey), his boss and now semi-regular lover, who proceeds to fuck him against a redwood tree (even though Patrick had admonished Agustín for wanting to do just that the day before). Over coffee in the morning, Patrick finally comes clean to his friends about secretly seeing Kevin.
Apart from the fact that they don’t blow up a Death Star or go on a speeder chase with Stormtroopers between the trees, there are a couple clunkers in this opening episode. Dom, whose angst about turning 40 permeated season one, hypocritically asks about Lynn, “Can you even call a 59-year-old man your ‘boyfriend’?” And Agustín, referring to Party Bear’s HIV+ status, says, “He has a ‘House in Virginia,’” which is a little glib. But overall, this is a slightly-above-average episode.
Photo courtesy of HBO
