Summary
Dory’s friends gather to eulogize her.
This recap of Search Party season 4, episode 10, “The Shadows”, contains spoilers.
Who is Dory Sief? She wanders into her funeral with that question in mind. More Dorys appear, in different outfits, with different dispositions, reflecting the complexity of Dory (that Shakwat plays each subtly differently is testament to her acting). In Search Party season 4, episode 10, Search Party’s fourth (and potentially final??) season brings together its cast to show the effect the show’s protagonist has had on all of them.
Sitting in the back of the room, Dory watches people she knows gather for her funeral. “Who was Dory?” Portia asks, before, as always, using her speaking time to talk about her own acting career. But Portia lands on something meaningful. “We don’t really know who we are,” she says, and that “a lot of people underestimated Dory.” It’s a comment on the show itself, that it sets us up to underestimate her before she does something brave (and potentially evil). “I didn’t understand her but I really love her,” Portia says, ending with a Jeb-esque request for applause.
Elliott is far less saccharine, saying that she was a “lying, manipulative bitch,” and also that she would go days without showering. But his point is that we all have these dark qualities. “We are all unlikeable!” He yells. “There is a dark side in all of us. But that darkness is connected to the light.” It’s another way of interpreting Dory, as a good person who has the capacity for bad things.
Finally, Drew brings on a ukulele and sings a pathetic song about his love for Dory. It’s perfectly in character for the Brooklyn sad boy who’s too weak to express his emotions.
Search Party season 4, episode 10 as a whole works splendidly as an excuse for catharsis, necessary after a particularly intense season. Elliott breaks down in front of Mark, Portia reconnects with her mother, and Chantal has a wonderful moment where she admits she did not really know Dory but is all the more thankful for her rescue. Even Gail shows up to confide in Drew and Julian that once she caught Dory kissing her while she was asleep. Worried she asks the two exes, “Did she ever try to kiss you?”
We get a call back to the first season in the form of an ex Bellow & Hare cult member, who says he has a vision of Portia. Mistakingly believing her birthday to be May 18th, he tells her the numbers 5, 1, and 8 are important.
Returning home, the gang finds a creepy box from Chip containing “items” of Dory’s, including her hair(!) and the camcorder Chip used at the season’s premiere.
Sick of obsessing on her ill fate, Drew, Elliott, and Portia fantasize about what Dory’s ideal life could have been. They imagine her running a restaurant in Seattle with a hot boyfriend, and visualize themselves there. But it’s only a matter of time until Elliott pops the question that’s been on everyone’s mind. “Do you think we killed her?”
Drew, as always, prefers not to think about the hard questions. But Portia, remembering the numbers given to her earlier, opens the camcorder and finds the corresponding timecode. The gang gathers around to watch a video recorded just before Dory succumbed to the smoke, where she confesses her love to her friends. They burst into tears.
And then she wakes up. Screaming, but alive. In an ambulance. This episode has been a dream of what people think of her, working through her issues. For Dory lives to see another day! And hopefully another season! It took a while to get great but the back half of season four has been an utter delight. I love this show and its eccentricities, and I will be praying that HBO Max decides to renew it.
