Summary
It’s out of the frying pan and into the fire for the crew of the Avenue 5 in another very funny episode.
This Avenue 5 season 2, episode 3 recap for the episode titled “Is It a Good Dot?” contains spoilers.
The terrestrial Avenue 5 show has made it to space in “Is It a Good Dot?”, much to Herman Judd’s displeasure. He’s barely in it, after all, and when he does show up he tends to just be agreeing with whatever is said to him — and he hates agreeing. But, as Mads points out, there’s little cool stuff that they can have the fictional Judd do since the real Judd doesn’t actually do much cool stuff. He insists that’s about to change, which can only be bad news.
Avenue 5 season 2, episode 3 recap
Of course, bad news is the only kind of news that the crew and passengers of the Avenue 5 ever seem to get. The ship’s supply of eels is dwindling rapidly, which means that an errant dot on the radar — which is where the episode gets its title, obviously — might represent salvation. Or, you know, more problems.
The dot is a space station called the Stormfalcon. Ryan leads a delegation aboard that includes Billie, Matt, and Spike, and they quickly discover that the Stormfalcon is an incredibly laidback science unit full of jigsaws, art, and nonconformist thinkers. Ryan is clearly striving for reasonable human contact, Matt wants some shoe deodorizer, and Billie is pretty focused on their imminent starvation. The crew of the Stormfalcon are also big fans of the Avenue 5 show, so their perceptions are a little… well, skewed.
Speaking of which, after installing Sarah on the show as a propaganda tool in Avenue 5 season 2, episode 2, Iris enacts the next stage of her plan, which is to drug Lucas — we learn that he’s fretting about Earth being on the verge of running out of lithium — and return to the Avenue 5 on a shuttle.
Johanna, the seemingly self-appointed leader of the Stormfalcon, invites the delegation and some plus-ones over for supper. This begins as a ripe situation for comedy — Billie keeps changing the subject to the eels, Rav is socially inept, Judd is vying for attention — and then morphs into a genuine predicament when it’s revealed that the Stormfalcon is actually a black ops prison ship and that everyone aboard is considered too dangerous to be incarcerated on Earth.
I mean, it’s still funny, obviously — the crimes that everyone has been convicted of are exaggerated to a point they become quite comedic, and the crew’s reactions to the news are absolutely hysterical. “Is It a Good Dot?” has the highest concentration of one-liners in the second season thus far, from Matt’s description of Frank — “Sad eyes, phenomenal omelets” — to Billy’s justification for allowing a pedophile on board to fix the eel tank: “I know you have some qualms about this, but we can’t eat qualms.”
Oh, yeah, the pedophile thing. So, the ship still needs its eels to supply food, so everyone agrees to invite convicted pedophile engineer Lyle on board to fix the tank, with the sensible security measure of having him paddle himself in a plastic hamster ball through a clear plastic tunnel for the safety of the vacationing families (Judd’s idea, which he’s very proud of). Lyle is able to fix the tank, but he was promised a place on the ship, so everyone is forced to aggressively push him back onto the Stormfalcon.
Crisis averted? Well, sort of. The eel tank is fixed, but another of the Stormfalcon crew, a cannibal who guested on Frank’s cooking show, is still aboard. And since Iris arrives with tools for the tank, it turns out that if they’d just waited a little longer, they wouldn’t have had to rendezvous with the Stormfalcon in the first place. A teachable moment, according to Spike.
