Summary
“The Engagement Party” proves that the more things change, the more they stay the same. Will and Sylvia are still besties, but they remain their own worst enemies.
At first glance, a lot of things have changed in Platonic Season 2. Sylvia is now a semi-self-employed event planner, she and Charlie are still living in their dream home, and their marriage is more even-keeled than ever. Will, meanwhile, is engaged to marry Jenna, who is also his boss, and as you’ll recall from the Season 1 finale, they enlisted Sylvia to plan it. You could have imagined everyone living happily ever after, but it only takes five minutes with Will and Sylvia in Episode 1, “The Engagement Party”, to realize that nothing has really changed at all.
Will and Sylvia are best friends, but they’re their own worst enemies. The narrative arc of the first season was them both using their relationship as a way to avoid dealing with the problems in their own lives, and the most interesting emerging dynamic of the second season is that most of those problems don’t exist anymore, and yet their relationship still constantly causes issues. In this premiere, the first of two that Apple TV+ released to kick off Season 2, it seems like Will is the one who can’t adjust to the new status quo. But I guess we’ll see about that.
Will’s problem is simple enough. He’s on the cusp of settling down with a very wealthy and successful woman in an extremely swanky San Diego beach house, and the idea obviously terrifies him. The pampered and privileged aren’t his kind of people, obviously, so Jenna’s moneyed family makes him uncomfortable — “She’s got eight aunts, it’s like a colony” — and he seems to have developed a crush on a young deli cashier with a Deadpool tattoo.
In the first season, Will dated younger women to try and obscure the fact that he was growing older. He still dresses like that Steve Buscemi meme, but he’s ostensibly more grown up now, with a stable job and a happy-ish home life. Sylvia recognises that his fixation on Hannah is his self-sabotage tendency manifesting again, so she tries to talk him down from the metaphorical ledge. But Sylvia’s guidance is also heavily informed by the fact that she’s desperate to keep her event planning job, so she needs Will and Jenna’s wedding to go well for her own sake.
This is the basic dramatic push-pull of the premiere. As soon as Platonic Season 2, Episode 1 brings multiple characters together for the titular engagement party, though, a lot of the slapstick-y chaos that defined the first season begins to show itself. Will’s buddy Andy put an acid tab in a champagne flute meant for their other friend Omar, and the flute has since gone missing, meaning that any of the attendees could be on the cusp of a psychedelic experience. To combat this, Will and Sylvia lead everyone in tipping their complementary champers on the floor in the guise of an old Jewish tradition — one of the happier ones, they both clarify — which naturally leaves the event with a serious champagne shortage.
Will and Sylvia head to a big box store to replace the champagne, steal a reserved batch, and then stop in for a sandwich, which is where Sylvia realizes Will is going out of his way to see his crush, Hannah. She gives him a stern talking to, which he seems to get the gist of, and they return to the party as conquering heroes — or they would if the replacement champagne hadn’t all smashed to bits in Will’s suspensionless car. Instead, they mix vodka and Sprite and pass it off as a “dry Spanish cider”, which seems to work.
This might constitute a happy ending — Will even participates in a dumb musical toast with Jenna’s father — if it weren’t for the fact that Jenna very much noticed Will and Sylvia disappearing for half of the event. And thus, we have our presumably season-long story. Is Jenna right to be worried about Will and Sylvia’s relationship? Or are they destined to continue ruining each other’s lives? If Jenna’s Uncle Pete, who ends the party naked and tripping on acid, is anything to go by, there are probably going to be a few more casualties before we get an answer to that question.
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