Summary
“The Dinner Parties” shifts focus to Sylvia’s acts of self-sabotage and solidifies the season’s core conflict by introducing a last-minute nasty streak.
Episode 2 of Platonic Season 2 interestingly takes an almost opposite approach to its predecessor, which focused primarily on how Will’s self-sabotage was threatening to upend his cozy life with Jenna through the medium of his relationship with Sylvia. Here in “The Dinner Parties”, it seems Sylvia isn’t immune to bad decision-making of her own, continuing to insert herself into Will and Jenna’s relationship under the guise of planning their wedding, against the sage advice of Charlie.
Remember, in the previous episode, it was established that Sylvia needs Will to marry Jenna for the sake of her floundering events planning business. In Season 1, Sylvia’s career — or lack thereof — was a vital part of her character arc. She gave up being a lawyer to have children, and her attempts to return to the legal field ended in disaster, so a lot of Sylvia’s self-worth is bundled up in her new business. She needs to be successful, but unfortunately, she has made her professional success contingent on Will’s personal life, so she has to keep interfering in his relationship.
After the engagement party, that relationship isn’t going especially well. The wedding’s still on, and the company is doing well with opening a chain of new gastropubs, even though the first location is named Jay 6, which is a bit too reminiscent of the Capitol riots. But Will and Sylvia’s disappearance from the engagement party didn’t go unnoticed, and it has made Jenna suspicious of their friendship. Will, under advisement of his friends, tries to ensure that Sylvia and Jenna barely ever come into contact, but Sylvia is also worried about history repeating itself. The last time Will got married, they fell out of contact completely, and she doesn’t want that to happen again.
Sylvia’s bright idea is a couple’s dinner, which she goes out of her way to invite Jenna to in person. Charlie dutifully plays along, but Will is a nightmare about the whole thing, cautioning Sylvia not to come across like a “Will historian” by flouting all of her long-time memories of him, stretching all the way back to college. This makes the conversation stilted, since Jenna asks about what Will was like in those days specifically, and Sylvia has to awkwardly pretend she can’t remember.
But Will also throws Sylvia under the bus in Platonic Season 2, Episode 2. Jenna wants them to arrive at their wedding in a horse-drawn carriage, and Will obviously doesn’t, so he never mentioned it to Sylvia. When Jenna brings this up, Will pretends he did mention it and implies Sylvia forgot, which she tries to run with just to protect him. Will’s lack of spine is ever-grating. It’s a wonder Sylvia is determined to remain friends with him at all.
Will and Jenna’s dynamic seems a little off, too. When Jenna mentions how she started walking when she was five months old and could ice skate by her first birthday, Will mocks her about believing the “family legends” and continues to press the subject even when he can tell she’s uncomfortable. To be fair, Will is obviously right that Jenna’s fanciful self-aggrandizing stories are nonsensical, but it’s not the kind of thing you bring up over dinner, let alone the kind of thing you keep harping on about for the rest of the evening (he’s still making quips about it as they’re leaving).
To her credit, Jenna seems to take all this quite well. That evening, she confesses to being intimidated by Will’s relationship with Sylvia, and they both apologize, seemingly sincerely. Jenna also wants to take Sylvia out so they can have some one-on-one time. It seems very much like Platonic is setting Jenna up as a decent person who is caught in the chaotic gravity of two dysfunctional people who act like children whenever they’re together, but that’s the “twist”, so to speak. When Jenna and Sylvia do go out, it all seems to be going well until Jenna reassures her that she was silly to be intimidated by Sylvia, since “she’s nothing”.
She says this with a smile, but it’s received in the spirit with which it’s clearly intended, repositioning Jenna as a minor villain whom Sylvia presumably won’t want Will to marry. Will will assume that Sylvia’s efforts to embroil herself in their relationship are sabotage, and I’m sure we can get a whole season out of that idea. It might not be the most original premise, but the fun of this show, I think, is the shenanigans that crop up along the way.
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