Summary
Platonic Season 2 feels like it’s already meandering in Episode 3. Its core gag is an old one, and the second-hand embarrassment is real.
I get that Platonic is largely a show about college friends slowly realizing they’re not in college anymore, but by Season 2, you’d think it would have come up with some meaningful variation on this one joke. Episode 3, “The Bachelor Party,” skirts the issue by introducing a new character, Wild Card, played by a guest-starring Beck Bennett, who was once a part of the party-animal triumvirate but is quickly revealed to be a sexless intermittent-fasting man-child who’s creepily enamored with Sydney Sweeney and is in bed by 10 pm. It’s the same joke, just with a slightly different target.
Putting aside the fact that Wild Card was somehow integral to the group but has never been mentioned or shown up until this point, I could get on board with the idea of examining where Sylvia and Will are in their lives in relation to someone who has suffered more from arrested development than the pair of them, but the episode doesn’t really work like that. Instead, Sylvia starts to act in a really ridiculous way to try and live up to her memory of Wild Card’s college-era theatrics and just keeps making a fool of herself, while a bit of gossip threatens to be exposed that’ll upset the balance of Will and Jenna’s impending nuptials.
This is quite difficult to buy into since there hasn’t been a sense since the beginning of the season that Will and Jenna have a halfway functional relationship. Sylvia is still reeling from Jenna calling her “nothing”, so the first thing she does upon seeing Wild Card is tell him about it and then swear him to secrecy. Then Will confides in Wild Card that he and Jenna only rarely ever have sex, and swears him to secrecy. For a while, Will’s bachelor party is three people being very awkward around each other, popping a few extremely mild weed gummies, and then making fools of themselves.
Sylvia gets a head start on this because the gummies make her extremely paranoid. She had already woefully attempted to implement Katie’s advice of “smurfing” the word “bitch” by using it so often that it loses all meaning, and the weed takes her to the next level, which is baiting the boys to talk about Jenna and leaving her phone recording them. When she listens back to the long-winded diatribe about Sydney Sweeney and Will’s eventual confession that he and Jenna don’t have sex, she confronts the issue more directly. But if the big takeaway of Platonic Season 2, Episode 3 is that a healthy sex life is quite important to a successful marriage, I don’t think we necessarily needed an entire episode to make that point.
Perhaps it’s just me, and it certainly might be, but I’d have much preferred to spend the evening with Charlie and his work pals preparing him for an appearance on Jeopardy. I would have certainly preferred that to a late-night after-dark aquarium visit that prompts Will to have an aquatic-themed wet dream and decide to break up with Jenna. Needless to say, he’ll require Sylvia to drive him to San Diego to do the deed, and she’ll doubtlessly get involved in it, both because she can’t help herself and because there wouldn’t be a show if she didn’t.
But the rapid falling-out and making-up structure makes the conflict feel a little meaningless, and the reiteration of the idea that these people are all boring adults now is becoming extremely tedious after we already spent an entire season making that same point. On a related note, one of my notes read, simply, “WHY DOES WILL DRESS LIKE THIS?”. I just thought everyone should know.
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