Season four of Louie played like a Woody Allen film written by Louis C.K. It was a strange, melancholy romantic comedy, best represented by multi-episode arcs like “Elevator” and “Pamela.” With “Pot Luck,” the first episode of Louie‘s fifth season, the show seems to embracing its once-lost identity. The iconic credit sequence is back, as are the segments devoted to Louie performing stand-up. In short, “Pot Luck” isn’t a classic episode, but it is vintage Louie. It says a lot about this show that Louis C.K. is willing to start its fifth season with what would normally be a mid-season episode. We are just bystanders to the train wreck that is Louie’s life.
Like most of this show, “Pot Luck” revolves around our inability to communicate with fellow human beings. Louie is nothing if not a show about the subtle but defining differences that set us apart from one another. The framing device of the episode could not be simpler: Louie goes to what he thinks is a parents’ pot luck, only to quickly and awkwardly find out that he’s in the wrong place. It says a lot about Louie‘s continuity that this episode could have easily aired in season one; the main difference is in the opening credits, where Louie sports a goatee and not the beard that he wears in the present day. The message is clear: you may age and mature, but the world never will.
Long story short, Louie goes to the wrong pot luck (although he still insists on bringing fried chicken to both). The first pot luck, which he leaves – awkwardly, of course – is a pseudo-Druidic sexual congress, which naturally he wants no part of. When he makes it to the right pot luck, held by a lesbian couple who want nothing to do with Louie, he sticks around just long enough to get a ride home with their very pregnant surrogate.
True to Louie‘s surreal nature – or, to critics cynical leanings, true to Louie‘s masturbatory self-involvement – the surrogate almost immediately jumps Louie’s bones, as he bends her over in her hallway to have sex with her – before her water breaks and she starts giving birth. This could be seem as shameless self-promotion, i.e. beautiful woman meets homely comedian and has sex with him right away, but it didn’t ring false to me, probably because Louie has managed to establish its own surreal reality, so this doesn’t seem unusual, especially after Yvonne Strahovski jumped Louie in last season’s “Model.”
Louie has always been about our inability or unwillingness to connect (last season’s six-part “Elevator” arc is a perfect example of this), so the surrogate’s actions didn’t strike me as false or unmotivated. Watching Louie, you have to commit to living in the show’s bizarro version of New York, where happiness, cynicism, bewilderment, and fury abound in equal measure. “Pot Luck” felt like an episode out of Louie‘s first or second season, and it announced that the fifth season would be returning to its roots. It’s damn good television.
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