Close Enough Review: First Date / Snailin' It

"Oh, sorry, I was trying to be sexy but I have no game."

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As we near the end of Close Enough's inaugural season, it's worthwhile to look back and see how things have evolved over the course of the past fourteen episodes. Even if the show still feels as loose as it always has in this week's batch, I feel like they continue to develop a fantastic trend for the series: devoting their time to developing our cast, and using absurdity to make grander statements about them rather than just putting them at its mercy. There was a definite tug-and-pull between those two camps at the start of the season, but it feels like the series' interest in fleshing out its characters has ultimately shined through, and I feel like it's managed to offer Close Enough a sense of maturity and pointedness that makes it feel unique and tantalizing. "First Date" and "Snailin' It" might not be the greatest refinements of that mentality, but their investment in having something more human to say ensures that they have an appreciable sense of purpose.

That's not to say that things didn't start off a little rocky. "First Date" was one of those episodes that, at least for me, benefitted from a rewatch more than anything else. I think a lot of that comes from the recognition that even if neither of its concepts did much for me compared to Close Enough's usual surrealism, it's a strong episode for its characters; you just need to be able to accept that its thrills are a little subdued by the show's standards.

Josh and Emily's plot is the simpler but more involved of the two, with Josh attempting to reinvigorate their love life when Emily fears that they've lost their spice by recreating their first date to a haunted house. It's an iffy conceit for me, personally, however flashy. Playing around with haunted houses theoretically presents shows a chance to cut loose and throw as much horrific imagery at the screen as possible while bending the rules of a show's universe on a whim, but since Close Enough's absurdity is so deeply-ingrained in its identity, there's so little to gain from the premise that it almost takes the show's edge off. That's not to say that the visual of a humanoid creature with a massive jaw for a chest and an exposed neck-butt isn't provocative, but it doesn't feel as shocking or inspired because we understand it to be fake within the context of the show's universe, and that feels hollow compared to the more creative frameworks the show has used to strong effect in the past.

The parade of frights manages to at least bring about some involved character work within Josh and Emily, though, trapping the couple in a mirror maze where their reflections belittle the stagnancy of their marriage before revealing that they had actually died earlier in the haunted house. Close Enough is always at its best when it's able to sharpen its weirdness towards a more character-driven end, and having Josh and Emily subsequently slam their way through the mirror walls, reunited with a newfound passion in spite of their perceived deaths, ensures that something gratifying and goofy (read: post-mortem sex) can rise to the surface.

"First Date" continues to look into the past of its characters through Alex and Bridgette's plot, with Alex stepping in as Bridgette's wingman when her sexy date turns out to be conjoined to his own ex. In line with the rest of the episode, it's a bit of a murky conceit, though not without fun details. The idea of couples conjoining as some insane step up from getting couple's tattoos is silly and disturbing enough, but I feel like outside of its conceit, the characters fall frustratingly flat: Ron's fixation on Machu Picchu is fun, as is Joy matching Alex's more chaotic energy, but the nonchalantly graphic nature of their conversations feels particularly cheap and aimless no matter how hard Chris Parnell can sell a line.

The ex-couple provide more value in how they're used to draw out conflict between Bridgette and Alex, with their turbulent relationship proving itself to be one of the most reliable wells for Close Enough to pull from. Aside from the fact that both characters are so innately fun in their characterizations, there's a sort of depth to their relationship that ensures the show's efforts to prod at them more deeply will bring about some solid observations. Whereas "Robot Tutor" sought to examine the baggage that restricts their intimacy, "First Date" focuses on how their intimacy restricts their ability to fully move on. Bridgette becoming increasingly agitated by the degree that Alex hits it off with Joy brings about an interesting bit of one-sided competition between the two, but I don't think that demonstrates either one of the characters to be any less detached from their former spouse; they just deal with their baggage in different, conflicting ways. As the ending reveals, though, with Alex recounting his appreciation of Bridgette's teeth, there's still a flame buried deep down there that prevents them from fully reconciling, or knowing if they even want to.

"First Date," then, is a mixed bag, but the extent that it prioritizes its characters over its occasionally undercooked theatrics ensures that it retains a nice edge all the way through. Perhaps if it placed more emphasis on the internal conflict of its cast than the external conflict enabling them, it could've fared a little better, but it's easy to appreciate in the places that it managed to reach.

Our other episode for the week, "Snailin' It," is a very different beast. Even against the context of pretty much every other Close Enough episode, something about it feels strangely different for reasons that I can't entirely pinpoint. Perhaps it's the fact that Alex and Bridgette have been fully cut out of the picture, not even warranting a mention, or how its plot touches on parts of Emily's character that the rest of the series hasn't bothered to flesh out, but the sum of its parts makes the episode feel like it exists in its own space, though a fun one.

As I've said before, I feel like Close Enough can be fairly inept at telling us basic information about our cast, and that causes "Snailin' It" to make a lot of revelations about Emily that perhaps shouldn't come as revelations: she works as an assistant for a food corp, and her duties are so rigorous that she struggles to allocate the time that she wants to be with her family (and especially Candice). The extent of her stress and anxieties has been well-established across the series, but they've generally gone unexplained and at the occasional expense of being able to understand who Emily is more clearly. It's really nice to finally have an episode assess the root cause, then, and put everything into perspective... though that also makes me feel like "Snailin' It" could've benefitted from appearing earlier in the season, or at the very least with a stronger acknowledgement of the work life that complicates Emily's family life.

Luckily, even if the themes could've afforded to have a bit more foreshadowing, it's nice to see them adroitly explored as to put Emily's personality more in perspective. More intent to find a way to combine both her dilemmas into a mutually-beneficial outcome, she attempts to spin Food Corp's condom scandal into a sponsored community garden at Candice's preschool, but the outcome only finds her buried deeper into the sort of insufferable work that she hoped she could twist to her advantage. I feel like Emily is a character that, despite being treated well by the show, can lack the sorts of stakes that make her narratives feel compelling, but presenting her as torn between two paths, neither able to be disregarded—either she fails to be present for her child or risks losing her job and the benefits that it provides for her family—make for a grounded conflict etched in realism, and one worthy of Close Enough's intense escalation.

In this case, it takes the form of Snailathan Gold, a British, anthropomorphic snail who uses the powers of his time-warping hat to exploit Emily and abduct Candice. While I feel like Close Enough doesn't have as strong of a batting average as Regular Show's in terms of its eccentric cast of one-off characters, Snailathan is probably the show's most successful effort to carry that torch, in no small part indebted to Noel Felding's ability to ensure that every ounce of the character's weirdness is as perfectly delivered as one could hope for. (The fact that he starred in The Mighty Boosh, almost certainly a defining influence on J.G. Quintel's sense of humor, adds even more to the fun; I can only imagine getting him in the voice booth was a dream come true.)

Time travel is perhaps one of the safest mechanisms that the show could possibly play with, but I liked its lack of indulgence or sophistication; it merely becomes a means for Emily to get dragged into even greater dilemmas, with her accelerated ability to complete tasks rapidly advancing her aging at the same time. Once the ulterior motives of Snailathan emerge, too, absorbing and taking control of Candace's body in the climactic chase sequence, Close Enough twists the overdone nature of its conceit into something legitimately inspired: a duel between the two where time travel is weaponized to incapacitate each other and radically alter their physiological states. Sure, maybe a significant amount of the action was mere build-up to Emily being able to deliver the bad-ass line of "Escargot to hell," but that doesn't make it any less entertaining.

Additionally, while it's a shame that "Snailin' It" only caters to a specific portion of the cast, that also allows it to feel a lot more balanced and give everyone involved something interesting to work with. Most notably, a sub-plot surfaces for Josh after he feels disrespected by his family for the sort of work that he does. Although it's fairly barebones, it presents a nice opportunity to further flesh out the character's relationship to his stone-skipping buddy Randy (someone who Close Enough has regularly struggled to implement), and Josh being able to channel his stone-skipping skills into saving the day during the episode's climax ensures that he gets a satisfying ending. Candice and Mr. Salt, meanwhile, score some fun character moments out of proceedings even if they're rarely in focus: Candice's imagining of her grave robber board game as a flashy Indiana Jones-esque sequence makes for the series' best cold open, while Mr. Salt proclaiming that Emily's disastrous time travel shenanigans inexplicably was a brilliant way to distract the press from the company's condom story puts a fun spin on the sort of insanity that Close Enough regularly doesn't consider the long-term consequences of.

Ending everything with Emily deciding to stand up to her boss' preposterous expectations of her so that she can spend more time with her daughter might be the final outcome that we were all expecting, but in light of everything else that transpires, it feels perfectly earned. "Snailin' It" might have a few unnecessary curveballs, but once you're caught up to speed with what it's doing, it makes for another satisfying entry into the show's catalog.

With our season finale being a fairly different sort of episode for the series, clocking in at the show's original intended runtime of 22 minutes, this marks the end of the road as far as standard Close Enough episodes are concerned. While I'm not too sure how sold I am on the more short-form approach that the series took on, it certainly didn't make for a more toothless show—Close Enough is nothing if not delightfully original, with its occasional lack of freshness being a consequence of its own high standards. I can only hope, though, that as the show's writers become more accustomed to writing for the newly-adjusted timeframe of its stories, they can rectify the sort of blind spots that made this season so occasionally frustrating (its difficulty in providing basic character information, and its struggles to accommodate for its entire main cast regularly) while continuing to hone in on what makes the series so great.

FINAL GRADES:
"First Date": B.
"Snailin' It": B+.

Next week: Josh and Alex compete for a dog-boy's affection, and Emily and Bridgette try to write some songs.

For my last review of the last two episodes, "So Long Boys" and "Clap Like This," CLICK HERE.

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