BrainDead: Season 1, Episode 3 – “Goring Oxes…”

“The town has changed. It’s toxic now.”

Indeed, Dean Healy (Zach Grenier). Indeed.

Washington, DC, has never seemed more insane, and that, friends, is saying something. Episode three of BrainDead’s inaugural season, “Goring Oxes: How You Can Survive the War on Government Through Five Easy Steps”, only drives that narrative further. There’s yet another exploding head. There are more ants. There’s a fully enabled conspiracy theorist. There’s a weirdly public half make-out session. And now, there’s a possessed cat.

This week finds the BrainDead universe advancing itself in valuable ways. Laurel (Mary Elizabeth Winstead) comes face to face with Gustav (Johnny Ray Gill) for the first time, when the latter masks himself as a constituent attempting to Be Heard by her brother, Senator Luke Healy (Danny Pino). He comes off as a little too odd for comfort, funnily ending their initial interaction with “Government is too big, don’t you think? Could you make it smaller? Thanks.” But wait. All is not lost.

It’s not long before they find each other again, outside the hallowed walls of the Capitol building, and Gustav goes all in on the crazy, asking Laurel to offer up her cellphone. Laurel declines, naturally, but eventually realizes that hearing him out is a good thing. She ultimately arranges a meeting of Ant Team America by getting him in the same room with Rochelle (Nikki M. James), and they devise a plan of sorts to try and get to the bottom of all this. That plan, of course, involves That Cars Song and Gustav taping solo cups to his ears. Because, duh.

This amounts to little more than the capture of a large cockroach that’s brought to Rochelle. Gustav’s cat, meanwhile, appears to be overtaken with the critters. Poor kitty.

While all this is going on, Red Wheatus (Tony Shalhoub) promotes Gareth (Aaron Tveit) to his Chief of Staff after his (now former) Chief of Staff, Jonathan Broadbent (Nick Sullivan), has his head explode on television (thank God for that eight-second delay!). This prompts the FBI to investigate Laurel because, as it turns out, Laurel has had a connection to all these spontaneous combustions that somehow keep occurring. And … whoops. How’s she going to get out of that?

Presumably, we may have believed that it would be via the help of FBI agent Anthony Onofrio (Charlie Semine), who appeared to be smitten last week. This week, though? Not so much. That is, until the very end, when we discover that he was actually the guy who called Luke to help get Laurel out of that Very Scary Predicament, which involved being questioned in a dark room by a particularly ornery FBI agent who doesn’t appear to be impressed by Laurel. Like, at all.

Speaking of Luke, though, the inevitable happens this week: his wife, Germaine (Lily Cowles), finds out about his extramarital affair with Scarlett (Paige Patterson) because Senator Pollock (Jan Maxwell) wants to take him down and become the Democratic Whip. This, in a strange underdeveloped twist, is somehow thwarted after Laurel goes to talk to the women of the Democratic Party. Or, at least that’s what they want us to believe by the end of the episode.

It all adds up to one big … I don’t know, man. We have now established a core team of characters whose job it is to figure out this whole head-exploding, what’s-the-deal-with-the-ants mess, and, all told, we just have to know that an upcoming episode is going to turn the season on its head when one of those three people get infected. We can also establish that Luke isn’t the greatest guy, even if we also kind of knew that already (for all the personal turmoil introduced this week, he sure did seem over it by the time he picked his sister up from the FBI building).

What’s becoming increasingly hard to figure out here is The Point. And clouding The Point is the notion that we may or may not be entirely sure about who, at this juncture, is zombie-fied. For instance, the FBI agents. Does the asshole agent have a handful of ants wandering throughout his skull? Were we supposed to believe that the hunky one was under the same spell … until we realized he orchestrated Laurel’s release?

And, perhaps most importantly, is all of this truly caused by ant farts?

We’re getting to the point where the episodes appear to be asking more questions than answering them. That’s expected in the first one or two hours, but as we inch toward midseason mode, it feels like BrainDead needs to move in a direction. Is it merely going to be a series of inside jokes about how fucked up American politics are, with occasional science fiction tropes thrown in every now and then? Or is it going to say something smarter, something bigger, all while holding our attention with an intriguing, ever-changing, poignant story that doesn’t always have to be reduced to obtaining plot points via the view of CGI ants marching all over furniture?

Only time can tell (and we’ll have to wait longer than usual; the series is off next week), but for now, we can only accept the obvious: Yes, Washington, DC, has changed. And yes, Washington, DC, is toxic.

On so many more levels than one.

You Might Think

So … The Kiss. You know. The one between Laurel and Gareth. Yikes. I don’t know if it was supposed to be awkward like that. I don’t know if there was some type of disconnecting undertone that was supposed to be front and center like it was. I don’t know if we are to believe that maybe this was the death knell that always fated Laurel and Gareth’s blossoming romance. Whatever it was, it sure was something to remember. Which leads me to …

… Why would they do that? Like, honestly. Why would they do that? In a crowded bar — and at a wake for a Chief of Staff, no less — they decide to jump into something like a kiss ostensibly based only on Laurel’s father telling her she shouldn’t do it? And then, for Laurel to react so strangely, as though she didn’t even realize anything about anything she literally just did? Huh? Plus, not to be too picky, but who the hell downs one Old Fashioned and within 10 seconds feels it enough to make out with someone they aren’t even sure they like? Man. If the Laurel/Gareth narrative is supposed to be the overall story’s singular romantic connective tissue, the Kings really botched that moment. I mean, even if Winstead and Tveit have no discernible chemistry, that entire setup could have been done way, way better.

Oh, and dare I ask: where does this put FBI agent Anthony Onofrio (Charlie Semine)?

Love Gustav with a capital “L”. It would be nice to see more of him, actually, which says something because we saw a lot of him this week. I’d actually like to see more from Rochelle, too. That seems like a character interesting enough to flesh out properly. This especially comes to mind after realizing how one-note the character of Luke Healy is and/or can be.

About Luke Healy: that was some of the worst, most unbelievable “I should have never cheated on you; I love you” responses in the history of television.

Red Wheatus: What do you need?

Gareth Ritter: A piece of mind.

Red Wheatus: Well, I can’t give you that.

Get it?

Still not sold on the musical recaps.

“Dr. Bob Bob” made me laugh. Sorry.

Things I’m interested in: Gustav. Rochelle. The notion that those who are zombie-fied don’t drink alcohol. The notion that to be human, you must drink alcohol. Germaine Healy. What the hell are in those green drinks. FBI agent Anthony Onofrio. Gustav’s cat. Dean Healy (still). Ant farts.

Things I’m not interested in: All romantic endeavors between Gareth and Laurel. Scarlett. Senator Pollock. The One-Wayers. The difference between “who” and “whom”. Stacie (Nikiya Mathis), who I guess I thought was dead after last week? Ear goop. The way politicians treat their dogs. Melanesian choirs. Screwworms.