by Dancin' Dan
The posters for Crazy Ex-Girlfriend's third season warned us. In them, Rachel Bloom spoofed iconic imagery from Mad Men, Breaking Bad, and Basic Instinct, sending a clear message: Bloom's Rebecca Bunch is one of our great anti-heroes, and she's about to go full-tilt crazy. And those posters didn't even tell the half of it. We're only four episodes into the new season, and already Rebecca's life in West Covina appears to have reached the end of the line. Things are moving so fast that each episode so far has left me breathless, perpetually on the edge of my seat wating for the next installment.
It's the best, most daring show on air right now, and it's even more jam-packed with film references than before. BUT BE WARNED. Lots of spoilers after the jump...
..because OH MY GOD YOU GUYS. Where to even start? Well, let's take Julie Andrews's advice (always a good thing to do) and start at the very beginning.
Which, taking a cue from the year's biggest box office hit, takes place in a medieval village straight out of Disney's Beauty & The Beast. "Where's Rebecca Bunch?" everyone is wondering. As it turns out, after vowing to destroy Josh Chan, who left her at the altar at the end of last season to become a priest, she's been holed up in a hotel, unable to face anyone else or what happened. But eventually, she figures out what she must do next: Give herself a(nother) makeover and become the main character of the next chapter of her story: The Woman Scorned. Armed with a bottle of black hair dye and a DVD of Fatal Attraction, Rebecca is ready for revenge.
The problem is, she wants a good, old-fashioned, catharsis-giving revenge, just like she's seen in the movies and on TV. Rebecca has always seen her life in terms of narrative conventions: Running into Josh in New York when she did meant that they should be together; when Josh was unavailable, maybe it was REALLY his asshole-y best friend who she should be with; at one point she worried that she wasn't a hero, but rather a villain in Valencia's Disney Princess narrative; when she had feelings for both Josh AND Greg, well naturally she was in a love triangle (despite all evidence to the contrary); she even spent a whole episode trying to read the universe's signs as to whether she should ultimately be with Josh or Greg. And the thing is, who among us hasn't at one point or another tried to force our life to fit into an established, friendly narrative? From birth, we are fed stories full of meant-to-bes and happily-ever-afters. But as Rebecca herself said in the first season theme song, it's a lot more nuanced than that, and real life generally doesn't conform to fictional narrative standards. At least, not for long.
Paula's idea to sue Josh for breach of contract is itself a standard TV sitcommy device, but it makes a lot more long-term sense than Rebecca's initial The Help-inspired scheme, and is (slightly) less mean to Josh than her real/fake sex tape idea. But that plan not only involves a lot of lead time, but would also open up the can of worms that is Rebecca's past in open court, something that Rebecca is clearly not ready for. So she goes to the most amoral person she knows, her boss Nathaniel, and seduces him, Chicago-style:
(And if I must say so, "So tell me 'bout your sins/And shock me with their luridness/Let me be your pupil/Let me choke on your cocksuredness" is one of the best lyrics Bloom and co-writers Jack Dolgen and Adam Schlesinger have come up with for this show)
Throughly seduced, Nathaniel takes Rebecca to a VERY Fifty Shades of Grey masked ball where he can connect with the rich and powerful to REALLY take down Josh, but when his plan is too much even for Rebecca's hunger for revenge, she tells him to call it off, finally electing to just track Josh down to his church and confront him in front of all the parishioners. But she can't hold herself back, and lists every single terrible thing she's done (that Josh "made" her do) - which as we know is pretty terrible indeed.
Realizing all the ammunition she just gave Josh, she attempts to launch a VERY public smear campaign. But Josh also has some secret info on Rebecca (thanks a lot, Trent!), which he privately shares with Father Brah, who in turn shares it with Paula, who stages a "convention of loved ones" along with Darryl, Heather, and Valencia. But Rebecca, still unable to face her past, or maybe just still unable to believe that anyone could love her after learning who she "really" is, lashes out, viciously taking down her friends and stalking out into the night.
The next narrative Rebecca tries on for size? That of the slasher-esque horror villain, à la Erika Christensen in Swimfan (an even better reference for Rebecca than Fatal Attraction), and... well...
Everything after that in the most recent episode is dead-on perfect teen slasher parody/homage (bringing Mama Chan to the carnival! dressing up as a shrub! heavy breathing on Josh's boob phone!), as Rebecca sinks to her lowest point yet. At which point, the only thing to do is have an end credits song sung by Josh Groban.
Go ahead. Read the credits again. They're AMAZING.
And Rebecca's not the only one placing herself into standard narrative arcs. After finding out her Community College is forcing her to graduate (she's taken every course they have), Heather finds herself forced to sing an (amazingly hackneyed) inspirational musical theater song. And poor Canadian lawyer Tim finally gets a big moment to shine... but it's after learning that his wife has been faking her orgasm for years, leading him to sing a song that is as close to Les Miserables's "Empty Chairs at Empty Tables" as you can get without calling it a rewrite, and shot in the super close-up style of Tom Hooper's film to boot.
I never would have expected Crazy Ex-Girlfriend to go as meta as it did in last week's episode, but the show has always been fairly open about how it is playing around with the narrative conventions and tropes of the myriad romantic narratives women in particular are subject to (this season's opening credits take direct aim at the contradictory nature of the romantic narratives peddled by pop music). Rebecca's attachment to those narratives is very much the point of the whole enterprise; she admitted to Doctor Akopian in the first season that she processes hard times by imagining her life as a series of musical numbers. It was only a matter of time before those musical numbers started telling her that, well, "life doesn't make narrative sense."
How are you liking this season? What's your favorite musical number so far? Let us know in the comments!