Broad City 4.2 Recap: Ilana’s New Job And Abbi’s Old Flame

After last week’s flashback origin story, Broad City catches up with Abbi and Ilana in present time. The opening scene has our two leads working to safely escort a woman into a Planned Parenthood type health clinic. When a protester confronts them, they blow marijuana smoke into his face. Almost immediately, he is turned from a high-strung, hate filled demonstrator to a more chill, sympathetic man who begins to question his own motives.  At least our heroes were able to convert one person through the magic of weed.
Ilana finds herself so broke, that she cuts a baked potato in half so she has both lunch and dinner. Due to her financial situation, she is in dire need of a new job. Luckily for her, her roommate Jaimé has scored her an interview for a waitressing job. She’s had prior experience in Long Island at Dumpers Post (it’s more sophisticated than it sounds), but is hoping to make the big time at a Manhattan restaurant.
In order to get the job, her catty and condescending boss, played by Rupaul sans drag, needs her to unleash her inner queen of mean to bully customers into ordering more and higher end food.  At first, Ilana embraces it even taking shots at Abbi during a phone conversation but later has second thoughts. After all, she’s all about being positive and lifting people up, not tearing them down. She spends the rest of the evening serving tables her way and earns a pretty good take in tips.

Meanwhile, it seems Abbi has pursued her love of art as she works for a graphic design company and is sitting behind a desk in an office. Alas, she was just checking the chair height for her boss.  She’s working as an assistant doing odd jobs like buying organic kitty litter and checking on the status of moccasins at the cobbler. Later, she has to bow out of work to pick up a package at her old place of employment, Soulstice. She has not been back since humiliating her coworker and ex-lover, Trey. While at Soulstice, she sees Trey working with Shania Twain, the namesake of this episode, “Twaining Day”. She’s been lying for years that she’s trained the Canadian country songstress and now has a chance to make it a truth.

Abbi is able to convince Trey to allow her to co-train Shania with him. What results is not a hard work out for Shania, but a rekindling of the romance between the former couple. Trey and Abbi are so enamored with each other, that they frequently forget the superstar’s presence. The sexual tension is so thick that Shania tries to urge the two back together by having them demonstrate some stretching exercises. Also, when they finally do hook up, she even serenades them. The song is short-lived though, as they are in the middle of love-making, Trey has a disastrous accident that requires medical attention. As Trey is taken away in an ambulance, he tells Abby that they should have just kept it physical as she is not the relationship type.
After hearing those words, one could see a genuine look of hurt and disappointment on Abbi’s face. Although their season 3 romance did not last long, this episode highlighted how the two were actually a great couple. From Abbi’s ability to exploit Trey’s love of Top Gun to convince him that they should co-train Shania, to both expressing their love of TV’s Friends in unison. Or even the silliness they shared as Trey does his spot-on Ross impression. Abbi’s already found her rebound in the EMT guy from the ambulance, but hopefully we still get to see Trey in future episodes.
Other interesting notes from the episode include:

• It was nice to see an over the top version of Shania, after all she’s the type of person to walk into a bathroom stall not to pee, but to watch an episode of Scandal
• RuPaul kills it
• The episode comes full circle as the package Abbi picked up was a 4-year supply of Plan B, just long enough for one presidential term

Broad City airs Wednesday nights at 10:30pm after South Park on Comedy Central.