Dating is weird. First impressions are rarely an accurate measure of a person. And a guy will do a helluva lot for the chance to hook up with a pretty girl, even endanger his own life.
Louie braves lies, embarrassment, threats to his sexuality, and even falling off a building because of his attraction to a woman whose name he doesn’t know. Parker Posey returns as “Liz” (it’s unclear if anything she says is true) from last week’s “meet cute” episode, and is both everything we’d expect and worse. She’s filled with life and energy, but she has no sense of boundaries. She is charismatic and compassionate, but she’s a liar and a troubled drinker. Everything she does is a test, a mini-adventure, and if her story about her childhood disease is true, it does make sense for her to act that way.
Don’t forget, this is all because Louie’s daughters wanted him to have a girlfriend. So it’s not just about the possibility of sex, but the possibility of a better life for his girls. Perhaps Tape Recorder would make a better girlfriend than Liz, who seems troubled past her veneer of carefree joy. She claims to not want to jump, but for a moment there, it seemed she might. A dark place to take the episode, not that Louie hasn’t done that sort of thing before. The girl Louie thought Liz was versus the girl she really turned out to be — that guy checking her out from the pool hall? That was seeing without hearing, the way Louie started out.
But then she made him wear a dress, laughed at him, then kissed him. Talk about confusing. I liked how Louie foreshadowed his hatred of stairs with his hatred of walking. And a beautifully painful shot straight up — although my favorite sequence was the visual orgy of food at real life store Russ & Daughters, which was combined with sounds of pure enjoyment. Made me want some rugelach, actually. That stuff’s addictive.
Clacked by Jeremy Fogelman 
on Jul 27, 2012 @ 02:12 EST5EDT
The Russ and Daughters scene was also a great relief from tension. The whole episode felt like was heading toward a very dark place, then suddenly it was like I sat on the remote and accidentally switched to an episode of No Reservations.