'Broad City' Review: "Mushrooms"

Kyra Power ’19 / Emertainment Monthly Staff Writer
Fun, trippy, and oddly artistic, this week’s episode of Broad City follows Abbi’s (Abbi Jacobson) and Ilana’s (Ilana Glazer) weekend adventure while on shrooms. With a combination of live action and animation, this episode was almost experimental in nature.
While fun and experimental, this episode still has a solid narrative structure. As Abbi and Ilana get high, fun bright colors saturate the episode and the two of them and their world slowly become animated. They bounce through tunnels and ride waves of colors. Animated Ilana doesn’t have any feet, which feels oddly right. Ilana just floats around while she’s tripping. Their high slowly fades as Abbi’s boss calls her in to buy macaroons for her wife’s party. By the time they get to the party with the desserts, they are fully back to live action. Intent on saving their high, they smoke weed and this is where their trip takes a dark turn.
Ilana gets invited to join a threesome by the two hottest people at the party. She heads back to their hotel, but no matter what she does, can’t seem to get it up. Instead, she keeps hallucinating an animation of Lincoln’s (Hannibal Buress) head. Meanwhile, Abbi gets trapped in a room with her boss’ cat. It keeps meowing until Abbi opens the door and lets it out. Her boss eventually finds her and shares some encouraging words for Abbi’s personal and professional life. Her bad trip seems to be turning around until they open the door to the outside and the cat’s dead body rolls inside: Abbi unintentionally murdered it. The episode ends with Ilana stalking Lincoln and his new girlfriend on social media. After a good stalking and crying session, she deletes him off of everything.
This season is an interesting one so far. Over the past few years, they’ve introduced all these characters and arcs.  While everyone’s arc moves much slower than a normal sit-com, they still have to move somewhere. I think Abbi Jacobson, who wrote this episode, did a good job keeping the light fun aspect of earlier seasons, while also furthering the characters. Abbi and Ilana are growing up and changing. This episode is definitely one of the stranger episodes of Broad City, but it still keeps the hilarious fun stoner vibe that makes me love the show.
Episode Grade: A