The Existential Entourage — “The Script and the Sherpa”
Reviews of the HBO series Entourage which make me want to kill myself.
It’s taken me three years to recuperate from the first half of Entourage season one, but now that that’s accomplished it’s time to dive back in with The Boys and see what’s next for Vince, E, and the somehow-even-worse rest.
We catch up with the Entourage at their product-placed Gold’s Gym. Vince follows in his older brother’s footsteps from the last episode by dating a woman who’s sabotaging his man card. This time, as opposed to Johnny getting cucked by his woman’s inappropriately testosteroned strength regimine, Vince’s vegan vixen has him embracing the ancient Indian art of emasculation, yoga.
Turtle sets up the premise for the episode: Los Angeles’ weed supply has gone dry, a global warming scenario so far-fetched that it‘s beyond credulity, like the plot of The Day After Tomorrow or suggesting that global warming itself is manmade.
Eric continues navigating his short-lived role as protagonist when nebbishy rival agent Josh Weinstein tips him to the script for Queens Boulevard. While reading it, he’s treated to Vince’s vapid vulpine (hereafter referred as Fiona, probably without further alliteration) disrobing to walk naked into the pool. A fleeting glimpse of E’s provisional days as audience surrogate and therefore our de facto means of vicarious male gaze? We’ll see.
Fiona continues exposing Vince to the virtues of her New Age lifestyle as we find the couple naked and practicing tantric sex. “The idea is to get as close as possible without actually touching,” she says, referring to either the intimate moment they’re sharing or her views on Indian cultural appropriation, I’m not sure. A similar scene from Peep Show comes to mind, handled with just as much grace and tact:
In order to meet up with Ari to discuss the new script (approved by falooda-feasting Fiona), Eric has a flirtatious phone call with Emily to a chorus of obscene epithets from Drama and Turtle. The following meeting once again infuses the episode with some actual tension: Ari condescends E who in turn resents Ari, while both are undermined by Fiona. It’s a scene at a table that would, on paper, impress a screenwriting teacher with its conflicts, and so we quickly exit it in order for Vince to talk a proto-selfie with some tween’s digital camera.
Back to the central conflict of the episode, the Entourage, desperate to score marijuana, the agrees to follow flesh-foregoing Fiona to meet her Sherpa. On the way to his Bel Air estate, they pass by the audience itself, one of the most meta and self-referential journeys to Bel Air since the opening to Fresh Prince.
Enter Val Kilmer, chewing the scenery as the titular Sherpa like it was an edible. He explains that Fiona’s channel name is Dakatoka. I tried looking up what a “channel name” is to find out what aspect of India is being scattered about like discarded stems this time, but I could not. I did find a YouTube channel name generator which I promise I’m not linking out of some kind of surreptitious paid promotion. BoyEntourage doesn’t play that game:
This isn’t interesting, but in the following scene they set up a dinner for Vince and Queens Boulevard’s antagonist producer at the product-placed Mastro’s Steakhouse in Beverly Hills, which the episode subtitles incorrectly write as “Maestros” despite the pronunciation.
I mention this because I’m something of a freelance transcriptionist, so my art is important to me, and also because the scene itself is so banal that you’d need way more than the two superfluous hookahs it features to find anything in it worth commenting on. And that’s in spite of two guns being pulled, so I guess Chekhov was tripping too for all that’s worth.
Prior to dinner, Vince assuages E by telling him that the dope-deifying Dakatoka is soon headed to an Indian ashram, concluding her appropriative arc (but not before she boards her plane wearing a feathered headdress to kick off her own confused-white-girl-in-an-exotic-land spinoff).
The late Stanley DeSantis makes his first appearance here as producer Scott Wick. His final appearance on the show (season two’s “The Sundance Kids”) happened to air the very same night (July 17, 2005) as his first and last guest role on Six Feet Under. Is it unfair to speculate that either or both of these episodes killed him? Perhaps, but there remains a certain catharsis in adding murder to the list of otherwise artistic crimes committed by these two terrible series.
To make his case to Wick, Vince casually drops the revelation that he grew up with five siblings beneath a “psychotically drunk” father. Surely this is foreshadowing of the inevitable shocking emergence of Vince and Johnny’s inner demons, or at least laying the groundwork to introduce one of their other siblings, perhaps even the aforementioned father, still suffering back in New York?
Surely?
Vince gets the role by hooking the producer up with some dank Sherpa weed.
5
