You’re the Worst Review: Worldstar! (Season 4 Episode 9)
On You’re the Worst Season 4 Episode 9 “Worldstar!” Jimmy tries to get over Gretchen, Lindsey confronts Becca, and Edgar tries to the find the funny in a depressing movie.
On the face of it, “Worldstar!” is a typical episode of You’re the Worst: funny, but not without particularly gut wrenching scenes throughout. The not inconsiderable caveat here is that we’ve come to expect more from the series than that.
The biggest problem that the episode faces is there’s not a solid anchor in it. The scenes bounce around rather erratically between the various characters without ever truly feeling like it’s telling one character’s specific story.
Arguably, that person in this episode would be Lindsey, but even then there’s a certain level of detachment from her desire to plant a flag of blame on her sister’s proverbial hill. The supposed emotional revelations that occur at the end of the episode fall rather flat, with more of a whimper than the bang they were going for.
It’s not telling anything particularly new about Lindsey or Becca, at least not anything that you couldn’t have deduced in a prior episode. It hardly takes the most sophisticated viewer to ascribe Becca with some sense of profound dissatisfaction with her life.
That’s been the entire point of Becca as a character since the beginning. She’s someone who only married Vernon because she wasn’t about to let Lindsey have an advantage over her. Her pettiness and general awfulness has always been her most defining quality, but now the writers expect us to feel sorry for her?
The fact is that You’re the Worst has put a lot of work into the fact that Becca is essentially one of the worst humans imaginable and now it wants us to have this measure of sympathy for her with no actual build up to that point. It’s not wrong for the series to want that, but it needs to put the work in for that and it has not.
Even at that, if the series wanted “Worldstar!” to be this Becca-centric episode, that would be all well and good, but, again, that’s not what this is. It’s told through the prism of Lindsey and that, as mentioned, feels a bit hollow in execution.
Gretchen is present throughout the episode, but she is so heavily overshadowed by Lindsey that she is almost a nonentity, serving as the outsider amongst Lindsey’s family.
The other sections of “Worldstar!” aren’t much better.
Jimmy spends most of the episode trying to get over Gretchen and get laid all at the same time and it’s not terribly interesting or compelling. Actually, it’s pretty one note.
If Jimmy’s storyline has any thing to say at all it’s that Jimmy disastrously believes that people are this static thing, destined to never change and only be what he imagines them to be and should that cognitive dissonance be shattered, his brain seems to shut down.
To its credit, “Worldstar!” does end on a severely intriguing note with Gretchen discovering Jimmy having sex and her (to put it delicately) very specific reaction to that could make for some fascinating soul searching in the next episode.
What did you think of this episode of You’re the Worst? Share your thoughts with us in the comments below!
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You’re the Worst airs Wednesdays at 10/9c on FXX.
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Drew Koenig
Drew has an ongoing, borderline unhealthy obsession with pop culture, but with television in particular. When he's not aggressively trying to get out of a perpetual state of catching up, he can be found passionately defending the ending of Lost. More of his online work can be found at The Lost Cause and he also co-hosts The Lost Cause Pod.