You’re the Worst Review: The Pin in My Grenade (Season 5 Episode 2)
You’re the Worst Season 5 Episode 2, “The Pin in My Grenade,” debates eloping versus traditionally getting married.
Where the premiere was a lively riff on the rom-com that it so lovingly lambasts, “The Pin in My Grenade” is in many ways a more traditional episode of You’re the Worst. That of course includes hijinks and our dummies acting very much like the dummies they are.
Centered around Jimmy and Gretchen’s desire to no longer deal with wedding planners that they tell ridiculous, grandiose lies to, the couple decides to forego the headache and simply elope at City Hall.
Overall, “The Pin in My Grenade” is an amusing episode for a regularly funny show. But there’s a kind of melancholy that seeps through the normally dark and off-kilter humor.
A lot of what makes “The Pin in My Grenade” work is the kind of relatability that exists in the unconscious self-sabotage at play when the pair misses their elopement appointment. Deep down in the parts of their brains they don’t want to acknowledge, Jimmy and Gretchen don’t want to elope — so they don’t.
It’s incredibly relatable — this act of your brain behaving in ways that, on the surface, don’t make any sense to you but reveal a certain inner truth that you either weren’t willing or able to address in a healthy way. Normally, this isn’t done by reciting some grand imagining of how you’d plan your wedding or “breaking in” your new toilet.
In that sense, actually, the actions both Jimmy and Gretchen take to avoid going to their elopement are rather perfect for their respective characters. A lesser show would somehow flip it for the two, and the subversion here is perfect.
For Jimmy, he simply wants to enthrall a crowd of bar patrons with his linguistic eloquence — especially after being told that he has to audition to write the screenplay for his book’s adaptation. Because more than any other defining character quality, Jimmy is a massive egotist that loves being told how great he is.
For Gretchen, give her a toilet that simultaneously allows her to avoid something mildly productive in her life and gives her a modicum of enjoyment, and of course she’ll dive headfirst without really thinking about it twice.
It’s all so in tune with both of their characters and demonstrates that the series has an exquisite grasp on its two leads. This groove is as easy for the show as breathing. Again, a lesser show might bog itself down in its own nihilism or the ever-growing sense that this relationship, in the end, probably won’t work out.
It side-steps that with something that feels a bit more warm and reassuring — that there is a light at the end of the tunnel and maybe it can all work out in the end. On the other hand, maybe this is the very thing that’ll make it not work in the end, because sometimes the light at the end of the tunnel is actually a barreling train coming right for you.
What did you think of this episode of You’re the Worst? Share your thoughts 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.