Portlandia Season 5 Finale

The Peeves: taxidermy, weirdos, helicopter parents, arson, talking heads (the phenomenon, not the band), Pussy Riot (the band not the phenomenon), police, hostage situations

Put a Cap on It: Bryce Shivers and Lisa Eversman switched from putting birds on things to selling taxidermy animals. Now they’re back, advertising their Dead Pets store: “not sleeping, not faking it, just dead.”

But in the dead of night, masked figures sneak into their Mississippi and Skidmore (of course they’re there) location and burn it to the ground.

Moral panic strikes Portlandia. “Whodunnit?” asks the news. Middle-aged parents Malcolm and Chris thank heavens their daughter, Brit, isn’t anything like them. Toni and Candace install an alarm system in their bookstore, Women and Women First. And Portland Police “round up the weirdos,” including Fred and Carrie at the goths from episode four. Without a real alibi, they’re taken to trial and represented by none other than Paul “Pee-Wee Herman” Reubens.

But before the trial can begin, activists from the San Diego episode put on Pussy Riot-style masks and gather by the courthouse. In the ensuing police chase two activists escape and the other two take Toni and Candace hostage at Women and Women First. It turns out one activist is Malcolm and Chris’s precious daughter Brit after all. After failing to talk her out of the situation, they turn themselves into police for being terrible parents.

Best Bits: “They’re listening to scary music and checking out dark pathways on the Internet!” tut-tut Malcolm and Chris, the WASPy parent couple, about the “weirdos.” It’s a dead-on impression of the passive-aggressive, Tipper Gore-style liberalism prevalent in Portland’s more sanctimonious quarters.

Reubens’ appearance at the weirdos’ trial should also go down as one of the best guest spots on Portlandia. In a Beethovian wig and a Dark Shadows-esque shirt, he lurches around the courtroom and delivers lines like: “Weirdos were the first people to eat kale. To try marijuana. To write poems. To fall in love.”

Duds: For the second episode in a row, Portlandia brings on an SNL-affiliated person who either fails to deliver or isn’t given a chance to be funny. This time it’s former Weekend Update host Seth Meyers, who plays a guest on the news. Meyers was funny on Update with a shit-eating grin on his smug, little New Hampshire face, quipping his way through news in his smug, little New Hampshire way. His joy in ridiculing people was part of the fun. Here, he just delivers half-assed lines (sick zing on Internet commenters, bro!) with a straight face. It feels like they’re just bringing him on because he and Fred are pals from SNL...boring.

Deep Cuts: When the activists confess, the news reports their location as a rooftop at Fourth and Salmon. Actually, they’re about four blocks south, on top of the 24-Hour Fitness at Fourth and Columbia.

What’s surprising is how much this episode gets right. They use the CW 32 logo on the newscasts. And when the police are rounding up weirdos, one’s alibi is a Nine-Inch-Nails covers show in Gresham. In the past the show bungled suburbia jokes, here it’s pretty accurate— the suburbs are crawling with goths.

Grade: A

This episode was the first of the season—ironically, it’s also the finale—where the skits seemed truly cohesive. It worked because skits were brief, and didn’t latch on to specific central characters: it starts with Bryce and Lisa, but ditches them for the cops, but ditches them for the parents, and so on and so on. Portlandia’s characters don’t succeed when developed, they succeed when given funny lines, like this. It’s about the sketches fitting together, not character transformation.

It’s also the most evil episode. With a witch hunt for weirdos, activists are no longer goofus liberal arts dropouts, but militant radicals. It’s unexpected for the show, but hits on the mob mentality of the young and the hip, and the consequence of heinous egoism: violence.

This season epitomized Portlandia: wildly inconsistent. Entire episodes went without jokes while others, like this, are stocked with dozens of “Put a bird on it” one liners. This episode would be a great blueprint for the next two seasons to come: keep the sketches brief, the characters simple, and the local references accurate—we notice.