It's A Dictator's Party, And Matt Will Go If He Wants To

Before any of us gets too high and mighty about the choice Matt LeBlanc makes in the latest episode of Episodes, it would behoove us to remember a few things.

First: the man has lost half his money.

Second: he's just learned that a goodly chunk of what remains is going to have to go to pay all the taxes that his now-dead business manager embezzled from him rather than pay on his behalf.

Third: from everything we've seen him do -- from sleeping with his stalker to trying to get his wife married to a maybe-abusive man in order to get him out of spousal support -- he was never exactly a paragon of ethics anyway...so if a dictator wants to fly Matt to his birthday party in his private jet and pay him half a million dollars to spend three days in his unnamed central Asian country, don't those considerations kind of cancel out the fact that the man just killed 11,000 people in January? And even if they don't, if it's a choice between going and selling his dinosaur egg, does Matt really have a choice?! Before you answer, there's one more thing to consider if Matt doesn't attend.

Obviously, Matt goes. And if qualms are something he ever had the capacity to have, which is an open question, those are certainly washed away when he's strolling through the party enjoying a glass of what is undoubtedly the highest of high-end champagnes, and recognizes one of the other schmuck celebrities in attendance.

A gag early on way back in the first season of Episodes found Matt calling around to his former Friends to see which of them he might be able to induce to appear on the show, but since we (a) only heard his half of those calls and (b) hadn't seen any of them on Episodes until this week might have led one to believe that Matt LeBlanc actually isn't friends with his ex-castmates. After all, Lisa Kudrow's Web Therapy has gotten Courteney Cox, Matt LeBlanc, Matthew Perry, and David Schwimmer, while Cox's Cougar Town has hosted three (Kudrow, Perry, and the elusive Aniston). But if the show's producers were holding back a Friend just so that his or her appearance could be this unexpected and delightful, it was worth it -- especially since the cameo also served to give LeBlanc a cold dose of reality with regard to his own drawing power relative to his former colleagues.

Cheer up, Matt! You haven't even looked in your gift bag yet!