As Louie's 'Elevator' Saga Comes To An End, What Has Louie Learned?

At the halfway mark of Louie's six-part "Elevator" series of episodes, I commented on how dismayed/infuriated I was by the protagonist's ongoing attempt to have a romantic relationship with a woman with whom he was incapable of communicating, other than what he imagined her series of pleasant smiles might mean. At the time, I gave the show the benefit of the doubt that the plotline might end up resolving itself with Louie realizing he's been living in a fantasy entirely of his own making. Not only isn't that the case, but he's already moved on to another lady, with what are already unfortunate results.

When we left "Elevator" in its penultimate installment last week, Louie had just been convinced by his friends that his relationship with Amia wasn't really serious until they slept together -- as opposed, for example, to "until they could carry on a conversation with one another." So Louie did get Amia to have sex with him (choice of words very much intended, given how we see him pulling her into the apartment when she lingers by the front door), only for her to express regret about it the next day in two of the few English words she knows: "No good." Though, to me, her meaning was pretty clear, by "Elevator, Part VI" we find out that Louie has convinced himself not that Amia was telling him the sex sucked (which is how I read her), but that she was actually worried about her immortal soul because they had sex out of wedlock. I guess he jumps to this conclusion after following her into a church, though she enters in the middle of a hurricane so maybe it's just the nearest building that offers shelter? Have we even seen any evidence that Amia is religious at all? GEE, WOULDN'T IT BE NICE IF LOUIE COULD JUST ASK HER WHAT WAS UP AND UNDERSTAND HER ANSWER?!

In the aftermath of their "no good" sex, Amia is clearly trying to put as much distance as possible between herself and Louie, but he won't let her: he intrudes on Evanka's apartment and demands that she translate for him and Amia even though Amia is -- for obvious reasons -- kind of embarrassed about involving her elderly relative in a discussion about the sex she wishes she hadn't had with Louie. In what I think CK the episode writer thinks is a sign of his unquenchable passion, Louie the character just ignores all the signals Amia is giving him that she wants to extract herself from their entanglement, and when signals give way to actual words, he ignores what Amia is saying, via Evanka. Only the seriousness of the hurricane and Louie's consequent need to help his ex-wife and daughters out of lower Manhattan breaks his resolve to browbeat Amia into interacting with him, so thanks, Hurricane Jasmine Forsythe: Amia owes you one.

I'm not enough of a misandrist to accuse the show of creating this waiter at the Hungarian restaurant to translate Amia's letter to Louie so that he could mansplain Amia's feelings on the matter of their weird relationship (or am I), but the fact that the plotline ends with neither one of them acknowledging that the main stumbling block for the longevity of their affair is THE LANGUAGE BARRIER -- which, by the way we have seen Louie taking ZERO STEPS to overcome -- is annoying. Instead, it's all about their ages and their children's needs and geography. Don't get me wrong: those are definitely valid issues that contribute to the impossibility of Amia and Louie getting together in any kind of real way. But seriously, seriously, these two don't know anything about each other and can't know anything about each other because they cannot talk to each other. "But maybe it's all an allegory about how no one really knows anything about anyone they date because no one ever tells the truth, common language or not!" ...Maybe? If so, (a) it's a pretty obscure one, and (b) unspooling it over six goddamn episodes feels really self-indulgent, even for this show.

And then, in the second of the night's two episodes, poor Pamela is back. Now that Amia has ditched Louie and returned to Hungary (and after his conversation with weird Dr. Bigelow about how the love is really in the losing or whatever the hell), Louie feels the time is right for him to let Pamela know that he'd like to take her up on her offer to be his girlfriend now. Of course, Pamela says she's no longer interested, though she does it in a Pamela way that suggests that what she really means is: he'll have to earn it all over again, which I think is fair.

Though CK is the episode's credited writer, Pamela Adlon is a consultant on the show, so even when the storyline finds Louie trying to force a kiss on her, knowing that Adlon would have had some say in her character's dialogue (veto power, if nothing else) takes some of the edge off what is kind of a problematic scene. The joke is supposed to be that Louie is a "nice guy" who's just trying to do with Pamela what she told him, not so long ago, she wanted to do with him. "This would be rape if you weren't so stupid," she grunts, fending Louie off. "God, you can't even rape well!" Granted, this scene was shot in a pre-#YesAllWomen context, but not before...you know, the existence of rape culture. But if we didn't know that Adlon has such a large behind-the-scenes role in the show, Pamela would feel a lot more like a convenient embodiment of CK's weird ideas about female consent, so under the circumstances, Adlon is hands-down the MVP of this entire season. And if the point of all this has been to prove to us once again that Louie isn't mature enough to be worthy of Pamela, then -- and only then -- will I feel it's been an acceptable imposition on my time.