The second episode of the new season of Looking, "Looking for Results," opens with Patrick (Jonathan Groff) and Kevin (Russell Tovey) finally waking up together in a real bed. Or does it? It turns out that they're not waking up but actually just finishing a nooner in a hotel room, on their lunch breaks, which ends when Kevin looks at his watch and says, "Patrick it's nearly two-thirty." But not before he shows his ass again and jiggles it in the daylight for Patrick's benefit.
British director Andrew Haigh probably contributed some personal detail to the script as Kevin admits that he had a schoolboy crush on the boy band Take That. Patrick shares a story of needing to dance around the house as a boy and having a crush on his dad's motorcyle-riding best friend.
The two then head back to work and discuss designing a gay role-playing game for cell phones, a "cage match for gay archetypes," bringing together their romantic connection and their work relationship when Kevin gives Patrick a verbal OK to go ahead and start on the project. And Kevin then gets anxious when Patrick tells him that he told Dom and Augustin about their relationship and Patrick proceeds to get super neurotic after his coworker Owen tells him there are bedbugs, everywhere, including hotels. Cue a bunch of ninny manifestations of his anxiety about this affair with Kevin as he examines and re-examines a small rash on his abdomen. Dom tells him it's not anything, and definitely not Kaposi's sarcoma, but Patrick of course takes it there.
Sidebar: Does anyone else enjoy the way Russell Tovey pronounces "San Frahn-ciss-co" when he worries that the rumor of the affair will get spread via some Castro queen "all over San Frahn-ciss-co"?
We have a dinner party at Patrick and Augustin's Lower Haight apartment where Dom and Augustin basically force Patrick to face the fact that he's Kevin's dirty secret, and basically a whore, and he shouldn't romanticize it too much. Then the gang goes out for margaritas at La Rondalla with Doris, where Doris meets a love interest: Malik (Bashir Salahuddin), who turns out to work for the Mayor's Office. (Spoiler: They'll be having sex shortly.)
Augustin solidifies his awfulness by calling Doris a fag hag, explaining that he's giving up on art (to which Doris cracks, "Oh, no, don't do that to the world!"), and then he proceeds to keep going out after getting pretty drunk on tequila, seeking out the bear they met at the Russian River, Eddie, presaging his romantic storyline for the season. And then he proves he has a death wish by taking some GHB from a friend despite the fact that he's been drinking. This ends with him passed out on a sidewalk next to a pupusa cart.
Dom has a date night with Lynn (Scott Bakula), who pushes the envelope with their open relationship which we're just now learning they have asking who Dom fucked and where while he was up at the river. And Dom tells him.
Then we have the re-entrance of Richie, who, while walking down the street with his new boyfriend, finds Augustin passed out and, even though he starts to walk away, decides to be a nice guy and take him home. This reminds Patrick what a nice guy Richie is, and yeah. The love triangle returns.
The episode ends with Patrick heading to get an HIV test, which unfortunately has a little bit too much didactic explanation about how modern HIV tests work, which like so many details connected to gay life should not actually be anything that Patrick (age 31/32) doesn't know already.
But then Russell Tovey finally does the full Take That dance routine for the song "Do What You Like," just for Patrick's benefit, in his glass-walled office, so, if anyone in the office didn't already suspect they were fucking, they're now sure of it.
This, by the way, is the 1992 video upon which that little dance routine is based.
Previously: 'Looking' Season Two Opens With Fantastic Party In The Woods, Quickly Slows Back Down To Snail's Pace
GIFs via OUT.