‘Crisis In Six Scenes’ Recap, Episode 5: “My Fight Goes On”

As continue our slow-motion stumble toward the conclusion of what Amazon is calling a miniseries and the rest of us are calling an insanely padded Woody Allen doodle that you keep waiting to in fact begin, I ask a sad question: Is this what has become of our Elaine May? Elaine May is one of the underrated comedic treasures of our time, a daffy, charming and hilariously deadpan space alien presence who has been a fixture of our popular culture from the days of “Nichols and May” to, sheesh, Ishtar. She wrote Heaven Can Wait and Primary Colors and parts of Tootsie, she’s one of the major founders of the improvisational comedy movement, she directed The Heartbreak Kid and Jack Lemmon once called her “the finest actress I ever worked with.” She won the national Medal of Arts, for crying out loud. This woman is amazing.

But she has only acted twice in 16 years. The first was her extremely funny supporting role in Woody Allen’s Small Time Crooks, in which she seems to be occupying a different, much more pleasant universe than the rest of the cast all together. And the second is … well, sad to say, it’s Crisis In Six Scenes. And the saddest part of it is that Allen hasn’t given her a part with much to do. She’s basically Allen’s imagine of a ’60s suburban wife, with her book club and her social visits and her complacent domesticity. All of those things are the opposite of who Elaine May is, on every level, but she’s shoehorned in by the role. You keep waiting for her to be loopy and untether herself from Allen’s earthly constraints. Instead, she just sort of sits and nods at him as he yammers.

This episode has the closest thing Crisis In Six Scenes is ever going to have to an action sequence, when Sidney and Kay leave thousands of dollars in Cuban money in a phone booth, lose it to a studious police officer and then have to run away through the rooftops of Brooklyn. Woody Allen, suffice it to say, is not the most physical actor, though I’d argue he gave a legitimately strong performance, which involved smashing a car with a crowbar, in Anything Else.

But here? Here to watch Woody Allen – or, more accurately, a stunt double with the misfortunate of bearing a slight physical resemblance to Woody Allen – jump from rooftop to rooftop is comical in a way that one suspects Allen did not intend. Even in Allen’s lesser films, he usually isn’t embarrassing himself. But here, his attempts to show the “action” that Sidney and Kay now find in their life as a result of Lennie are strained and, yeah, sort of difficult to watch. There has been a lot of that happening on this show.

Allen does get a laugh in this episode, when he pretends to “mime” making a phone call – he can still drop a weird Keaton-esque facial expression when he needs to – but this, more than any other episode, feels like Farce Night at your assisted living facility. Heck, this episode even has a five-minute interlude with a cardiologist. When Woody doesn’t try, he really doesn’t try.

Oh, and the end of the episode, Alan sets off a bomb offscreen to try to impress Lennie. It seems unlikely that the penultimate episode would end with carnage of a Breaking Bad level, but who knows, maybe the next scene of the final episode ends with poor John Magaro looking like this:

Episode’s “Cosmic Embarrassment Level”: 8 (out of 10)

That chase scene isn’t exactly Bullitt, let’s say that.

[Watch “Episode 5” of Crisis In Six Scenes on Amazon Prime Video]

Will Leitch is a senior writer for Sports On Earth, culture writer for Bloomberg Politics, film critic for the New Republic, contributor to Sports Illustrated, contributing editor at New York magazine and the founder of Deadspin.