‘Horace and Pete’ Recap, Episode 9: He Thrusts His Fists Against the Posts and Still Insists He Sees the Ghosts

With one foot planted in the fertile territory of the past two episodes’ modest goals and subdued tone, and the other stuck in the earlier episodes’ mire of try-hard melodrama and screechingly bad pseudo-satirical political arguments, Horace and Pete Episode 9 seems like this split-personality series is at a real crossroads. Considering how this one ends, and where Louis C.K.’s storytelling instincts almost invariably appear to lead him, I’m not optimistic it will take the right path. For now, though, it’s worth taking a close look at what this bifurcated installment does right, and what it gets wrong.
In the win column, you can find a pair of cameos in the rich vein of Rick Shapiro and Lucy Taylor’s short but searing appearances in the past two episodes. The first is John Sharian as Jerold, a clean-cut but very nervous applicant for the bar’s soon-to-be (or is it???) vacant bartending position. It comes out in his interview with Sylvia, at whom he keeps smiling at awkward moments because, he says, he’s “trying to be easy,” that he served time in prison for manslaughter, a crime he committed when he was 16 and on drugs. “I get nervous for every job interview,” he says, after Sylvia reacts with surprise but not with hostility, “because I know at some point I have to drop that news. Takes me, like, fifty interviews to get a job. It’s what I live with, it’s my fault, but I would like to know, y’know, your inclination, so I can move on if I have to.” Sylvia is sympathetic, but ultimately can’t bring herself to “invite more drama into the place,” even though Jerold points out that with a lifelong parole officer, he comes “pre-drama’d.” In the end Sylvia offers to keep his number in case she hears of a job opening elsewhere, and he leaves it. Both people are polite, even kind. Both people know this man has no hope. It’s maybe the quietest performance the show has seen, and as pointilist portraiture of a life of quiet desperation it’s tough to top.

Until the return of Tom Noonan as the bar’s towering, beret-wearing, piano-playing regular. After a Match.com date between a New Yorker staffer and a guy whose dad was an astronaut devolves into repeated, mutual screams of “YOU’RE NOT NICE! FUCK YOU!” (long story and not worth going into, though it should be noted this is the least worst of the show’s awkward-date asides), the gang at the bar explains why such dates never work out. Online dating services, Kurt and others argue, set people up according to shared interests, when what really connects couples is chemistry, up to and including the opposites-attract sort. But seeking out opposites doesn’t work either, because this kind of chemistry can’t be forced.

“That’s why they call it ‘falling’ in love,” Tom chimes in. “You can’t fall on purpose.” With a smile on his face, he tells the story of how he used to be an actor, and in one acting class he was trying to learn how to fall on cue without making it look like he was falling on cue. For him at least, this was impossible. “So I quit being an actor.” The little smile is still there, but its relationship to his emotions is now distressingly unclear. Tom’s point is this: “Well, you just accept…just accept the fact that love is rare and it probably won’t happen to you, ever.” “Is that what you do?” asks the New Yorker writer. “You just accept it?”
“No,” Tom replies, the smile flitting in and out of existence as he talks. “No, I…I walk around brokenhearted. And I, I get drunk and…I mean, I hate being alone. And…” Here the smile returns, as sad as fresh-dug grave. “And someday it’ll kill me.” I’ve now watched this scene twice, and each time I exhale sharply afterwards, like something really difficult to endure just happened to me. The contrast Noonan’s gentle bearing and his blunt despair is that powerful.

After that, things take a bit of a turn. We learn via a query from Leon, the regular played by Steven Wright more or less as himself, that Pete has been missing for a week. When Horace gets an unexpected phone call, his subsequent trip to the hospital reveals why: In a misguided attempt to control his symptoms before his Probitol prescription ran out entirely and took the decision out of his hands, he and his now-girlfriend Tricia decided to wean him off on their own, rather than let their newfound happiness end with such finality. Unfortunately, his psychosis bests them both, and in a destructive rampage through their apartment he turns on her, knocking her unconscious and then beating her prone body. “He never hurt anybody before, never,” Horace adds after apologizing to her, before adding with sickening realization, “We can’t say that anymore.” That’s a fine moment for C.K. as Horace, maybe his best since his conversation with Laurie Metcalf’s Sarah way back when.
And it’s a sad fate for Pete and for Tricia—but that’s part of the problem. Unwittingly or not, the scene presents her as an Eve-like figure in the sense that going off his meds was her idea, not his. Yes, his intention was to commit suicide after he ran out, so she was literally trying to save his life, but she did so in a way that can be construed as bringing this on herself. The fact that her Tourette’s flares up repeatedly during the heart to heart she has with Horace sure doesn’t help, either, since the suspicion she was given this affliction just so C.K. could have a character shout racial slurs and filthy sexual slang at random intervals is impossible to shake.
The episode just bottoms out after that. Kurt and Sylvia argue about, god help me, Hulk Hogan’s lawsuit against Gawker; cross-cutting this horrendously dopey conversation with Horace building toward a blowup at Leon for wanting to know where Pete is doesn’t make it any less excruciating—if anything, it does the opposite. New York City mayor Bill De Blasio makes a substantial cameo (a callback to Pete’s earlier attempt to get the bar declared a landmark) that stops the whole show dead in its tracks; imagine the Alf scene from Mr. Robot Season Two played straight, or Ed Koch’s cameo in The Muppets Take Manhattan but it’s the puppets from Charlie Kaufman’s Anomalisa he runs into instead of Fozzie Bear or whoever. Finally, there’s a lengthy hallucination in which Pete, who’s actually god knows where, imagines himself sweeping up in the bar, where the only person who can see and talk to him is dead old Uncle Pete. God love Alan Alda, but christ was that character dead weight on this show, and his return even in ghost form smothers whatever signs of life the episode had left. Watching Steve Buscemi break his back to get through this store-brand A Christmas Carol is grim work indeed.

Two key quotes end this penultimate installment. Toward the end of his imaginary chat with Uncle Pete, Pete the younger says “There’s no good options for me down the road. I’m just unlucky, that’s all. I got a bad straw.” When Horace and Pete plays it cool and avoids histrionics (and uses the right actors), it can be and has been quite good at depicting this inconvenient truth about life—some people, Jerold and Tom and Pete among them, are just fucked, and that’s that.
Before the credits roll, there’s a title screen with a quote from the recently deceased Garry Shandling as an epigram: “The world is too noisy and distracted to probably ultimately survive. Everyone needs to shut the fuck up. The answers are in the silence. Monks set themselves on fire to protest and to make this point. Just consider it.” Given the overwritten histrionics and melodrama that the show too often traffics in, I wish it had taken its own advice.

Sean T. Collins (@theseantcollins) writes about TV for Rolling Stone, Vulture, the Observer, and anyplace that will have him, really. He and his family live on Long Island.