This week, on HBO’s gay Sunday night dramedy about gay guys in a gay city in a gay country on this, the gayest of planets, the team breaks a gay world record for how many times the adjective “gay” has been used in a single episode of television. We have gay nuns, gay apps, gay proms, gay stereotypes, and gay genies that are out of “the gay fucking bottle.” In case you forgot, this show is about gay people.

The episode opens on two of those gay people: Patrick and Kevin, their union now legitimatized by the fact that Kevin finally broke up with Jon. In case you’ve already forgotten, Jon was Kevin’s live-in boyfriend who looked pretty much just like Patrick if Patrick went to an Ivy League school, played too much Frisbee golf, and wasn’t an uptight child whose idea of making breakfast in bed is pouring some cereal into a bowl. Patrick, in stark contrast to Kevin’s naked breakfast triumph a few episodes ago, drops everything on the floor. Typical Patrick!

(Oh, god. I just shuddered at the thought of young gay kids running around, proclaiming themselves “such a Patrick.” Just kidding, no one watches this show.)

It turns out that after one brief conversation about it and one scene of Kevin lazily pawing at his keyboard, Patrick and Kevin’s gay app is ready to launch. Well, nearly ready. There are still a few bugs, but Patrick wants to debut it at GaymerX, which is like gay (!) Comic Con, if Comic Con took place at some Ramada Inn and had a gay prom at the end of the first night. Uh oh. Am I going to get Gaymergated for saying that?

We learn that Kevin has been staying the night at Patrick’s, presumably because Jon burned their down their apartment building and a wide swath of the city as he returned to Seattle and resigned himself to a lonely existence without Kevin. Patrick emerges from the bedroom, ready to go to work wearing that French bulldog sweater that Kevin wore earlier in the season. Kevin is, understandably, hesitant. He’s not sure he wants to go public with their relationship yet, so soon after he dumped Jon (something he has yet to tell his coworkers he has done). Patrick decides that the hill he wants to die on is covered in French bulldog sweaters and pushes back, telling Kevin that wearing this fucking sweater to work represents a big step in their relationship, a relationship which has had to take baby steps up to this point due to the fact that Patrick just recently graduated from the role of sidepiece to the role of boyfriend.

Later at the office, Kevin and Patrick are making a presentation to their team and cannot help but finish each other’s sentences. They’re basically doing a terrible vaudevillian bit that feels like it was cut from those interviews with old couples at the beginning of When Harry Met Sally... When Owen comments how weird it is that Patrick bought the same French bulldog sweater that Kevin has, Patrick and Kevin announce their relationship to those gathered.

Dom, having accepted Doris’ dead dad’s money to fund his dream, has moved forward on the chicken window. But money tends to complicate things, and I’m worried to see how this gift/investment/loan/whatever-it-is affects his relationship with Doris. Doris’ relationship with Malik is something that’s already taking its toll on Dom, with Doris — who, no surprise, is excellent with power tools — opting to go to Malik’s niece’s birthday party in Vallejo rather than stick around and help Dom get his chicken window ready. She promises she won’t stay the night in Vallejo and that she will come back and help him out after the party.

Kevin and Patrick arrive at GaymerX and we learn that they have named their app “One Up Him,” which Patrick promotes as a “matching game where different kids of gays battle each other.” Gabe Liedman, in a perfect guest turn as a wheelchair-bound app developer — his is called “Glorified,” basically a Yelp for glory holes, which sounds like something people would actually use — drolly responds, “Isn’t that the title of a Reese Witherspoon movie?”

It is not, but if it was, she would play a young, up-and-coming woman in a man’s field who is competing for the same job as some bro-type (I’m thinking a Ryan, either Gosling or Reynolds) and hijinks would ensue as they try to sabotage each other on their race to the top while also falling in love. It would end with her getting the job and getting the guy and the guy deciding to stay home and raise their kids because modern romantic comedies’ favorite thing to do is subvert expectations established by classic romantic comedies to show viewers just how smart and current they are.

Patrick thinks he’s doing some subverting of his own. He declares that One Up Him, pitting different “kinds of gays” against each other in a fight to the death, is subverting gay stereotypes rather than re-enforcing them. His complete and total misunderstanding of the definition of “subversion” is just another thing that makes Patrick so damn annoying.

I’ve been wondering for most of this season why I have such different reactions to both of HBO’s repugnant Sunday night protagonists: Patrick and Girls’ Hannah Horvath. Why is it that I tolerate Hannah yet drag needles across my retinas whenever faced with Patrick and his nonsense? I think what sets them apart is the way that their respective shows feel about them. Girls knows that Hannah is terrible: childish, petty, insensitive, and self-obsessed, with a terrible case of tunnel vision. But Looking sees Patrick — who shares every single one of these qualities — as adorable. Part of the pleasure of watching Girls is knowing that the show is in on the joke that is Hannah. Looking seems to be nearly oblivious to these things in Patrick, opting instead for infatuation: the show just wants want to get gay married to gay Patrick in a gay chapel on a … well, you get the idea.

Somewhere that isn’t GaymerX, Agustín and Eddie are having gay sex. They are using a condom, and Eddie pulls out, but he still accidentally gets some cum in Agustín’s eye (boy, if my high school journalism teacher could see me now). Agustín panics and runs to Dom to have his AIDS meltdown. Dom — who has never really felt like a fully formed character to begin with — plays the sage role in this scene, suggesting that Agustín’s reaction may really be about the fact that he’s not equipped to date someone who is HIV positive.

Eddie agrees and tells Agustín he can’t do this anymore. “Everyone in San Francisco likes to talk about how well-informed they are and how inclusive they are, but really, when you get down to it, they’re just the same self-hating, close-minded, racist gays that you see prancing on Santa Monica Boulevard in WeHo.” Eddie’s tirade is brutal and Agustín feels every word of it. But he asks Eddie to give him a shot, to give him the opportunity to get more comfortable with the fact that he is HIV positive, because he really likes him. In a season where the show got a lot of things — primarily Patrick-related — so wrong, I admit that they got Agustín’s transformation really right. He reads as totally sincere in this scene and, against staggering odds, he charmed me.

Back at GaymerX, Patrick returns to his table to find Kevin talking to Richie and his new boyfriend Brady, who is here to write a story. Patrick, so keen on his coworkers knowing that he and Kevin are dating, is less keen for Richie to know. Kevin, recognizing Patrick’s total hypocrisy, tells Richie that they’re together and invites him and Brady to grab dinner with them after gay prom.

Patrick has a surprise for Kevin: he booked them a suite at the hotel and brought along suits for them to wear at gay prom. Patrick, of course, had an awful prom. So to make up for it, he bought some truly terrible 2-for-1 suits from Men’s Warehouse along with those shirts and ties that are sold bound together in plastic.

Patrick and Kevin go to gay prom. It’s just like the Beverly Hills, 90210 prom except that instead of Donna getting wasted and passing out because she’s too nervous about going all the way with David, this scene is just Patrick and Kevin wearing suits that even my uncle wouldn’t wear and slow dancing while Richie looks on longingly.

Back at the chicken window, Dom calls Doris and gets her voicemail. It looks like she isn’t making good on her promise to come over and help after the birthday party. Last week’s episode served to remind us how much we love the Dom and Doris dynamic and this week’s episode has Doris’ new relationship threatening to take that away.

Little Brady drank too much at gay prom and thinks he is going to puke at the diner where he and Richie are having their double date with Patrick and Kevin. He singles out Kevin to help him in the bathroom. “Richie’s judging me and the way you talk, it’s like Mary Poppins,” he says, both true. Richie asks what made Patrick go back to Kevin and Patrick explains that he went to a funeral and got into a car accident and remembered that he was going to die someday and that Kevin was the first person after that to ask him to be boyfriends.

Brady, who still has not puked (“Saving all my vomit for you,” he tells Richie, severely misremembering that Whitney Houston song title), comes back to the table and tells Patrick and Kevin he’s going to take back all the shit he and Richie said about them, namely that Patrick is “a 13-year-old girl afraid of her own vagina” and that the fact that Patrick and Kevin are together is “what’s wrong with the gay community.” Patrick is like, “whatever, I don’t need this. I have a suite at the Ramada and need to return those suits to Men’s Warehouse before they charge me for an extra day.”

Back at the hotel, Patrick and Kevin get their first negative “One Up Him” review: “Another attempt to label and divide the gay community. Bullshit.” This review, in addition to Gabe Liedman’s character and Brady’s spot-on assessment of Patrick and his vagina, suggests that maybe the Looking writers might not be as completely head over heels for good ol’ Patrick as I’ve accused them. And this episode isn’t the first time people have addressed him like the clueless idiot he is: Doris has done it, the woman who sold him his enema did it, and Richie, on occasion, has done it. But they are always immediately dismissed, as in this scene, where Russell Tovey responds to the negative review with, “Fuck that bitchy queen,” a sentiment he’s been expressing quite a bit lately.

“Oh my god, I love you,” gushes Patrick. “I love you, too,” responds Kevin. “Why? Please tell me what you love about him. I am actually so very interested in knowing what it is about him that draws you in,” screams Brett, waking every animal and human, gay or otherwise, in a five-mile radius.

Brett Barbour is a writer who lives in Brooklyn and is prone to binge-watching.

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Photos: HBO