‘Black Monday’ Season 2 Episode 8: Starting with best Trump joke, things take a dark turn as secrets come out
Spoilers for ‘Black Monday’ Season 2 Episode 8 ‘Lucky Shoes’
That ‘Black Monday’ gets savage with its political jokes is something that cannot be said enough. The black comedy series based in the late-‘80s has time and again made commentary on modern social and political issues but in the context of the show’s timeline.
Season 2 Episode 8, however, sneaks in perhaps the most hilarious and unexpected joke on Donald Trump in the history of the show. While there is a lot that happened in the episode that is important to the plot, let us just address the joke (that really does not have anything to do with the main story) and get it out of the way. It’s simply too good.
Tiff ( Casey Wilson) wants to have a baby. Blair (Andrew Rannells), of course, doesn’t want to. But he tells her that she could look after a friend’s three children for the evening while Blair and he would be at Congressman Roger Harris’ (Tuc Watkins) election night party. Tiff agrees.
The three children, however, were a nightmare. Not only did they spend the evening reenacting their parents’ fights, the father’s sleazy nature, and the mother’s dissatisfaction with the marriage, they eventually went nuts around the house and broke nearly everything there. When the Hispanic babysitter comes back to pick them up, she calls them by name. Junior, Ivanka, and Eric. It was, honestly, a moment worthy of a slow clap.
Okay, coming back to the main story, after the events of Episode 7, Mo (Don Cheadle), Connie (Xosha Roquemore), Dawn (Regina Hall), and Marcus (Dulé Hill) found themselves on a double date. While talking, as Mo sensed Connie was trying to get information out of an unaware Dawn, he changed the topic to that of his days in the Black Panther. And in the process, he recounted, without naming names, the story of how Connie backstabbed him back then. Connie was visibly uncomfortable as everyone on the table began to refer to Mo’s backstabber as the “FBI b****”. And things would have continued to go the same way. But Keith (Paul Scheer) arrived and changed everything.
Rewinding a little, Keith accidentally discovered that Lenny Lehman (Ken Marino) was still alive, and Lenny told him that Larry (also Marino) was using him. A shaken Keith approached Mo to tell him about everything. But when Mo told him to “f*** off”, Keith had an outburst and revealed to everyone that Mo was an FBI informant, Connie was in the FBI, Dawn was playing with Marcus’ African-American Scholarship Fund, and that he had leaked the information on the Yen trade to the Lehmans.
Connie left, but not before threatening that she was coming for all of them. Marcus left angry at Dawn. And Dawn was heartbroken that Mo would break her trust again, especially like this.
On Blair’s end, things were not going well either. The Congressman won. But when Blair asked him how soon he would bail the banks out, he said that it would have to wait at least a term. An angry Blair threatened to leak a video of them having sex if he did not comply with his promise. When the Congressman left, Blair showed the tape to the Congressman’s homophobic father-in-law, Pastor Newell (Michael Hitchcock).
Blair told him to make sure that the Congressman complied, else they would both risk losing their reputations. He handed a copy of the tape over to the Pastor. But things did not go the way he thought they would.
The Pastor leaked the tape to the press. When Blair found out on the news, he ran to the Congressman’s home. There he found him hanging from the ceiling. And that is where the episode ended.
Episode 8 came in like a wrecking ball and turned everyone's life topsy turvy. And by the looks of it, it left a few things permanently damaged.
New episodes of ‘Black Monday’ arrive every Sunday at 8 pm EST/PST only on Showtime.