Ep 3 recapped below. Spoilers coming so if you haven’t seen yet, beware…
Episode three opens on a title card that reads “Single Mom,” and a date that is going well enough that the stakes are suddenly real. Jordan is about to meet her son. She has a tip: Jordan does improv, so if he does an impression or an accent, the kid will love it.
The door opens, and Jordan greets the boy in a Jamaican accent. “Hey man, it’s-a me, Barack Obama! Welcome to Jamaica!” It does not stop there. A bad Christopher Walken. A Boston accent that is somehow also SpongeBob and also Mexican. Morgan Freeman from The Shawshank Redemption, but Vietnamese. The kid stares at him blankly through all of it.
Jordan looks over at the mom. She smiles at him. Apparently it worked.
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Which is how we end up at the wedding. The reception looks like a hellscape, and it is empty except for the officiant. The camera pushes in, and it is Steve Buscemi. “Welcome to the Terrors.”
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The Hospital
The first terror starts on Reddit. Someone is scrolling r/UnresolvedMysteries, where a post titled “Insane found footage from missing YouTuber” explains that a creator vanished nine months after exploring St. Joseph’s Hospital in Toledo, Ohio. The theory is that the hospital was used in the ’70s for psychiatric experiments of the black ops variety.
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Then we are in the footage. Jordan, holding the camera, walks the halls and lays out the hospital’s history in full Blair Witch mode. He hears something, stumbles and drops the camera. Title card: The Hospital.
He picks himself up and keeps going. He finds a recording of a woman on the staff explaining what they were trying to do here. They were tasked with solving the “male loneliness epidemic.” It went wrong. The patients were lonelier than anyone thought.
There is a crash, and the camera swings to a man in a hospital gown, mid-monologue about A24, microdosing, ketamine and proclaiming that Drag City is both music and comedy. He spots Jordan. “Hey dude. Did you know David Lynch was into Transcendental Meditation?”
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Jordan runs. The patient follows, letting him know they are remastering Mulholland Drive on Blu-ray.
What makes the sketch is where it goes next. Once Jordan stops panicking and actually watches the patients, the found-footage horror turns into something of a nature documentary. These men are alive. They seemed dangerous at first. Watching two of them talk, Jordan concludes they are harmless and “mildly annoying.” They live on non-alcoholic IPA and tinned fish. They are passionate about music, but nobody plays anything. They just tune their guitars. One of them lives in a medical supply closet, picking out his favorite “DVDs,” which anyone who has watched a Criterion Closet video will recognize immediately. Sometimes, Jordan explains, they get overstimulated and talk past each other.
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A second recording from the same woman fills in the rest. The staff stole real DNA from the celebrities these men most wanted to talk to, hoping it would finally give them peace. She warned it was too much. Then a patient creeps up behind her and asks what she is watching.
So Jordan presses on, and finds the cell. Glass wall, Hannibal Lecter setup, and behind it, Marc Maron. Or a Marc Maron, anyway, since the credits list him as “Marc Maron Clone.” He is recording WTF with his guest, Patient 57901, who wants to know whether there is a connection between music and comedy. Maron sees Jordan through the glass and starts pounding on it to be let out.
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It is the best-built sketch the show has done so far. The joke changes three times, from horror to documentary to a cameo, and each turn makes the one before it funnier.
Last Words
The second terror starts in a doctor’s office. Jordan, as the doctor, tells Steve Buscemi that his brain scans came back with a large mass. Glioblastoma. Buscemi takes it in, and his first question is not about treatment. “What the hell am I gonna say?”
Title card: Last Words.
Buscemi plays Robert Wheelan, and the rest of the sketch is a man spending the end of his life on the wrong problem. We see him at the computer and then at the dinner table, surrounded by notepads, while his wife, played by Lauren Tom, tries to eat dinner with him. He searches famous last words. Bob Marley’s come up. He pulls up Oscar Wilde, highlights the word “Irish” on the Wikipedia page and immediately tries out a brogue.
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His wife suggests a break. “Fuck! I just had it!” He tries to retrace his steps out loud. Dying. Quippy. Wife. Annoying. Marriage. Regret. Dinner. Interruptions. Interrupting? He starts writing something that might actually mean something, until it falls apart. “Oh come on, it’s too long!”
At some point he even pays someone to write them. We find him in a hospital bed on the phone with a customer service rep, complaining about the last words he got from a writing service. The rep is not quite sure what the problem is. He asks whether Robert has family, and what they might say. “Something like… I love my family?”
Back home, his wife is on the phone with their daughter, who wants to know if she should come home. Her mother does not want her to see him like this. From the other room, Buscemi asks whether Warner Bros. could sue him if he went with “That’s all, folks.” Then he rules it out himself as “too fucking jokey.” The daughter asks if he is in pain. His wife looks down at his notes, a mess of scribbles around one circled word, KEURIG, with “There may be a Keurig for my condition” and “Bitter end” crammed in beside it. She says yes.
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At the hospital, his wife and another woman watch through the door. From inside, Buscemi says “I’ll see you in your dreams” and collapses. His wife reassures her. He is fine. He is just practicing.
Then the sketch finds its ending. In the next bed, another man says something simple and meaningful to his daughter, who cries as he dies. Buscemi, one bed over, offers a review. “Not bad.” The daughter is understandably stunned, and he invites her to come hear his own last words, probably tomorrow.
It is not tomorrow. Buscemi flatlines mid-sentence, and the daughter runs out of the room shouting, “There are two dead men in here!”
The last shot is his tombstone, which reproduces his final image, breathing tube and all, along with the exact last words he actually said…
Spoiler: the tombstone
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The Tag
The credits scene returns to the hospital, where the man in the DVD closet finds his copy of David Cronenberg’s Scanners and explains how Cronenberg’s way of playing with the human body inspires him as an artist. Then he wonders out loud what Cronenberg was smoking.
Where it leaves us
Three episodes in, this is the strongest one yet. The Hospital takes a format everyone knows and keeps changing what kind of joke it is. Last Words gives Buscemi something to play beyond hosting, and he makes a dying man’s vanity both ridiculous and sad without ever winking at it.
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