Brand New Cherry Flavor Ep. 4: Tadpole Smoothie begins with Lisa (Rosa Salazar) rushing home following the events of Episode 3, she finds a disturbed cat and the strange trapdoor that appeared in her apartment now open! She climbs down the ladder and finds herself in a disturbing world (later revealed to be Brazil) where she is stalked by a faceless lady in a white dress. Soon she bolts back up the ladder and slams the trap door shut!
Lisa later meets Lou (Eric Lange) in a diner and Lou is suspicious that it is Lisa curse that is causing all the events around him to happen. Lisa says curses are not real and offers to help. After Lisa leaves, Lou moves a few booths back and joins James (Sean Owen Roberts) and Ralph (Darcy Laurie) who he instructs to follow Rosa.
A meeting with Boro (Catherine Keener) at a pet store turns weird as Lisa wants to call the curse off. Lisa says she wants to stop puking kittens and Boro agrees. Then a lady named Shauna Davies (Andrea Bendewald) disturbs the conversation recognising Boro as “Jennifer.” Boro fails to respond in anyway and Shauna believes she made a mistake.
With Roy’s (Jeff Ward) help, Lisa tacks down Shauna and learns that Jennifer she knows went missing 10 years prior and who she saw today wasn’t “punk rock” enough to be the same woman. Shauna reveals that Jennifer has a husband and children who live at the same address she vanished from – like they are hoping she will come home.
Meanwhile a poisonous spider is delivered to Lou’s house and bites his son Jonathan (Daniel Doheny) who gets rushed to hospital with a painful erection. Later, Jonathan discharges himself from hospital and heads straight over to Boro’s house where she crushes up a strange concoction of tadpoles and powder, injecting it into his neck.
In a very Cronenberg moment, Lisa, and Roy check into a hotel. Lisa “births” a cat from her side in a very disturbing scene. The mysterious biker turns up and takes the cat. Then Lisa and Roy get it on into some very Cronenbergian sexual activities.
The episode ends with Lou confronting Boro and Boro nonchalantly revealing Lisa hired her to do the curse. Boro reveals that Lou and Lisa now have a symbiotic relationship. Boro persuades Lou to find out what happened to Lisa in the past. After Lou leaves, we see Jonathan as one of Boro’s servants.
Verdict: 8/10. The weirdness gets weirder, and more is revealed to us. Just what is revealed is unclear, but we have been show some of the details behind the show’s curtain. We just do not know it yet! Keener’s Boro is starting to creep out in the lead as the show’s most interesting character, but I feel Salazar’s Lisa is simply coiled up and waiting to unleash some dark secret upon us.
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