Entourage: Season 5, Episode 11: "Play'n with Fire"

Season 5, Episode 11: “Play’n with Fire”

Grade: A

This week’s Entourage showed me that the writers do have the ability to cash in on the potential they show week after week by giving us what probably is the best episode of the entire show. With only one episode left of the season I am anxious and excited to see what they do with Vince’s acting career and with Turtle’s character as they finally give him some depth and show that he actually is a worthy character to have on the show .

I’ll start with Vince. Vince’s acting career has been the most interesting part of the show for me as I said last week and if it did not exist I would not watch the show. One can imagine how excited I’ve been by these past few weeks and this entire season for that matter. Early this season the show started to hint at the idea that maybe Vince does not have much talent as an actor. Yes he can act, but can he truly act? As distinctly different characters? This is a man who loves acting but someone who I do not believe needs it to survive at all. I think he enjoys being famous and the wealth and advantages that come with that. He has no training and he is not someone who I believe to be talented enough to function without it, at least within “films” as opposed to movies. If we look at his resume we see “Head-On” and “Aquaman”, two movies that simply require leading man type actors with charisma but not necessarily enormous amounts of talent. Queens Boulevard is a project he can easily relate to and Medellin is apparently an awful film with an awful performance. Can he truly act? I don’t know. So they very subtly brought this into play early in the season. I found Dana’s comment at the end to be interesting as she said that both her and Ellis saw the footage and thought he was great. I did not a lot of what they saw and I wonder if that if supposed to put to rest this idea of Vince’s acting ability and we are left to assume that Vince go unlucky with a difficult director (which he did, there’s no denying the douchebagery of Werner.) Werner was a huge asshole but I wonder if the show is still going to put a little bit of the blame on Vince's ability to emote? I feel like this should still be gone into a bit and I hope they do. I feel like it would be taking the easy way out to blame everything on Werner.

I loved what this episode did with Vince, we got to see Vince being directed in a way that was a disaster. Vince got fired from “Smokejumpers” and eventually the film was cancelled. Which is a shame because the entire season was about Vince getting this film. Basically what made this episode so great was that it went into all of the issues that they have only ever lightly touched on and expanded on them in a very intense and effective way that changes things and that shows that the show can actually be great and not just good or annoying or repetitive or one note which is often the case. Adrian Grenier was great in this episode showing Vince finally loses it through frustrations with Werner, getting to see Vince act in a way we have not before. The screaming match that takes place in the office with Ari, Dana and Werner is great. I felt really bad for Vince as he just sat there and listened to people argue about him for an extended period of time. This episode really takes the cake as the best of the series because it shows a certain amount of depth that the other episodes either do not have or touches on in a way that never really fully explores the issues that are hinted at.

I think that Turtle’s story however, stood out as the most interesting part of the episode, managing to show more depth to his character in one episode than the writers showed in 5 seasons put together. It had been hinted at a couple of times, most prominently in the episode when they take mushrooms. This episode spends as much time on Turtle as it does on Vince and actually ends with something having to do with Turtle which emphasizes how important this episode was for him. None of these characters on “Entourage” are truly deep. They never will be and that is fine. But they do have a certain amount of potential linked to their characters in terms of what can be done with them. And it is really nice to finally see this being done with Turtle. I’ve liked him more than Drama in recent episodes and by the beginning of Season 5 I decided that I liked Turtle more than Drama. Drama is a whiny annoying little bitch whereas at least Turtle sees how ridiculous Drama is and thus I was relating to him in that way. Jerry Ferarra’s chemistry with Jamie Lynn Sigler is really fantastic, easily the best guy-girl combo on this show ever. This is in no large part because they are dating in real life. It has not been confirmed but they are. She is adorable and I love that she sees something different in Turtle. This episode really marked new territory with his character and officially made him more useful than Drama. Note to Drama: fuck off already.

So overall this episode marks the best in the series, showing depth I had only dreamed of and expanding on Vince’s and especially Turtle’s characters greatly. By dealing with Vince’s acting career in a way that ended with the gang going back to Queens (!!), we really see Vince and Turtle completely beaten down, one by the ruin of his career and another by the premature end of the first potentially great relationship for Turtle. With only one episode left of the season, let’s hope they can keep it up because Lord knows that this won’t last forever and pretty soon we will be back in the throes of boring “wacky” shenanigans, lots of pointless naked women and heaven help us, Sloane.