Welcome back to another Woke Season Two recap. Last time on the show based on Keith Knight‘s comix, Keef (Lamorne Morris) took on “the man” and was rewarded with a nonprofit, while Gunther (Blake Anderson) adopted all the plants. Keep in mind, this recap of Woke Season Two, Episode Three “Papa’s Got a Brand New Boil” contains spoilers.
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“No phones, no logos, no swine.”
We open on a dude (Isiah Whitlock Jr) driving a van through the streets. It’s covered with Black pride, anti-racism stickers and a “powered by plants” placard (is that where last episode’s plants went?). Our hippie man grinds to a halt, and “asks” a guy on the street if he can use his phone. Oh! It’s Clovis’s dad! He tells Clovis they’re having lunch.
Next, Keef is meeting with Laura (Aimee Garcia ) in her skyscraper office. They’re discussing what the Keef Knight Project should be. Since there’s no way one foundation can end systemic racism, Keef wonders if it might be best for him to just bestow money upon random folx who need it right then and there. Laura’s not upset. It’s OK, this is just the brainstorming phase.
Unfortunately, Keef has to leave ’cause Clovis (T. Murph) is texting him “CODE RED!!!!!!!” Again, Laura understands issues with tough parents, so she lets him go.
Then, Clovis is prepping Keef on how to deal with Papa Clovis, aka Mr. Jackson. They’re not to talk about phones, capitalism, pork, Hype (Marquita Goings), or Clovis’s recent foray into cunnilingus. Keef teases that his bag is full of baby back ribs and that he was going to lead with Clovis’s new sexual adventures.
Also, Clovis rejects Keef’s sharing his activist comics with his dad. Even though he grew up around the Black Panthers, was an S1W and toured the world with Public Enemy. OK, so Clovis has some daddy issues. Let’s see where they stem from.
They find Mr. Jackson, who is putting a wheel boot on his van, so he doesn’t get towed.
“Oh, what is that? That’s notes of lemonade”
Over at The Bay Arean, Ayana’s (Sasheer Zamata) newspaper, Gunther is admiring the weed Ayana has been sent as advertiser samples. Gunther looks around the empty office and asks her how business is going. Not great, she’s taken pay cuts and resorted to pay cuts and selling some of her weed samples. Gunther teases her about being a drug dealer. (Yes, even though recreational cannabis is legal in California, you do need a license to sell.)
Gunther suggests they try some of the pot for quality control.
Back at Mr. Jackson’s van, he’s introducing Keef and Clovis to urban guerrilla farming. He’s working with young people in their neighborhoods on how to liberate their diets form government oversight. I mean, cool. Then, he tosses Clovis a peach he grew under a patch of grass in Modesto. When Mr. Jackson tries to get Keef to eat the peach instead, Keef actually almost lets loose the cunnilingus secret by making a tasteless 🍑 joke.
Keef then tells Mr. Jackson he’s started getting political in his work. And as Clovis predicted, he’s not so enthused. He reads Keef’s work as escapism. Keef argues that he wants to do what Mr. Jackson did, get involved. But, Mr. Jackson insists that time has passed. Keef’s generation signs online petitions and Twitter, his generation had guns. He derides the current generation for begging white men to let them matter.
When Keef tries to show Mr. Jackson that he is making a change by showing off his $250K check that he apparently just carries in his pocket, the elder man tears it up. He says that if Keef wants to enact real change, he’ll join him on his truck. Then, they discover there is something very (medically) wrong with Mr. Jackson’s foot.
“Do newspapers even make money? Which, like, no, they don’t …”
Over at the Bay Arean, Ayana and Gunther are shooting the breeze. He betrays his extreme whiteness by waxing poetic about how maybe his Thing can actually be Finding His Thing. He also cottons on to the fact that Ayana’s living in her office, but like, because he smelled toothpaste, not because she’s got an air mattress set up in the corner.
Ayana’s trying to find a roommate, but trying to find one as a Black woman in SF is hard AF. I LOL’d when she asks Gunther if he knows what it’s like, and he immediately says, “I do not.” Anyway, all the “well-meaning liberals” she tries to room with don’t want to live with her once they meet her. They don’t want to have to think about what they say around her, in their own homes.
Ayana’s supposed to go see an apartment right then, but she worries she’s too high to deal with a Karen. Gunther offers to come with ’cause “one person high is a problem, but two people high is a party.” #truth
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Back at the van, Clovis tells his dad that he needs to go to the doctor, but Mr. Jackson doesn’t want to “subject [himself] to colonized, Western medicine.” Clovis refuses to let his dad die the same way Bob Marley did. Clovis plays the adult chid role real well and drags his dad to the doctor.
“Can’t have a Black-owned business in San Francisco that helps other Black people. I guess white folx just need a new Panera Bread.”
Unfortunately, Mr. Jackson’s regular doctor — an herbalist — has closed, having been priced out of the neighborhood. Clovis is relieved ’cause he doesn’t trust non-Western medicine, much the same way his dad doesn’t trust vaccines. Keef tries to mediate the situation by agreeing with Clovis. Mr. Jackson still doesn’t want to go to the hospital because one of his friends went in to one complaining of a sore throat and left with lung cancer. Because he had lung cancer.
Mr. Jackson says he just needs to soak his foot in a tub for an hour, but he needs to use Clovis’s, since he himself lives in a “mother f***ing van” and all.
Meanwhile, Ayana and Gunther have arrived to the apartment interview. Gunther tries to pep Ayana up, maybe this lady won’t be so bad, he says. Then, he learns her name is Libby and his whole demeanor shifts. He recommends Ayana tell Libby her red eyes are due to seasonal allergies and small talk about avocado toast. Also, did you know that Timothée Chalamet is the poor man’s Orlando Bloom?
Libby (Tiffany Denise Hobbs) turns out to be a Black woman with a really chill apartment. In fact, Libby is just a safety nickname she uses — her full name is Apolebo (I could not for the life of me find the correct spelling of this name online, so that’s why I’ll be calling her Libby from here on out). Libby almost immediately offers Ayana a room, with the caveat that they’re both business owners and can she handle that power? Things are going great until Libby clarifies that she doesn’t identify as Black.
“Your mom left ’cause I cheated on her — a lot.”
Back at the trio’s apartment, Clovis is trying to make his dad comfy on the couch, but Mr. Jackson is a bit demanding. He asks for some turmeric and grape soda.
In the kitchen, Keef is on the phone with Laura about the little check snafu. Clovis comes in, muttering that he’s gonna knock his dad out and drag him to the ER. When Keef tells him the good news that Laura can just cut him another check, Clovis gives him a wtf face and tells him that he needs him to just be his buddy right now, instead of an activist. Clovis is on the edge — he grabs a knife to deal with his dad, but luckily, Keef is there to take it out of his hands.
Over at Libby’s apartment, Ayana needs some clarification. Libby’s parents are from the Igbo tribe in Nigeria, so she identifies as African. Ayana argues that in America, if you have Black skin, you’re Black and the cops don’t care what tribe you’re from. Libby is not gonna use cops to define herself. Besides she says, she doesn’t break the law. Oh no.
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Gunther jumps in to try to save the situation and asks Libby how she feels about Timothée Chalamet ; she loves him, of course. But Ayana isn’t gonna drop this. She wants to know how Libby can possibly “opt out of the struggle.” Simple, she says, it’s not her struggle: she “comes from kings and queens, not slaves.”
Further, she doesn’t understand America’s “obsession with oppression.” You know, I work with a lot of people from around the globe, and that last bit is something I hear a lot, but I struggle to understand how a person who is visibly a member of a marginalized group could fail to grasp why Americans feel this way?
But, Ayana and Gunther are still trying to let Libby’ wrong opinions go for the sake of the apartment. That is, until, she tells them she only heard of Nina Simone after watching a Zoey Saldana movie about her. “I hate you,” says Ayana.
“I’m gonna try to take a picture of the foot. Hold on.”
Oh goodness. Keef and Clovis hire Dr. Cho (Regina Ting Chen) over Zoom. They warn her that Mr. Jackson is a tough cookie, so she uses an Elmo puppet to talk with him. That goes over about as well as you’d think it would. Dr. Cho apologizes — she’d thought they’d been describing an actual child.
While Keef is stealthily trying to deal with taking feet pics, Clovis and his dad duke it out. Clovis accuses his dad of moving into the van so he wouldn’t have to pay child support. Mr. Jackson makes fun of Clovis for calling him a dead beat and asks him to ask MLK‘s kids how much time they got to spend with their dad. Clovis wants to know where his dad’s Nobel Peace Prize is, then.
Then, Clovis says he’s done. He doesn’t want to take care of someone who never took care of him. The tension of the scene breaks when Keef finally gets his feet pics.
Next, Keef knocks on Clovis’s door. Good news! Dr. Cho told him they can fix Mr. Jackson’s foot themselves, but Clovis just hands Keef a pair of sneakers and tells him to tell his dad to GTFO. Keef doesn’t know what to do.
Marker (JB Smoove) tells Keef that it’s too complicated for him to get involved. Then, when Keef picks up an X-acto knife, Marker squeals with delight! Is Keef gonna shank a b****?
Keef brings the shoes to Mr. Jackson, but he doesn’t want any handouts from his kid, even if Clovis insists good shoes give a man dignity. He also warns Keef not to get so involved in the cause not to forget what’s going on in front of him.
“This is why I’m always saying s*** like ‘woke equals broke’.”
Clovis comes out of his room to yell at Keef for not having already kicked his dad out. It devolves into an argument. As that’s happening, Ayana and Gunther are coming up the stairs. He’s not saying Libby is “insane,” but he’s not not saying it. Gunther has a solution to Ayana’s problem, though. She’s gonna take his room, and he’s gonna move into the living room — that’s where ends up sleepwalking to most nights, anyway.
They walk into the apartment, where the argument about which generation is actually woke is still happening. Mr. Jackson greets Gunther as White Devil and Ayana as African Queen (in a rather smarmy way). She corrects him that she’s a Black Queen.
Keef tries to get everyone to stfu. Dr. Cho told him he just has to lance the boil and all will be well. But, Mr. Jackson isn’t taking any advice from a doctor who works for the government, ’cause the US Department of Health and Human Services was responsible for the Tuskegee Syphilis Study, as well as many other experiments on Black people.
Ayana agrees with him and references the higher Black maternal mortality rate in the US. Keef tries to tell her that now is really not the time, but then Mr. Jackson shoots himself in the proverbial foot. He agrees with Ayana, but only because he things Black women need to be healthy and strong to stay at home and raise future Black generations.
Ayana wants to know why she’s meeting “so many messed up Black people today.” Mr. Jackson takes offense — what’s it to her if he believes in traditional gender roles and that 5G is poison? He tells Gunther to get “his girl” in line. Clovis tells his dad to stop. Ayana isn’t anyone’s “girl,” and further, that’s his best friend Mr. Jackson is being rude to.
Everyone is a little unsure about the best friend part, but Gunther jumps on it as an opportunity to tell them Ayana’s gonna be staying with them for a bit. They’re all cool with it. Mr. Jackson calls them the “Wayne Brady Bunch.” Clovis agrees, ’cause those weirdos around him are his real family.
“I’ve been stabbed before”
Mr. Jackson starts railing against pronouns and cunnilingus, so Clovis uses this as an opportunity to come out — as a proud fan of the 🍑 . His dad asks if Clovis is trying to kill him and says that if he is, he ought to just do it. So, Clovis grabs the X-acto knife and his found family has to pull him back.
Clovis plays it off like a joke, then when his friends release him, he lunges for his dad and starts to strangle him. In that process, the boil on Mr. Jackon’s foot pops (or as Clovis so delightfully puts it, “nuts”), all over Clovis’s shirt.
After, Keef, Clovis and Mr. Jackson are taking a walk — Mr. Jackson is wearing his new shoes. Mr. Jackson’s ripping on Hype’s name, but Clovis doesn’t think his dad has much room to judge, considering his name is Clovacious De Lucious Jackson. When Keef laughs along, Mr. Jackson asks him where he gets off, since his name makes it sound like his mom had a “speech impediment.” Turns out she did.
As they’re all saying goodbye, Mr. Jackson sees a barefoot white man at a homeless encampment across the street. He gives him the shoes off his feet. Clovis is mad, but Mr. Jackson insists the other guy needed them more than he does. He repeats Clovis’s line about shoes giving a man dignity.
OK, I mean if it wasn’t obvious before, the shoes thing has sparked Keef’s nonprofit idea. This, this was a great episode. Look, I have no problem with this show being largely episodic, but each episode’s plots need to be tight and serve the overall goal of the show. Each storyline in this episode was entertaining and ultimately led to a satisfying conclusion that impacts the season overall.
RELATED: Read all Woke recaps here!
Thanks for joining me as I recap Season Two of Woke, here on Geek Girl Authority!
Season Two of Woke is streaming on Hulu now.
https://www.geekgirlauthority.com/drawing-more-attention-to-black-mental-health-representation-on-tv/
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