Apple TV+ musical comedy Schmigadoon! wraps its second season with an action-packed episode this week entitled “Over and Done.” Josh and Melissa are being held captive, and unless some unlikely people decide to change their ways and recover from past wounds, they’ll be killed or married — or both!
It’s a lovely little wrap to the big-hearted show’s second season.
Schmigadoon! recap: ‘Over and Done’
Season 2, Episode 5: As the Schmigadoon! season finale kicks off, Josh (played by Keegan-Michael Key) and Melissa (Cecily Strong) are in dire straits. Josh has been kidnapped by Otavius Kratt (Patrick Page) and is being held at gunpoint by Sgt. Rivera (Jaime Camil). Unless Melissa agrees to divorce Josh and marry Kratt, Josh will be killed. Bobbie Flanagan (Jane Krakowski) shows up to get the paperwork filed.
Josh tries to talk Rivera out of killing him, and hits upon an idea. Kratt has been promising Rivera his own act at his nightclub for 36 years. If Rivera kills Josh, surely Kratt has to finally grant it to him. Understanding a complex when he sees one, Josh takes a page from Topher the hippie’s (Aaron Tveit) book, and tells Rivera a parable about a man devastated by broken promises. He tells him one parable after another, trying to instill guilt in the gunman until finally Rivera cracks.
Meanwhile, Dooley Flint the butcher (Alan Cumming) is still fuming that the plan to kill Kratt last night didn’t work. He goes to Mrs. Coldwell’s (Kristen Chenoweth) orphanage to rage-kill an orphan to satisfy his bloodlust, but she hits on a better idea. Why don’t they just sleep together? That’ll work, it seems.
Who will save Josh and Melissa? Everybody!
Photo: Apple TV+
Flint lets slip that he saw Rivera carting Josh off last night, and feels bad that he didn’t stop it from happening. So they conspire to find the two lovers. At the same time, across town, Topher’s hippie gang comes to him to ask them to help free Josh and Melissa, too.
When the two parties descend on the basement where Rivera’s holding Josh, it means that Jenny Banks (Dove Cameron) finally sees Dooley, her father, for the first time since she was a girl. Rivera finally comes clean that he helped frame Dooley for the murder of his wife, and Jenny and Dooley reconcile.
The crew all rush up to the wedding ceremony, but the police stop Josh and Dooley’s intended death blow misses. Before he can force the wedding to its conclusion, Mrs. Coldwell cuts the rope holding a chandelier and it crushes him to death.
The narrator (Titus Burgess) tries to ask Melissa and Josh to stay in Schmicago, but they agree that looking for fantasy was a mistake. They need to understand themselves and their lives better, not run away from it all. They want something real. So they bid a musical farewell to the town and head back to their real lives, where they finally conceive a child.
Schmigadoon! knows how to do a finale
Photo: Apple TV+
This week’s finale serves up some very good stuff from the Schmigadoon! writers. When Topher and Jenny try to stop Rivera, they try to talk him out of using violence. Jenny puts a flower in the barrel of his gun and says wistfully, “Love is stronger than any gun.”
“Are you sure about that?” he replies.
“No, I’m not sure about that,” she says, just as wistfully. That got me.
And then there’s the bit where Bobbie stands up at the wedding when Kratt pulls his gun. “As your lawyer, I must advise…” Bobbie says, but as Kratt points the gun at her, she completes her own sentence … “myself to sit back down!” Krakowski sells it beautifully.
Ariana DeBose also came back as the emcee for this episode, thank heavens. And it’s just in time for a showstopping, Dreamgirls–style number over a montage of the characters’ current predicaments. DeBose is such a star. She makes for a perfect introduction to the season finale.
What does the future hold?
I find when a show as whimsical as Schmigadoon! puts on a set piece or tries for slightly higher stakes, it usually doesn’t work. And it’s true that none of this week’s gun-toting or rescue stuff works as well as it should — it looks like a high school play rather than a Broadway show. However, there’s no denying that the chandelier falling on Kratt, Phantom of the Opera-style, is a good image. I also like the way Cecily Strong gets covered in his blood, in a rhyme with her memory of seeing Sweeney Todd as a little girl. It’s another great little stroke of the macabre.
I would like the show to allow itself to get darker in the future, but I know the Schmigadoon! creative team is walking a tightrope of whimsy. Even just the idea that they let Kristin Chenoweth and Alan Cumming spend three episodes talking about killing and eating children was nervy for this crew, but I mean there was never any danger they’d follow through on the promise.
It’s a minor complaint. The show is very obviously, and usually very successfully, what it is. But very few TV shows are perfect. Everything has room to grow. However, I like Schmigadoon! more than most of the Apple TV+ shows, so they’re doing something right. Let’s hope there’s a third season in the works.
★★★★☆
Watch Schmigadoon! on Apple TV+
New episodes of Schmigadoon! season two arrive every Wednesday on Apple TV+.
Rated: TV-14
Watch on: Apple TV+
Scout Tafoya is a film and TV critic, director and creator of the long-running video essay series The Unloved for RogerEbert.com. He has written for The Village Voice, Film Comment, The Los Angeles Review of Books and Nylon Magazine. He is the author of Cinemaphagy: On the Psychedelic Classical Form of Tobe Hooper and But God Made Him A Poet: Watching John Ford in the 21st Century, the director of 30 feature films, and the director and editor of more than 300 video essays, which can be found at Patreon.com/honorszombie.
