BWW Recap: LOOKING Starts Season 2 With a Brotrip

Patrick's love life gets complicated, Dom still schemes for his own restaurant without or without the help of his sugar daddy and Augustin spirals towards an intervention. Yeah, LOOKING is back.

When we last left the San Francisco trio of LOOKING, Patrick (Jonathan Groff) was in the midst of making the kind of poor relationship choices many of us have seen our friends make (or made ourselves): he broke it off with the cute Latino barber Ritchie (Raul Castillo) to begin an affair with his boss Kevin (Russell Tovey). And if sleeping with the boss wasn't bad enough, the boss has a boyfriend and wants to keep things on the downlow.

Fighting Patrick for the coveted drama queen sash is Augustin (Frankie J. Alvarez). Augustin has finally admitted his failures as an artist, watched his relationship with his long term boyfriend Frank (O.T. Fagbenle) deteriorate. In short, pretty much everything he defined himself is now gone.

The stable force in the trio of friends at this point is Dom (Murray Bartlett). Still struggling as a waiter with dreams of owning his own restaurant, he still shares a flat with his high school friend Doris (Lauren Weedman) and is in the midst of an open relationship with an older man (Lynn, played by Scott Bakula).

Season 2 begins with the boys taking a bro-trip. Lynn has loaned Dom the use of his cabin in the woods and it's Patrick's hope that once out of the city the trio will be able to reconnect as friends, play some board games and maybe hug a couple of thousand year-old trees.

Dom and Augustin have other plans. Dom is using the opportunity to snoop around Lynn's second house (calling it a cabin doesn't do it justice; it's a mansion). He finds a photo album filled with pictures of Lynn with his dead husband and you get the sense that the previously confirmed bachelor is kind of jealous of what the two had.

Augustin, meanwhile, just wants to do drugs and get laid. Patrick and Dom have to work overtime to convince him it isn't an intervention (though that is probably where he is headed if he doesn't ground himself).

Clearly, none of them were boyscouts. The three have some trouble paddling a canoe down the river and end up drifting past the gay beach where they are met by a gaggle of bears who invite them to a shindig in the woods later that night. The weight-conscious Patrick takes offense that one of the bears refers to him as a seal pup (a hairless gay man who is kind of chunky).

They return from the canoe trip to find Doris. She managed to get the weekend off from the hospital ("everybody died," she jokes), took a taxi up to the cabin and helped herself to Lynn's liquor. My kind of broad. She convinces the boys to go to the party in the woods. And Augustin breaks out the Molly ("That's what we used to call X, right," Doris asks. "Oh, God, it's like 1994.") Love, love, love Doris.

The pact to stick together quickly dissolves. Augustin hangs all night with the bear from the lake (Eddie, played by Daniel Franzese). Patrick makes out briefly with a guy in a baseball cap before breaking away to call his boss for an outdoor booty call and Dom brings home a guy who, upon seeing Lynn's photo, asks Dom if that's his dad.

All three return to the cabin to watch the sun rise. Patrick comes clean with his affair with his boss. It's clear that neither Dom nor Augustin think it's a great idea. At Patrick's insistence, the trio make a final pact: to watch the sunrise and pretend everything is going to turn out fine.

And with that, LOOKING season opener comes to a close. Patrick continues to make some questionable choices, Agustin may have found a path out of his funk (courtesy of an HIV positive bear who consoles at risk LGBT teens) and Dom is beginning to want more than just an open relationship with Lynn.

So are you team Ritchie or Team Kevin? Weigh in below on who you want Patrick to end up with and come back next week for another glance at LOOKING.

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