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Did you know Billie is struggling with the concept of growing up? It’s kind of core to Adults, especially the longer it airs. She’s a heightened version of a relatable character: freshly 25 and spiraling about the lack of stuff she has accomplished in her career and love life since graduating from college. The show is, in a way, the chronicle of Billie’s quarter-life crisis. I’m not sure I’ve ever thought of her as the main character before, but in many ways, she’s the clearest avatar for the show’s themes.
“Fake ID” uses Billie as the vehicle for a pretty familiar, predictable comedic story about projecting onto someone you see as a younger version of yourself. From the moment Billie learns about Sophie-Rose, the teenager who inherited her legendary fake ID after it was already passed down to multiple other Gen-Z blondes, she’s obsessed. She insists she would never want to be that age again, but it’s obvious she would like nothing more. If she can be a source of wisdom and guidance for sweet, naïve Sophie-Rose (or “Fake Billie” as they call her), she can help her skip the mistakes of her 20s. And maybe fixing Sophie-Rose will also fix Billie.
Of course, Sophie-Rose and her friend Garrett (social-media personality Jake Shane) have no reason to care about Billie at all. They’re mostly just fascinated that this wrinkled old prune of a 25-year-old was alive for 9/11, even if she was an infant. Still, Billie convinces some of the gang to join her for a club night at Uncle Tuesday, a spot on Avenue A frequented by the youths. Seeing Sophie-Rose, Billie sets out to prove she’s still cool and young and chaotic and fun. Getting swung around by Anton in a painful “Tilt-a-Whirl” (apparently a tradition he usually shares with Issa) doesn’t work, and ultimately, neither does faking some unprotected bathroom-stall sex with Alex (Stranger Things’s Gaten Matarazzo, all grown up), the kid who inherited Samir’s fake ID.
As in the previous episode, Samir’s internal conflict is the least developed here. He’s desperate for the assurance that Alex made something out of his life after Samir kicked off his drinking journey — and he receives it when he meets Alex at the club and learns he works in advertising. That’s pretty much it for Samir in this episode: Meeting Alex and his other fake-ID descendants makes him feel mature, accomplishing exactly what he hoped it would.
He does share a nice moment with Billie, who vents about her reluctance to embrace maturity just when she was starting to have fun with her life. (Lucy Freyer perfectly captures Billie’s dead-eyed, drunken seriousness.) She’s being dramatic as usual, but I understand where she’s coming from as someone who didn’t party at all in high school and spent a portion of my mid-20s panicking when friends started tapping out after two rounds. (Eventually, I turned 30 and realized most people still like drinking and/or just smoke weed.) Sometimes, turning 25 makes you feel like the oldest person in the world — even if saying that sentence out loud earns death glares from anybody out there who’s actually old, like 45-year-olds.
Billie’s bathroom maneuver concerns Sophie-Rose, who decides to take Billie under her wing and secure her some Plan B. Confronted by an armed robber at the ATM afterward, though, Billie finally proves herself a slightly older and slightly wiser person than Sophie-Rose. It’s not as though she actually does anything to fight him off; she just takes control and safely ends the interaction by calmly handing him their bags.
Sophie-Rose is also more than the effortlessly confident New York teen she appears to be. “Everything is just so hard here, and I don’t feel anything like Carrie Bradshaw,” she admits after sobbing and pepper-spraying everyone in the vestibule. It’s often easy to forget Adults is set in New York, especially given the Toronto of it all, but her breakdown will feel very familiar to any Midwest transplant in the big city. (Like Sophie-Rose, I am from Michigan.) Much of Billie’s story in this episode hits the expected wacky beats, but the closing moments are poignant, as when Billie reluctantly accepts her chopped- and unc-ness by sighing and telling Sophie-Rose, “It comes with age, I guess.”
The real story to watch here, though, is everything going on with Paul Baker and Issa — and Anton, who’s still yearning from afar. In fact, let’s talk about that first. Anton has a nice little meet-cute at the club with a hot guy named Eric (Isaac Powell) who uses the same method as he does to get whatever he wants. It’s called … the Method. Both Anton and Eric (and Paul Baker, who has been going out with Anton lately) are familiar with the technique: simply name-drop and make shit up until bouncers (or bartenders, etc.) believe you or get too annoyed to keep the conversation going and just let you in.
The episode doesn’t actually invest that much time in Anton and Eric’s budding romance besides a few flirtatious exchanges related to the Method, and by the end, we know why: It’s going nowhere. This man is very attractive, he’s clearly into Anton, and they have a lot in common if their shared manipulation techniques are anything to go on. But in a clever use of the Method theme, Anton avoids a perfectly good fling by using a lie that isn’t exactly a lie: He’s married to a man named Paul Baker. (A nice touch: Eric thinks the name is clearly fake.)
It’s telling, of course, that Anton uses that “lie” of all lies. He’s into Paul Baker. And Paul Baker may be on the rocks with Issa based on how poorly their relaxing home date-night goes. The two don’t argue; they simply run out of things to say to each other, which in some ways is much worse. They’re awkward together, and that’s a new mode for this couple. It feels realistic, even if we’ve never seen real ambivalence between them before tonight.
The sitcom-y twist is that Paul Baker and Issa keep inviting new people into the date to avoid acknowledging the distance between them: a Polish deliveryman named Viktor and eventually Eric himself, whom Anton abandons for a cab ride with his roommates. I’m not entirely sure how to feel about the hard-to-watch Celebrity scene, during which Viktor somehow manages to guess more clues related to Paul Baker’s upbringing than Issa does. She doesn’t know about his childhood pet, or his dad’s first name, or the month he was born? I can get behind the idea that their relationship is getting stale or running out of steam, but is the show implying Issa really knows or cares that little about her boyfriend?
Still, the stakes of this season so far are resting on this budding love triangle, and it’s working. In my last recap, I wrote about appreciating Adults as a mostly plot-free, laughs-first sitcom, but I don’t mind having a narrative anchor at this point, something that pushes me to let the next episode play as soon as this one ends. “Fake ID” may be a step down from the premiere, but it’s still a sign of good things to come.
• “I’m 25, which, actually, Maxim says is the hottest age to be, so.” “Is Maxim your husband?”
• “Billie, you can’t ‘win’ at club.”
