Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt Season 4, Part 1 recaps and review

Netflix

Recap of Episode 5: Kimmy and the Beest!

Titus holds auditions for his play, “Beauty and the Beest,” which features talking soda along with the traditional Beauty and the Beast characters.

A publishing house wants Kimmy to write a book about her bunker experience. Kimmy doesn’t believe she can get her message out that way, though.

She decides she’s going to talk to Fran Dodd, the men’s rights activist from Party Monster. If she can get through to him, she can change his followers’ minds about what Richard Wayne Gary Wayne did to her.

Meanwhile, Jacqueline and Lillian hatch a plan to scalp the tickets from Titus’s play. They buy them all and try to sell them at a premium to the kids’ parents.

But the parents call their bluff and refuse to buy the tickets. After all, they’re the show’s only market. What will Jacqueline and Lillian do if the parents don’t buy them? Lillian refuses to back down.

Kimmy goes to see Dodd. He works at a bridal shop and is bitter that none of his clients will go out with him.

Kimmy tries to tell him Wayne is a monster. Dodd is shocked. He thinks someone must have gotten to her.

Dodd thinks women have it easy in America. When Kimmy points out that all guys like him do is blame everyone else for all their problems, Dodd claims that that’s whose fault it is. He thinks the bunker was a return to traditional values.

Kimmy beats him at arm wrestling and then just beats him.

Titus is making things impossible for the kids in his show. Beest quits. Titus, having never been in a play when he was in school, wants to take over the role. He gets the kids to think it was their idea. They beg him to play the Beest and he graciously accepts.

Lillian and Jacqueline decide to lie to people on the streets of New York about the play. They tell people it’s an immersive theatrical experience, making it sound sophisticated and esoteric. Tickets sell like hot cakes.

Titus overhears his lighting guy, Hudson, singing. He has a voice just like Titus’s. Threatened, Titus tells Hudson he should get into wrestling instead of continuing to work on the play.

Kimmy comes to watch a rehearsal. She is down on men after her experience with Dodd. Hudson is watching too and sings to her.

After hearing Hudson, Kimmy realizes that Titus just wants to make the play about him. Are there no good men at all?

The night of the play finally arrives. None of the kids’ parents have come, it’s just people Lillian and Jacqueline have duped into buying tickets.

Kimmy tries to convince Titus to give the role of the Beest to Hudson. When Titus realizes he can’t fit into the Beest’s boots, he has a change of heart, and finally hands the role over to Hudson.

Titus may no longer be in the play, but Kimmy takes the role of a villager. She was in the bunker for most of her childhood so she never got to be in a school play either.

As the play ends, Kimmy takes to the stage to deliver a message: The Beest is not a good model for how to treat girls. Boys can and should learn to be different from the men who were influenced by the princes’ treatment of girls in fairy tales.

Best lines:

Auditioning kid: “a 5, 6, 7, 8.”

Titus: “You forgot 1 through 4! Next!”

Titus: “Books! As if my day couldn’t get any worse, now we have books! Who would do this to me?”

Kimmy: “It says it’s from Random House.”

Titus: “So it could be any of them?”

Kimmy: “You cut off the head, you kill the snake.”

Titus: “Isn’t that true of any animal?”