Room 104 season 2, episode 6 review: Arnold

On the sixth episode of Room 104 season 2, a man named Arnold wakes up in the room and has to figure out how he got there — in song.

Making a musical television episode is not easy. Some end up as masterpieces (see Buffy the Vampire Slayer “Once More With Feeling”). Some should have never seen the light of day (7th Heaven “Red Socks”).

Room 104 took the idea of a musical episode and turned it on its head in Arnold and delivered a fantastic episode that, pardon the pun, hit all the right notes.

A guy named Arnold (Brian Tyree Henry) waked up in Room 104 and has no idea how he got there or what happened the night before. Then, as he tries to remember, he starts to sing.

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He is soaking wet and comes out of the bathroom when we first see him. He then starts to sing a song wondering what happened that led him there — a song that included a few words that give him hints.

Arnold then hears his phone ringing. He searches all over the room for it and then when he finds it he is too late. He tries to call his friend P-Dawg back but it goes to voicemail. He then sees he got a voice mail and P-Dawg is mad that he left a party with some girl.

He then starts to sing his main song, “I only came to drink one beer, how did I end up here?” See, he normally stays at home and reads and hates to be in busy places.

However, he starts to sing again and this time the lights in the room go out and his music is accompanied by special effect lighting as he walks around the room singing.

He sings that he was at home reading Stranger in a Strange Land for the 17th time when P-Dawg called and demanded he comes to a party with him for “at least one beer.”

He agrees and while there meets a girl in a “yellow jacket.” She played his favorite song on the jukebox but then he started talking to her (with a pillow with eyes standing for her) and she said her name is Vickie.

He tried to leave but she started to talk back to him and they hit it off. However, a guy named Chris came over and Vickie told him that Arnold was her new boyfriend (Arnold holder a plunger was Chris). Vickie kissed Arnold and they left the party together.

The lights came back up and Arnold was lost as to what happened next. He then investigated his cellphone and remembered the words “kikialvarez.” He looked it up and realized that “kikialvarez” was the password to a warehouse party.

Arnold then got a ton of messages from his friends who broke out in a song called “Arnold’s Out Tonight” telling him that he went to the party and got drunk, stoned, sang karaoke and was a wild man at the party.

This was accompanied by the text messages showing up on the screen while Arnold reenacted drinking, doing drugs and singing karaoke in Room 104.

Then he stops and tries to remember what happened next. He sees a photo of him and Vickie together on his phone and now knows what she looks like.

In a funny moment, he starts to sing things he might remember and then looks around and seems disappointed that the musical accompaniment in the room doesn’t kick in to lead him to his next memory.

Then, it kicks in with disco effects as well and then Vicki (Ginger Gonzaga) is there and the two of them sing a duet with the lyrics “I am falling” and he has an amazing moment in this song, seeming very happy.

However, then he tries to kiss her at the end of the song and she stops him. Turns out they were singing karaoke together. She said that she was having fun but that was it. However, he felt that he felt something was there, but he was wrong.

Arnold then loses it because he said that he always falls in love and screws up, only for Vicky to tell him they just met and he might do better if he doesn’t tell a girl he just met that he loved her.

Then Arnold is depressed, tells her to leave him alone and wonders once again how he ended up there in Room 104. He starts to sing the “I Only Came to Drink One Beer” song again. He finally goes to bed to sleep.

He wakes up when his phone starts to chirp again. That is when he sees that there is a video of the night before. In that video, he sees that Chris came back and was arguing with Vickie. He pushes her and Arnold comes to her rescue.

Chris punches Arnold and the two then start to fight. He watches the video and sees that Chris threw him off the balcony. The camera looks over the balcony and sees Arnold lying there dead.

Arnold runs into the bathroom and sees that the towels are still clean and set out on the bathtub. He hears his phone and runs back in and it is gone.

That is when he sees Vickie sitting on the bed with his phone. She calls Arnold’s mom to tell her that she is really sorry about what happened. She tells Arnold’s mom that she had just met him the night before and that he was trying to help her.

She said that it was her fault because she was mean to him but he was protecting her anyway and she wanted her to know that about her son. As she sits there with the phone crying, Arnold walks over and sits across from her and says she doesn’t have to feel bad and starts to sing the “I am falling” song again.

She looks in his direction and the screen goes to black.

Honestly, this was the best episode of the season for Room 104 — a heartbreaking short that has some catchy songs but is truly a life-affirming story. If you only watch one episode of Room 104 this season, watch “Arnold.”