"You're playing a very dangerous game of chicken with the head fucking hen."
Selina's plan to lobby votes at the annual White House Congressional Ball goes awry, while Dan tries to save Jonah's disastrous campaign.
Team Selina prepare to use the Congressional Ball to canvas members into voting for her. Meanwhile, Gary, Dan, and Amy get caught up in gossip about The Hill's "50 Hottest White House Staffers" list, and Jonah continues to campaign in New Hampshire and runs into his old enemy Teddy Sykes.
Tropes:
- Batman Gambit:
- Bill Ericsson engineers for Teddy - Doyle's aide who inappropriately fondled Jonah's balls as a power move - to show up to an event where Jonah is working a counter alongside a sweet girl with Down's syndrome. Inevitably, Jonah gets angry and tells Teddy off, and Bill films it from an angle where it looks like Jonah is addressing the girl! Then he puts it on TV. It works perfectly, though there's a false hope when it seems Richard may have recorded it from another angle.
- Belligerent Sexual Tension: Tom James and Selina's finally culminates in a vicious argument in the Green Room and a vigorous round of sex.
- Bullying a Dragon: The Colorado congresswoman Nickerson tries to dig her heels in going up against Selina (pictured above), and Selina unleashes a tirade of profane warning that browbeats her thoroughly.Selina: I will have my administration come down to your shitty little district and shake it to death like a Guatemalan nanny. And then, I'll have the IRS crawl so far up your husband's colon that he's gonna wish the only thing they find is more cancer!
Nickerson: Good God...
Selina: So can I count on your support? Or do I have to shove a box of White House M&Ms up your stretched out six baby vag? - The Casanova: Dan reveals his ruthless ways of being this once again:
- Dan: The point of the 50 Hottest Staffers isn't to be on it. It's to use it to know who to fuck. Find someone who was on it last year, but not this year. That's like a "make her pay for dinner" situation.
- He's also made number 26 on the list 5 years in a row.
- Hypocrite: Congressman Jaegar tries to back out of voting for Selina and has the audacity of saying he needs to listen to his conscience, when his defining character trait to everyone is that he bangs every prostitute in DC, and even brought one as his date tonight. Selina lets him have it.
- Idiot Ball: Richard commits perhaps his single biggest mistake in the series by failing to properly record Jonah telling off Teddy. Instead of recording an unqualified win - Jonah telling off a predator with a known history of abuse in Washington - he fails, accidentally turning the camera off instead.
- Not What It Looks Like: Jonah's admonishment to Teddy for assaulting him and multiple female employees is reframed to look like he's addressing a girl with Down's syndrome, and his phrasing is precisely what you shouldn't say:
- Jonah: People like you look like us, but you have something missing! [...] You're a lesser species! One I hope gets struck from the Earth!
- Pet the Dog: Selina stands up for her daughter when Mike can't talk about her intelligently:
- Selina: She's a lesbian, Mike, not a werewolf.
- Precision F-Strike: Invoked. Selina implores Furlong to just explain the plan for the ball without resorting to his usual language, and he makes it all the way to the end cleanly before throwing some spectacular profanity into the last sentence.
- The Reveal: Selina gets definitive proof that James is working against her and is, in fact, telling the various congressmen to abstain from the House vote to prevent a majority going to either presidential candidate despite being her freaking running mate! This is because he knows if the state delegations in the House can't get a majority to elect a president, then whoever the Senate elects as vice president will automatically assume the presidency. And he knows HE can win in the Senate with all of his connections.
- "Shaggy Dog" Story:
- Mike, as usual falls victim to this. He spends the congressional ball getting happy about a job with the NHL he thinks he's got nailed. Proceeds to get drunk and embarrass himself. And then finds out he didn't get the job at all because one of his colleagues at the ball got it.
- Jonah. For once, he's actually doing well at an event and even getting along well with the cute girl with Down's syndrome he's working alongside. And he confrotnts Teddy for being abusive, something he might never have done before, which leads to the entire bowling alley applauding him. But it's unfortunately misconstrued to make him look like a bad guy, leaving him worse off than ever.
- Gary as well. He thinks he's being complimented for once in his life, and then it turns out his presence on the hottest staffers' list was a total accident - the magazine meant to include someone named Gary Welsh and made a typo - and Amy roasts him terribly for it.
- Slave to PR: Catherine reveals that she doesn't want to reveal her sexuality to the public yet, but Selina, in a rush and stressed, accidentally starts associating her with LGBT representatives at the ball, and then the episode ends with Mike accidentally telling the press Catherine's sexuality.
- Smug Snake: Gary gets a case of this when he makes the 50 Hottest White House Staffers' list. He is swiftly deflated.
- Spotting the Thread: During their argument, Selina says she knows James still has a crush on her because she referenced a night over ten years ago when they interacted and he specifically remembered the green shoes she was wearing.
- Selina: No straight man remembers a woman's shoes!
