Recap / Veep S 5 E 3 The Eagle

A sensitive tweet posted accidentally by Selina causes chaos for the team.

While Selina is DMing with her boyfriend Charlie Baird, she accidentally publicly tweets an insulting message about O'Brien and causes chaos in the press. Meanwhile, Amy, Dan, Jonah, Richard and Bob The Eagle keep looking for Nevada notes.

Tropes:

• Black Comedy:
  • Furlong is reaching a new level of comic villainy by taking his assistant Will and his wife out to dinner for their anniversary but using it only to openly insult them both.
    Furlong: I guess Will likes ‘em old.
  • Selina's tweet insulting O'Brien also counts: "O'Brien only goes down on his wife with biscuits and gravy."
• The Bus Came Back: Karen from Season 4 ends up doing work to delay the vote.
• Chekhov's Gun:
  • Dan asks Amy for a drink.
  • Selina does an impression of Mike that will return later.
  • The episode starts with Mike making a reservation with his name for the president that night. Halfway through the episode, Furlong hijacks Mike’s date reservation by ALSO using his name
  • Early in the episode Selina brags about downsizing of the Post Office she instituted some time ago.
• Country Matters: Selina drops one when she mentions the Queen of England.
• Confusion Fu: Bob’s leaving the meeting two minutes in is so random and unnerving that when the opposition gets up to leave they let it slip which county is most likely to have leftover votes
• Idiot Ball: No one suggests simply deleting the tweet and hoping it makes her look better. Considering that Mike told her less than five minutes after she tweeted it, it's possible she could've gotten away with it.
• Malaproper: Bob Bradlee mixes metaphors by saying “Does a bear piss in the shower?”
• Official Couple: Charlie Baird and Selina are now openly dating, since Mike's flub last episode spilled the beans anyway.
• Overly Long Gag:Richard has a super-long voice message. It can be heard here (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IEq7TWExBtI&t=657s).
• Phrase Catcher: As has happened before, Jonah ends up being told to shut the fuck up, and even gets three people at once saying it.
• The Reveal: Selina's team in Nevada finds a bunch of missing mail-in votes that were stolen by a postal worker that had been laid off by a downsizing of the Postal Service that Selina bragged about earlier in the episode.
  • And those mail-in votes were primarily from military so they skew heavily to O'Brien. As a result in Selina not only still loses Nevada, but also loses the national popular vote.
• The Scapegoat: Selina ends up deciding to blame her tweet on Chinese hackers to cover her ass. But doing so causes retaliations from the Chinese government in kind.
• "Shaggy Dog" Story: Mike is planning to adopt a Chinese kid, but the Chinese sanctions against America for Selina using them as The Scapegoat include freezing of foreign adoptions, which Mike only finds out when he has to read out the sanctions for the first time during a press conference
• Skewed Priorities:
  • When Selina compares something to choosing to living in The Matrix, Kent stops to correct that no one chose to live in the Matrix, since the Machines put the humans there by force.
  • While waiting in an important meeting, Richard ends up going on a tangent about his favorite Robert De Niro movies.
    Richard: What are your top five De Niro movies? And you can’t say ‘Meet The Parents’, because that’s automatically number one.
• Take That!:
  • American foreign policy:
    Selina: Can I really blame a country for something they didn’t do?
    Ben: It’s been a cornerstone of foreign policy since the Spanish-American War.
• Technologically Blind Elders: Selina not being familiar with how Twitter works leads to her tweeting a joke she meant to be a private message to Charlie.
• Trauma Conga Line: The audience sees that Bob may not be as capable as we thought. First, Amy finds him fumbling alone in a closet and he calls her Jamie. Then we see him popping pills, possibly randomly. Then he leaves an important meeting to go talk to Selina, then leaves mid-conversation with her, then seems to forget what he’s been doing. Jonah then confirms that the people he said to get in touch with earlier are either dead or the owner of a legal brothel. And also told him the Jews cause hurricanes.
• Xanatos Speed Chess: When Selina is late for a dinner, Baird uses the opportunity to sit with Gary and ask him about his life, managing to get a lot of information about him and Selina while he waits. Gary is sadly so desperate for attention that he talks a lot.