Broad City Season 5 Episode 3 Review: Bitcoin & The Missing Girls

This Broad City review contains spoilers.

Broad City Season 5 Episode 3

Last week might have been all about the business bitch, but this week is all about the wizness bitch. For those of you not up on the times, that’s women-owned businesses. If you’ve been paying attention you might have noticed Abbi and Ilana’s matching wig iPhone cases in the last episode. The big reveal of episode 3 is those cases were created by Ilana and just happen to be her new wizness. Goodbye SheWorks! We’re onto the next, keep up. On her way up the ladder, Ilana finds a fruit-by-the-foot wrapper in her lamp shade that sends her on her on a journey to an old flame that gifted her with some bitcoin she’s raring to cash in. 

Before Ilana can shatter the glass ceiling, on her way to find the keeper of the coin, she gets a matrover (a Matrix-style makeover, again, keep up). Decked out in head-to-toe patent leather and equipped with some witchy powers that include changing crossing signs and “pitching tents,” Ilana finds her former lover and  manages to trade in her cryptocurrency for about eight grand. Although she does learn from some protesters that BitCoin is the preferred currency of pedophiles, as well as some other harsh realities. 

Meanwhile Abbi is facing a hardship of her own, she’s lost her favorite sweatshirt. Instead of doing her own laundry on her day off, Abbi— heeding the advice of her ride or die—  decides to instead take her dirty laundry to the nearby Laundromat and take the time to have a “me day.” The allotted hour (the only convenient thing about the Big Apple is that they are quick on their laundry game) zooms past, Abbi gets nothing creative done, and when she picks up her laundry notices that the sweatshirt he lost her virginity in is missing.  

further reading: The Best TV Comedies on Netflix

It’s not an envelope full of cash, but who can put a price on sentimentality? When Abbi puts flyers all over town inquiring about a missing sweatshirt  with her face plastered across it, she quickly becomes “another white women [who’s] gone missing.” Everyone cares too much and Abbi’s forced to take down all the flyers that just happen to be covering Abolish I.C.E. and Black Lives Matter posters. Suffice it to say, Abbi becomes one of the very few white people to learn a white privilege lesson. But she does get her sweatshirt back in the end. 

If I had to pick a theme for this week, it would probably be privilege. Both Abbi and Ilana pursue a “lost” item in their own respect and learn some valuable lessons about privilege and the cost of certain things. 

So this week, I don’t think Abbi and Ilana have a lesson to share with us… well other than check your privilege. So instead I will share a list of very crucial items that the news might have missed courtesy of Abby and Ilana. But, like, I’m typing them out for you, so I too am contributing to a better tomorrow. You’re welcome.

Here’s your list of topics that need a closer eye from the news instead of “latching onto stupid but really understandable layout issues:” 

Paper money 

The meat industry

The Fashion industry and all the clothes their burning. 

Child labor 

Recycling, the udon containers specifically 

Garbage island 

Surveillance 

“Free” social media 

That one mystical tribal Jewish symbol popularized by Spock. 

“We’re just data.” 

The end. 

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