Review: Tender Touches “Microecosystems”

Overview (Spoilers Below)

Everyone hisses. Cockroaches flee, fuck, and fight. Curtis fears his bowel movements, gets 70 viewers on his live stream, and mistakes a nude modeling fiasco for growing closeness with Michelle.

Our Take

“Microecosystems” opens with an in-depth conversation about cockroaches and the range of communication contained within their hisses. Steve’s collection of roaches includes Zebra cockroaches, Porcelain cockroaches, Green Banana cockroaches, and a Suriname cockroach. After some quick google-searching, we verified that these are all real types of roaches.

It looks like the guys did their research when it comes to cockroaches. Hissing roaches have three separate hisses, which all sound the same to the human ear. The different hisses carry different purposes, with aggression, reproduction, and distraction. We looked it up, it’s true.

And that’s not where the cockroach trivia ends with this episode. Next, we learn that the insects are capable of learning and that they will crawl on humans for food. We also looked this up, and it too is true. It turns out that roaches have memory and salivate at the presence of stimuli such as sustenance. Reuters.com likens this occurrence to Pavlovian conditioning and the famous Pavlov’s Dog study. The audience also learns a bit about parthenogenesis – aka asexual reproduction, or “cloning” without any necessary fertilization.

Meta commentary rears its head via Michelle as she calls out Steve for “having a new passion project every other week.” This comment is an obvious hint that “Episode 4” of Tender Touches will likely not even mention the roaches anymore. Is the train-set comment foreshadowing?

Steve’s obsession with roaches leaves Curtis and Michelle to spend time together. Curtis, having unrequited issues with Charlene’s affair with Steve, attempts to close the gap between himself and Michelle, his brother’s girlfriend. After less than a minute of interacting, the two decide to schedule a nude modeling session in which Curtis would paint her naked, with Steve’s permission.

Naturally, the first thing Curtis does, even before the nude modeling session with Michelle, is heads over to Charlene’s bakery to rub her nose in the turned tables, intentionally upsetting her in the process. Then we learn that he is afraid of his poop?

Before Curtis can realize his fantasy payback dream, he meets the cold reality that he completely misunderstood his brother. What’s more, we learn that Michelle minored in nude modeling in college, further embarrassing our lead character. And if that wasn’t bad enough, he mistakes his brother’s comments once again, but this time for a three-some invitation.

“Microecosystems” is a hoot and a holler, and even though we thoroughly enjoyed last night’s “Foods of the World,” this installment of the show’s third season still proved to be an improvement over its predecessor. The plot of the episode flows well from beginning to end, tying in all of the elements of the show together for one fluid, hilarious ride.

The cherry on top of the extremely well-crafted quarter-hour series is all of the impressive cockroach trivia. At first, I expected what they were talking about to be comedic and improvised nonsense, but research proved that the creators did their homework, leading to a very satisfying episode.

Oh, and we’re not even going to try to unpack the reveal that Steve’s friend Daniel is – and always was – glass.