Review: Smiling Friends “The Glep Ep”

Overview

We learn about Glep, the green character who sits on the bean bag and spits on the ground and stuff like that.

Our Take

We’ve arrived to the season three finale of Adult Swim’s biggest show, Smiling Friends and with it we get almost a prequel on a couple of fronts that may or may not be canon depending on how Zach Hadel and Michael Cusack feel on any given day. For starters we get a bunch of Glep background which is helpful because if you’re a Glep fan like me you want to know as much as possible about the lil’ bastard and also we sort of get a precursor to how the Smiling Friends business came to be.

If you thought Smiling Friends couldn’t get any weirder than a demon having a mid-life crisis, buckle up, buttercup. The latest episode plunges into the deepest, darkest lore of the Smiling Friends office, revealing that Glep, the small green chaos engine, isn’t just a low-level employee—he’s a historical catastrophe machine whose passive existence led to the fall of Rome and the literal bubonic plague.

Glep returns just in time to save the day, convincing Mr. Boss to rehire him just before the office faces an attack from an unknown force. The episode wraps up with a chaotic, classic Smiling Friends Christmas dinner, where the main cast is suddenly joined by family members and love interests.

But the final, magnificent bit of meta-commentary? The friends confront the literal narrator for his unexplained appearance and, in a moment of brilliant absurdity, call him out for his prejudice against an unspecified minority group. It’s the ultimate fourth-wall break, reminding us that even the voice guiding the chaos is subject to criticism.

This episode is a masterclass in lore building, character development, and peak Adult Swim surrealism. If this is where the show is headed, we are all ready for the Black Death.