And it strikes me that it’s a very loving and tender one. Everything about the episode visually, from the focus on one specific place to the long camera shots, was about lingering. And in that regard, the formal qualities of the episode seemed to be a sort of response to another ongoing topic of conversation: death, loss, time slipping by.
This is clearest in the episode’s focus on Ilana’s will. It’s a strange sort of insight into Ilana’s character that, on her birthday, she starts thinking about death! And I think it’s an interesting question, how we’re asked to respond to her childlike 23-year-old anxiety. Are we supposed to share it? On the one hand, it’s clearly a manifestation of Ilana’s ridiculous self-involvement that she treats 23 as the beginning of the end. But on the other hand, she’s not wrong that that part of life goes by quite quickly. The lingering formal qualities seems to validate, at an emotional level, Ilana’s sense of time passing and our sense of nostalgia; as in the “Knock Offs” episode, I was impressed by the show’s ability to register a sadness and a tenderness that sitcoms can’t often accommodate.

http://talkingpointsmemo.com/dear-tv/dear-television-broad-city-season-two-episode-ten-st-marks

Sarah: Well, let me answer that on an anecdotal level: I take pleasure in the Peeing Millennial precisely because she signals freedom to me. It’s a freedom that’s closely associated with one of the main pleasures I take in watching this show in general: It is mindblowingly pleasurable to watch women—it’s usually but not always Ilana—completely fail to follow the rules of feminine propriety and to escape unscathed. Like, there are no repercussions. (Here, following up on your Sister Carrie reference, let’s think about how Ilana is absolutely the opposite of Lily Bart. Or Tess. Or Edna Pontellier. All variously unruly women who die. That’s what’s usually happens to unruly women!)
As a woman, I think I have a very strong ingrained sense that if you don’t keep everything together, and spend a rather considerable amount of energy making yourself attractive to other people, shit is just going to hit the fucking fan. Like, no one will ever love you and no one will ever hire you or take care of you and you will not be okay, in a vague but nevertheless terrifying way. (And I say that as a woman who really carries my femininity very lightly!) So to watch this woman just not give a shit and be fine – yes, that does signal freedom!
But the condition of her being “fine” is her discovery, or her confidence, that she’ll be okay even without the safety net of public approval. Or, rather, she is fine because of the security that comes from knowing you have other ways to marshal care and comfort. That is a security which people of color, in the U.S., have typically been denied.
Which brings us more concretely to race. Another example of unruly/abject behavior is Ilana doing the “tongue thing” at—or, I guess, about—the handsome black man she passes on the street. How do you read that? At the most basic level, I think it’s a moment that “knows” that Ilana is safe in deploying her “tongue thing” in a way that the black man is not. That’s a moment, I think, about the power differential around race. Yes?

As you noted above, this episode is an ethnographic encounter with themselves. It marks their privilege, marks their feelings of touristic superiority over their surroundings, at the same time that it refuses to validate that superiority.