HBO’s “Search Party” Season 5 Devolves Into a Full-Blown Apocalyptic Nightmare! [Images]

I initially gave up on HBO’s “Search Party” after the first season because it abandoned its original premise – Alia Shawkat‘s Dora becomes obsessed with tracking down a missing college acquaintance, roping her boyfriend Drew (John Reynolds) and best friends Elliott (John Early) and Portia (Meredith Hagner) into a messy private investigation.

Thankfully, I returned to the series and discovered that it turns into one of the most insane, zany, over-the-top, and chaotic shows I have ever seen. It jumps the shark so hard that I continually had to question as to whether or not the season arcs had been planned by the show’s creators since the beginning or if they were just making shit up along the way.

Things get even more fucked up in the fifth and final season, which HBO Max just released in full late last week. “Search Party” has always been grounded in reality, offering hysterical commentary on the absurdity of today’s society. The filmmakers have never been afraid to take big swings and that’s what makes this series so special.

And with that, the mystery was solved by the end of the first season, a risk that changed the complexity of the show and opened the door to endless possibilities. Because of this, the series slowly devolves into the ludicrous, taking things as far as to even introduce time travel in Season Four. Yes, time travel.

Digging into the new season, Dory (Shawkat) enters a very public business partnership with charismatic tech billionaire Tunnel Quinn (the always ever-so-perfect Jeff Goldblum) on the other side of her near-death experience.

You see, Dora is now enlightened and feels it is her destiny to share the experience with others – to spread love and happiness. Goldblum’s Tunnel, a delirious jab at Elon Musk, uses all of his resources to harness Dora’s “gift” and create a product from it. Enlightenment in the form of a pill.

Things go haywire as the pills turn people into zombies, diverting the final three episodes into a full-blown apocalyptic nightmare! Interestingly, everything comes full circle as Dora comes face to face with not one missing person’s poster, but thousands. It’s a truly morbid, but perfect stamp of a final image.

If you haven’t seen “Search Party” yet, now you have your excuse…