Portlandia Season 4 Episode 5, named "Spyke Drives" opens with domesticated Portland couple Peter (Fred Armisen) and Nance (Carrie Brownstein), who we've seen before doing domesticated things, i.e. putting together a replica of Big Ben. Nance hurts her ankle and needs Peter to take her to the emergency room. The problem: Peter is the wimpiest driver on the planet earth. He can't make turns, he stalls endlessly, and drives so slowly that a limping Nance gets out of the car and walks faster than he drives. She gets so upset with him that she calls him the P-word before she calls 9-1-1 and gets in an ambulance. Meanwhile, Peter is stuck at a standstill created by bicyclers who are picketing for "bicycle rights," one of whom is Spyke.
Cut to Spyke back at his job. Spyke's boss tells him to get a car. He's appalled, having just come off of a bike riders' picket. He asks his girlfriend if she will still love him even if he gets a car. After a short pause, she responds, yes, duh. Spyke asks his most macho friend Lance (played by Carrie Brownstein) to help him choose a car. There's a hilarious run of different vehicles, including a biodiesel car ("Constantly smells like french fries. Which is either good or bad, depending..." - sounds good to me) and a muscle car that Lance tries to hump. Spyke finally selects a car that costs "some boring number."
Beloved Portlandia guest star Kyle MacLachlan returns as the city's super friendly mayor. This time, he stops by Fred and Carrie's failure of a yard sale, where he loves everything and then wants to buy it all for a super super low price. After selling it to the mayor for a super low price, the two walk into his Y2K Cafe which showcases everything that they just sold to him. The concept is simultaneously brilliant and terrible; the food at Y2K Cafe, on the other hand, is "bad" as said by the mayor himself.
Next up is a dinner party, where Fred cannot, or rather, will not let his guests go home, despite their futile attempts to excuse themselves multiple times. Eventually the guests have to murder in a scene that suddenly becomes a medieval banquet. It's funny but rather confusing in terms of how it is part of the episode.
