Trippy Dreams Haunt Louis CK In 'Louie'

Louis CK may have been tripping on acid while he wrote the Season 5 Louie episode "Untitled" or was watching too many weird scenes of the fellow FX series American Horror Story: Freak Show, because the episode featured Louie experiencing strange dreams involving a man wearing a mask and shorts attacking him constantly among other eerie moments. So why did all of this freakishness begin and what could Louie's weird dreams mean?

"Untitled" began in true Louie fashion, with Louie up onstage at the Comedy Cellar telling funny jokes as per usual. After killing it with a cute, slightly corny but hilarious joke about dabbling in beekeeping, Louie meets fan and fellow comedian Crazy Glasey, aka Jon Glaser from Parks and Recreation, who makes Louie tell the bee joke over and over again. He very clearly fits his stage name as Glasey later tells Louie's joke and not actually realizing that stealing another comic's joke is a bad thing. But the dreams didn't begin thanks to Glaser supposedly. Louie first experiences a dream after refusing to help the mother of one of Lily's friends move her aquarium to a new location in her house which used to be her former husband's job. Instead of empathizing with the lady, Louie awkwardly comforts her by putting a blanket on her and leaving.

The dreams come all at once and actually freaked me out at first as all of a sudden the man in the mask jumped on top of Louie in his bed. Louie woke with a start and the episode cut to commercial. At many points in the episode, I could not what was a dream and what wasn't until something absolutely bonkers started happening much like Louie himself. He would be at his doctor's office discussing the dream and boom, the masked man was crouching on the doctor's desk. He's be buying a cannoli and boom, all of a sudden the music would turn off and suddenly Louie is bumping and grinding with a man in a unicorn mask who turns out to be his brother Bobby.

When he finally sits down to think about when the dreams and began and what could subconsciously be causing them, he remember Lily's friend's mom. He immediately goes over to her house, moves the aquarium, changes a lightbuld, has sex with her, fixes the faucet and takes care of other menial household chores she apparently doesn't have the strength to do herself. It's altogether completely confusing as later that night, Louie is able to sleep like a baby.

So what was it that caused the dreams to start and stop? One theory I have is that in the back of his mind, Louie actually felt bad for leaving the mom by herself without any help as she struggles through her new life as a single mom as he himself can actually empathize with being a single parent. Perhaps when he left her thanks to feeling uncomfortable about her showing her emotions, it triggered some strange impulse in his brain to continuously make him feel uncomfortable until he did what was right. Theory number two is similar to the first but instead of feeling guilty for not empathizing with the woman, Louie perhaps felt like there was unfinished business between him and the woman which included both helping her with her menial yet still significant problems and also wanting to have sex with her.

Or perhaps from the way the masked man kept jumping on Louie to his dry-humping of the unicorn man, maybe all Louie really wanted to do was have sex with her. But if that's only the case, we've changed the role of women on the series once again from last week's wonderful episode "Bobby's Place" which featured women subverting typical gender roles with Louie. So the more subconscious and open to interpretation the dreams, the better in my opinion. Louie really does seem to work at its best when the plot and Louis CK's motives in the episodes aren't fully understood.

Images: KC Bailey/FX (3)