Kevin Can F**k Himself Episode 4 Review and Recap: Live Free or Die

Kevin Can F**k Himself episode 4 explained: two road trips, one house

Road trips are a rite of passage. They can be magical, or they can be an air-conditioned hell, and they are always revealing. The fourth episode of Kevin Can F**k Himself, called Live Free or Die, confines its characters to small spaces and then watches what they are made of. It aired on AMC on July 4, 2021, was directed by Anna Dokoza and was written by Mel Shimkovitz.

For anyone landing here cold, the series was created by Valerie Armstrong and stars Annie Murphy as Allison McRoberts, a wife trapped in a husband's sitcom. The show alternates between multi-camera sitcom scenes with a laugh track and darker, single-camera drama, and the style flips depending on whose point of view the story has. Eric Petersen plays Kevin, Mary Hollis Inboden is Patty, and the supporting cast includes Alex Bonifer, Brian Howe and Candice Coke.

The episode makes a clean split. The sitcom side stays in the basement with Kevin and his friends. The drama side rides along with Allison and Patty on a drive that gets more dangerous mile by mile. The structure is the point, and the review below asks whether it pays off.

Season 1 has an 82 percent approval rating on Rotten Tomatoes, with the show praised for its social commentary and Annie Murphy's performance. AMC confirmed in November 2021 that the series would end after two seasons.

A note on the title: the hour takes its name from the license-plate motto of New Hampshire, and it is a fitting joke for a story about a woman who has been told for years that she cannot leave.

The Escape Groom in the basement

The hour opens with a deflated Neil and Kevin returning from a treasure hunt with a shovel and a metal detector and nothing to show for it. Kevin has a new way to make easy money: an escape room in the basement, built around what people most want to escape, which is husbands. The Escape Groom is born.

Allison asks to borrow the car for Patty's beauty expo and lies about buying tequila at a New Hampshire duty-free store. She reminds the men about the corned beef in the oven, sets an Alexa for six hours because none of the three is listening, and leaves. Kevin, broke, promises 10,000 dollars to winners and plans to make the room inescapable with clues that lead nowhere, the real key hidden somewhere random.

The escape room runs on bad planning. It has 56 clues, and the last one means searching a bowl of rice for a grain marked with the word pipe, with the key sitting on top of a pipe. Pete is dressed as a priest, Neil is the emcee, and Kevin plays a customer who is supposed to lead the players astray. The players are quick, and a tall one bangs his head on the pipe, which knocks the key loose. Kevin tries to claim it is fake by snapping it, cuts himself, and ends up swallowing it, insisting it is candy.

Allison and Patty on the road

Before the trip, Detective Tammy Ridgeway visits Patty. The detective stops by for a follow-up about the pharmacist and notices a copy of Memoirs of a Geisha, then leaves with a warning to stay put. Patty and Allison leave in Kevin's car with Patty at the wheel, since Allison counts as a tourist. They agree no place is better than another, Patty talks about a trucker father who was never home, and Allison's joke about a murder lands better than expected. Patty says she changed her mind about Allison at that moment.

The drive leads to a shack where Jif, played by Troy D. Wallace, lets them in. Patty asks for newspapers, which are cocaine, while the Oxys are called magazines, and they have already been traded away. No exchanges are allowed. A teen named Trevor, played by Cole Tristan Murphy, will show them where the pills went for a six-pack that used to be a twelve.

Patty has had enough of the chauffeur role by the time Trevor and his girlfriend start kissing in the backseat. They are in Vermont, Patty doesn't care about the coke in the car, and Allison supplies the line that gives the episode its title: Live Free or Die, which is the New Hampshire motto. Trevor gives them the meeting spot and they send him out of the car.

A gun, a cop and an unexpected last line

At the meeting point the pair trade the coke to two haggard people from a red rooster van and Patty comes back from the woods with a gun instead of pills. Allison panics. Patty insists all Allison has to do is point it at “Jason” and he will leave her alone. Allison begs for the pills anyway, and Patty finds one more place, two hours off.

At the gas station Patty goes for Red Bulls and menthols, Allison vanishes into an alley to make the buy, and Patty pistol-whips the wrong man from behind. Allison snatches the pills and takes the wheel. A patrol car lights them up. Her father, Les Devine, was a Worcester cop, which doesn't help, and Kevin has reported the car stolen. She talks her way out with her blonde charm, claiming she forgot to tell her husband how long they would be gone.

Back in the basement the escape room has gone wrong. The roast burns, smoke fills the room and the group climbs out through a transom window, where Kevin gets stuck. When Allison finally phones, she has thirty-two missed calls, and Kevin is more worried about the Crisco than about her.

Then the secret comes out. Patty finally learns that when Allison worked long hours as a paralegal, Kevin convinced everyone she was having an affair with her boss, a married man in his sixties, and then went as far as putting sugar in a gas tank, which got her fired. Patty, who laughed along, is shaken. The episode ends with Allison saying she is going to kill Kevin, and the Dropkick Murphys' song from The Departed starts up as they head home.

Live Free or Die at a glance

• Air date: July 4, 2021, on AMC.
• Director and writer: Anna Dokoza directed it, and Mel Shimkovitz wrote it.
• The boys: Kevin (Eric Petersen), Neil (Alex Bonifer) and Pete (Brian Howe) run the Escape Groom.
• The girls: Allison (Annie Murphy) and Patty (Mary Hollis Inboden) hunt for pills.
• Guest players: Candice Coke as Detective Ridgeway, Troy D. Wallace as Jif and Cole Tristan Murphy as Trevor.

Live Free or Die review: a lopsided split

The episode is slightly askew. Cutting the story into a boys plot and a women's plot means the viewer learns more about one side than the other, and the division is palpable. Little is added to Kevin beyond what the series already knows: he is needy, conniving and willing to trap people for his own gain. The escape room is a sitcom premise stretched past its comic value, and the weight gags around the Crisco and the stuck window are the kind of cheap humor the show is meant to be satirizing, not repeating.

The women's half works much better. The car conversation between Allison and Patty is the best writing of the hour, because it gives a woman who has spent three episodes as a victim a friend and a plan. Patty's bravado cracks the moment she steps toward the shack, and Allison, who has been treated like a tourist in her own life, takes control of the wheel. The reveal about the sugar in the gas tank explains why Allison needs more than a sitcom ending.

The takeaway might be that everyone has a motive. That is a thin theme for an hour, but it sets up the last scene, where a character who kept quiet about her husband's cruelty hears it laid out and has to decide what to do with it. For a show about the gap between sitcom and truth, Live Free or Die works best when it stops joking and lets Allison talk.

One more thing is worth saying about the pairing. Annie Murphy plays Allison as someone discovering what she can get away with, and Mary Hollis Inboden plays Patty as someone who has always known and never said it. Put them in one car, and the show's central question becomes visible: how long can two people laugh along with a joke that is at their own expense, and what happens on the day one of them stops?

Sources

• Kevin Can F**k Himself, Wikipedia — cast, episode list and premise