Vice-principal. Aniq's crush. Chelsea's former friend. Brett's ex-wife. Maggie's mom. Zoe is many Zoes rolled up into one. Wonder no more about the bear in the opening credits -Mama Bear Zoe is here, and she takes no prisoners. This has to be the most inventive, absurd, and ambitious episode of The Afterparty. That doesn't necessarily mean it's the best. Conceptually, it's strong. It makes sense to have Zoe, the art teacher, have her story told in the style of a cartoon, but the execution is messy. It's also still really not cool that he and Yasper are listening in to the conversation, despite the shenanigans they got into looking for a charger. Not only is it illegal, but it's also ethically murky.
The most entertaining sequence by far was when Zoe realized she could just have fun by herself well, with her other selves. The Afterparty is at its heart an ensemble comedy, and it has managed to maintain this vibe despite each episode having only one central character. With so much of this episode focusing on an animated Zoe and multiple versions of herself, the only other characters we saw in real-life were Aniq, Yasper, Culp, and Danner (with a little bit of Jennifer #1). Zoe spent more time with Xavier than virtually anybody else, but we're no closer to finding out who killed him. If anything, this was the clearest picture of Xavier that we got from anyone, and it tracks most of what he was doing that night -- right up until his death, which is the most crucial part. At the end of the episode, Zoe makes a good point, one that the show has done expertly -- any one of them could have done it. Details could have been left out of anyone's stories. It seems likely that the culprit is someone unexpected, someone who hasn't had an episode centered around them. This was an uneven episode, but it did have moments of brilliance that wouldn't have been possible without the medium of animation.