Bacon and Eggs
S3 E6: Indianapolis
Parks and Recreation, NBCUniversal, 2009.
Ron Swanson has been fasting since morning.
This is voluntary. This is the point. The fast is not a sacrifice, it is a container, a way of honoring what is coming. What is coming is Charles Mulligan's Steakhouse, Indianapolis, the best damn steakhouse in the damn state, where Ron has eaten porterhouses and rib eyes and something called The Enforcer since at least 2000, where he has photographed every steak he has ever consumed there in a private archive of personal history that functions, essentially, as a spiritual autobiography. June 2004. January 2000. February 1996. The steak, the whiskey, the lady next to him, who was his ex-wife Tammy. He has fasted so that he might be empty enough to receive what Mulligan's will give him.
Mulligan's is closed.
The Indiana State Department of Health has boarded it up. There is a notice on the door. Ron stands before it in the manner of a man who has been told that the concept of beef has been discontinued, effective immediately, and that all existing beef will be collected and destroyed, and that there is no timeline for when, or whether, beef will return.
"They just boarded her up like she was some common warehouse," he says.
He asks what happened to the steaks that were inside when they closed. Whether they got eaten.
Nobody knows. Nobody has thought about this until now. The question hangs in the Indianapolis air without resolution, which is the only way it can hang, because there is no resolution available, because the steaks are gone, and Mulligan's is closed, and Ron fasted all day for this.
Chris Traeger, who is relentlessly healthy in the way of someone who has made wellness into a project with deliverables, invites everyone back to his apartment, where he fires up the grill and produces portobello mushrooms.
Ron nearly passes out.
This is not a metaphor. This is a man who withheld food from his body in anticipation of a specific, sacred meal, and has arrived at the appointed place and found it shuttered, and has been redirected to a cheerful apartment where a very fit man is grilling fungi at him with sincere enthusiasm. Ron looks at the mushroom. The mushroom is not a steak. The mushroom will never be a steak. The mushroom exists in the same category as the steak only insofar as both are technically food, a category so broad as to be meaningless, a category that also includes airline pretzels and the garnish nobody eats.
He is given a cold compress.
This is an episode about the distance between what you came for and what you get.
Leslie Knope came to Indianapolis to receive a commendation at the Indiana Statehouse and will leave without attending the ceremony, because her best friend needed a ride home and Leslie decided, without deliberation, that this was more important. Ann Perkins came to Indianapolis to confront a man she believed was cheating on her, and discovered instead that she had been broken up with, gently and positively, approximately one week prior, without her awareness, because Chris Traeger delivers bad news with such relentless optimism that the bad news sometimes fails to arrive. Tom Haverford came to pitch Tommy Fresh, his cologne, to Dennis Feinstein, a man whose real name is Dante Fiero but who goes by Dennis Feinstein because in Pawnee that is considered the exotic option, and Dennis Feinstein told Tom that Tommy Fresh smells like someone spilled Chinese food in a bird cage, which is not a comparison Tom was prepared for, and which lands in the manner of all true criticism: precisely, and too late to do anything about.
Everyone came for something. The steakhouse was boarded up for all of them.
Ron ends the episode at a diner.
He orders a steak. The steak disappoints him in the manner of all replacement steaks ordered after the original steakhouse has been condemned by the state health department, competently, without grace, as a steak-shaped reminder of the steak that wasn't. He looks at it. He has a conversation with the waiter that is, in its way, the clearest thing Ron Swanson has ever said about who he is and what he wants and how much he is willing to accept from the world.
"Give me all the bacon and eggs you have."
Not some. Not a reasonable amount. Not the portion a normal person would order when making a practical decision about a meal at a diner. All of it. Every unit of bacon and eggs the diner currently possesses, brought to this table, for Ron, now.
The waiter confirms. Ron clarifies. He is not asking for a lot of bacon and eggs. He is asking for all of the bacon and eggs. The distinction matters. A lot is a quantity. All is a position.
It is the most romantic thing in the episode.