Workaholics: “Ditch Day” (Episode 5.06)

As Workaholics gets older, it keeps getting farther away from being about, well, work. Adam, Anders and Blake must have earned plenty of cool points, because they rarely have to show up at the office anymore, as their weird adventures have taken up a large part of the series and taken them outside the work place. In this fifth season, the trio’s TelAmericorp coworkers have occasionally shown up, but usually just in an episode’s third act to react to whatever weird conclusion the adventure leads to.

While in the office setting, it seems like Blake, Adam and Ders are the most reckless and crazy of the entire office, but what “Ditch Day” posits is, maybe they aren’t. “Ditch Day” is the rare Workaholics episode where the supporting cast are the real stars, while our usual leads are left cleaning up the shit show that they’ve accidentally created.

When Alice announces that everyone in the office needs to quit whining to her about their problems, the trio set up an office wide ditch day. Thankfully Karl has given the three guys $1,000 upfront to make sure a box he has gets delivered while he goes down to Mexico. So Adam, Blake and Ders try to throw a classy soiree, with no dookie stains on the soap and rented chairs. But when the boring party gets shaken up with some shots, the party becomes a full-on rage, with a bunch of drunk co-workers causing havok.

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“Ditch Day” sets up bare-bones arcs for the main three, with Adam deciding he should change his name to “Nails DeChamp,” Blake becoming very interested in learning the origins of Olmec from The Legends of the Hidden Temple and Ders just wants to seem a little bit classy. But none of this truly matters since Waymond becomes a furious drunk that must be contained and starts jumping into neighboring backyards, Bill and Gary Ghostman start fighting over Jillian and Gil just feels like breaking stuff. “Ditch Day” is simply an excuse for the side characters to get the spotlight and go nuts. “Ditch Day” works because it puts us in such a crazy environment for this group, which is surprisingly rare.

Even for an episode of Workaholics, “Ditch Day” is incredibly light on plot, with the box Karl gave the trio to watch—which they assumed to be filled with drugs—filled with rare Princess Diana Beanie Babies. But “Ditch Day” sort of shows that Workaholics doesn’t need much plot to work, just a possibly-drug-filled MacGuffin and some booze. In fact Workaholics would likely be more consistent without fussy things like story in the way to complicate things, even though this season has had stronger episode structure than the past few seasons have.

“Ditch Day” gets down to the core of what Workaholics is about: getting fugged up with some friends and go ahead go nuts, go apeshit. No real plot, no prob. It’s nuts how far a few shots from the God of Chillaxing can go.

Ross Bonaime is a D.C.-based freelance writer and regular contributor to Paste. You can follow him on Twitter.