Knowing and being friends with someone for seven years is a big deal, but making it for seven years as roommates is a gigantic accomplishment. According to the guys of Workaholics, this also means that they are common law married, even though common law marriages don’t actually exist in California. Though we’ve only seen four of these years, we can imagine the other years were filled with booze, weed and wacky adventures that had no long-term consequences. But with living together for that long, you also get the seven-year itch, which in their fourth season finale, we see in “Friendship Anniversary.”
As the three guys sit at dinner for their seventh anniversary and get ready to sign their lease once again, they end up in a series of disagreements. Blake’s anniversary presents are Ders and Adam’s property, just covered in shells and dry pasta, which Blake considers his “reinterpreted art.” Adam plans on spending the anniversary drunk, like most days in his life, and when Ders brings out what looks like a lovely meal of KFC, it turns out he just used KFC boxes and buckets containing a disgusting-looking Norwegian meal he made. This turns into a food fight that they believe will end their friendship and cause them to go their separate ways.
Blake goes to spend the night at Gillian’s, who turns out to be an insane dog show better who treats Blake like crap. Anders ends up sleeping in his car outside a park, where he tells a bunch of underage kids to quit drinking, to which they tip him over when he uses the nearby portable toilet. Adam decides to continue the party by going to a bar, where he unknowingly gets picked up by a guy who clearly wants to have sex with him, which he doesn’t even realize even when he’s in bed with the man and there’s a poking underneath the sheets.
At work the next day, they decide to go back to the house, split up their stuff and security deposit and continue the new lives they’ve started that they all hate. Clearly, these three are going to get back together. I mean, if they didn’t there wouldn’t be any show, right? But the way they reunite is maybe the most disgusting moment in a season that has included skunk burritos and Ders getting a face full of crap. As they enter the food-ridden house, they find rats everywhere. So their solution? Smash them all, in what becomes a ratblood-soaked gore fest. These rats pop with explosions of blood like balloons filled with Kool-Aid. It’s absolutely disgusting, even by Workaholics standards. Of course, they reunite over their destruction of the rats, then finally share their KFC dinner at Adam’s almost-new-lovers’ house.
What “Friendship Anniversary” posits is that these three need each other to survive, that they’re all better with each other than without. Seven years is a good stretch, but would they be better if they stayed together? I imagine without their antics, Blake and Anders could probably be far more successful than they have been, whereas Adam, yeah, he’d probably be dead within a week. He’s like a baby that needs constant attention, or things aren’t going to go so great. This might be an irrelevant question, since this show can’t go on without these three united, even when the arguments that split them apart are pretty simple and easily solved.
That being said, “Friendship Anniversary” is a nice celebration of the relationship these three have cultivated over the past seven years. When they sit down for their real KFC dinner at the end of the episode, you do see the love these three have for each other that they surely feel for each other in real life. It is quite a nice way to end the season, even if getting to this point involved a blood-covered mash fest, but what a fitting way to conclude Workaholics’ most disgusting season.
Ross Bonaime is a D.C.-based freelance writer and regular contributor to Paste. You can follow him on Twitter.