ENTOURAGE
Season 3 Episode 17
“The Return of The King”

The whole Medellin thing comes to a head (as Ari said it would 4 episodes back) on Yom Kippur, of all days; and we all know how many Hollywood types are circumcised, right?
It seems Benicio’s walked away from the project (as has Paul Haggis, as we find out later on), and the producers need a star in place before sundown, or the project collapses.
But it’s Yom Kippur, and the fasting and the moratorium on business deals has to remain in place… till sundown.
With Ari’s regular cell phone as well as his BatPhone confiscated by Mrs. Ari, Ari slinks around with the producer’s son, making deals with Amanda in the back alley of Temple by the dumpsters!
Ari does his best to pull the deal together (ostensibly representing the co-producer, as he’s no longer Vince’s manager), but in the end, the deal falls apart.
Agreeing with E that Ari would have never let the ball drop on this one, Vince confronts Amanda, and though it’s made clear that this really wasn’t her fault, they still go their separate ways.

Meanwhile, there’s a subplot involving Johnny Drama and a race horse who happens to be the grandson of a horse that Johnny bet on years ago, and from whose winnings he bought a Lincoln that the whole gang remembers.
Though the horse loses, Drama ends up buying him as it looks like the owner’s about to send “King” off to the glue factory. But Drama spends a whole lot more than he bargained for on King’s upkeep, so he gives the horse to Ed Burns as a gift, much to Burns’ daughter’s glee.
And though that subplot is serviceable enough, the meat of the episode is in the Medellin subplot, as it picks up the thread of the long-running storyline, becomes the catalyst for the end of Vince’s professional and personal relationship with Amanda, and paves the way for next episode’s goings-on.

(Image courtesy of hbo.com.)

ENTOURAGE
Season 3
Episode 13
(WARNING:
SPOILERS)
“Less Than 30”

After, what, a four month break, the boys are back, and look who their new hottie agent is: Amanda, played by Carla Gugino!
And speaking of breaks, that’s sort of the way Vince and Ari are acting, as if they were once an item and now they’re on the outs. (E makes an interesting point: outside of Mrs. Chase and the guys, Ari’s is the longest relationship/friendship Vince has had.)
All this tension (and yes, jealousy) comes to a head when, ostensibly as a birthday gift, Ari gives Vince the script for Medellin (which was once a bone of contention in light of the Aquaman franchise; of course, Benicio Del Toro ended up with Medellin, and Vince was passed over for Aquaman 2). Amanda’s understandably annoyed by that, and Ari makes his pitch at Vince’s party.
It’s a great scene, where it’s pretty clear that beneath all the agent schmooze, this is really just a friend reaching out to another, hoping to salvage the relationship. And the thing is, with Ari, his friendship with Vince is all wrapped up and intertwined with their being agent and client. (Perhaps not the best set-up, but there you have it.)
And though Vince says all they really can be at this point is friends, he holds back on signing a deal to make an Edith Wharton adaptation with Sam Mendes, just to see if the whole Medellin thing pans out the way Ari claims it will.

Parting shot: It’s too bad the Carla Gugino-headlined Threshold was cancelled. One of the Lost clones to storm the network schedules in 2005, Threshold was a great X-Files throwback I enjoyed.
Maybe that was its downfall, though. Classic case of damned if you do, damned if you don’t. If it had come out during the whole X-Files boom, it would have been a rip-off. In 2005, when it premiered, it was probably a little too late, given that the boom had already gone bust. (Invasion—another show I enjoyed—was a fresher and more involving approach to the X-Files idea of aliens among us, but even that couldn’t get past its freshman year.)

(Image courtesy of aol.com.)