Broad City is back for its fourth season, and its premiere “Sliding Doors” is the show’s most structurally ambitious episode with some laughs, feels, and wigs along the way. Writers Abbi Jacobson and Ilana Glazer and director Lucia Aniello do an episode long riff on the 1998 Gwyneth Paltrow movie Sliding Doors and posit the question, “Were Abbi and Ilana fated to be friends?” The product is part alternative universe, part origin story, and it’s all set in the great year, 2011, when our president was black, and maybe Young Jeezy had a blue Lamborghini. (I can neither confirm nor deny this fact.)  Glazer and Jacobson play with expectations and aren’t afraid to show that before meeting each other that Abbi and Ilana were kinda pathetic.

Jacobson and Glazer run two parallel narratives through “Sliding Doors”: one is that Abbi and Ilana miss their train and end up hanging out all day like a typical episode of Broad City, and another where they make the train and end up off by themselves having a miserable day until the last scene of the episode. In this second narrative, Jacobson and Glazer expose the cracks in Abbi and Ilana’s characters like Abbi not standing up for herself and getting her ponytail snipped off and accidentally setting up Bever’s free-loader arc. (2011 Bevers is quite ripped, however.) And Ilana is just a mess, sleeping with expensive coffee in the bathroom at her barista job, and wandering into a college class where she has a presentation and forgetting what day and time it is, and what the class is. While she makes her walk of a shame to the front (A relatable moment to anyone who is afraid of public speaking, especially when utterly unprepared.), Aniello cuts to her whispering and harassing fellow, nameless students, a visual of foreshadowing about how she treats her co-workers and the unpaid interns in that one episode at Deals Deals Deals.

My favorite parts of “Sliding Doors” were all the various meet-cute moments showing the genuine connection that Abbi and Ilana. And it’s mostly little stuff. They bond over a shared love of pizza, weed, and wanting to be a throuple with the Obamas. Abbi also thinks that Ilana looks better with curly hair than straightened, and Aniello lingers on her unstraightening her hair and creating the signature Ilana ‘do early in the episode. It’s up there with Tony Stark’s first flight in the Mark II armor in Iron Man, or James Bond shooting a gun at the camera in Casino Royale. Abbi and Ilana just vibe and work well together even if Abbi has much more of a filter and is a little less outgoing.

“Sliding Doors” also has a really damn good plot twist for a half hour comedy show, and you almost have to rewatch the episode to get the full context for the real and “fantasy” way that Abbi and Ilana met. Until the surprise, semi-political ending, the fake way that Abbi and Ilana meet plays like a fantasy New York romantic comedy with more weed, bowls, and a burrito bowl devouring played by Jane Krakowski, who is more Professor Trelawney than Long Island Medium. Keeping these Broad City-isms, whether jokes or visual motifs, helps the surprise linger longer.

However, the real meeting between Abbi and Ilana is much messier and kind of random than their epic quest through New York. It nails the weird logistical reality of making friends as an adult when you run into one another at the same bars, shops, or coffee places and eventually add each other on Facebook and maybe even hang out eventually. Aniello, Jacobson, and Glazer also get the immediate chemistry between Abbi and Ilana beginning with their “obviously had a hard day” appearance like Abbi’s “artsty” haircut or Ilana’s baggy white T-shirt she wears because some asshole stole her tank top and then we get the walking, talking, and smoking as their bond slowly begins to form.

Using a complex, yet thoroughly entertaining, interweaving plot structure that would make those cute, breakdancing NYU-Tisch students smile, Lucia Aniello, Abbi Jacobson, and Ilana Glazer tell the origin story of one the best female friendships on TV and basically how Abbi and Ilana were meant to be. Also, 2011 Bevers is quite sexy, and Abbi’s bangs were so cute back in the day.

Verdict: 9.0