Writer Lisa McQuillan (Blackish) and director Abbi Jacobson spin shit (Aka the most used word in this episode) in metaphorical gold in “SheWork and Shit Bucket” an episode that turns poop jokes and the running gag of Ilana being unable to find a job into a sharp satire of gentrification and technocracy. The episode splits Abbi and Ilana up for the most part as Abbi tries to improve the plumbing in her apartment building, and Ilana uses free charging ports, trash, and nicotine addictions to create SheWork, which is like Elon Musk’s Hyperloop for co-working spaces.

Building off last week’s episode’s barbs about social media stories and how they shape every day experience, McQuillan and Jacobson continue to show that Broad City’s final season is big picture oriented and more than two girls having shenanigans in New York City while still building off jokes from previous seasons and the chemistry between Jacobson and Ilana Glazer. “She Work and “Shit Bucket”‘s tech satire begins in the unlikely way that is Ilana applying for an office manager job at WeWork, a co-working office space that offers great “millennial friendly” perks like free snacks and beer.

But they’re actually trying to get her to buy office space, and she ends up on the street charging her dead phone on one of New York’s free charger’s station. However, a chance meeting with her old temp agency boss Linda Lodi (Rachel Dratch), who has a smoking habit turns into her arranging old New York street junk into a smoking friendly workspace for the price of 50 cents a minute. She’s basically doing what the tech bros are doing, but outside and with more cigarette smoke and transforms a free or inexpensive service (Chargers on the street) into a moneymaking scheme a la HyperLoops or that bus thing that Lyft and/or Uber were going to do. She calls her start-up “SheWork” to add a veneer of white feminism to it and then still ends up selling the business to WeWork for $500, and they end up stealing her money. Guess, there’s still money in the tobacco industry.

Unlike a show, like the excellent Silicon Valley, which comes at the tech sector from a male, insider POV, Lisa McQuillan takes an intersectional feminist perspective of start ups, and how women are often undermined and minimized in them. However, she also turns the tables and shows that the lure of making a profit off something that was previously given away for free or a very low cost crosses gender boundaries. She and Abbi Jacobson take a stab at some big issues in hypercapitalist American society, but with Ilana running around and picking up random odds and ends in a crop top and sketch comedy Dratch just reacting to the strangeness around her in a more extreme, open air version of her previous role as the MoneyPenny of temp agencies.

Abbi’s storyline in which she gets all gentrifying imperialist faux woke on her Latino landlord Fernando (Nelson Ascensio) starts as a bunch of poop jokes and an opportunity for Jacobson to do a highly choreographed high five/dance thing with her character’s favorite Bed, Bath, and Beyond employee. However, it turns into a critique of the kind of activism that is actually just code for gentrification. In campaigning for better plumbing so she can flush paper down the toilet, Abbi ends up losing Fernando’s job, raising rent, and being very problematic along the way.

McQuillan’s writing for Abbi is either very broad or quite subtle. For example, Abbi calls herself the “Rosa Parks of poop” as well as the “Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of Astoria” although Ocasio-Cortez does, in fact, represent Astoria, Queens in Congress. These two lines show that Abbi is the heiress of a long line of white women, who take credit for what activists of color have done, and McQuillan boldly doesn’t give her a happy ending, but a more sinister one using her apartment building as a microcosm of how gentrification has made New York City, especially Brooklyn and Queens, unlivable and displaced the immigrants and children of immigrants who made their home there. But there’s also a funny joke about how everyone in the building know that Abbi pegged the late, great written out of the show Jeremy.

Although Lisa McQuillan and Abbi Jacobson riff off old Broad City jokes (and songs; “I Shit” becomes “She Work”), they aren’t content to retread old plots as “SheWork and Shit Bucket” is an episode that is both socially responsible, madly hilarious, and shows that both Abbi and Ilana need to check their privilege and not be seduced by exploitative capitalism.

Overall Verdict: 8.7