"Fantasmas": Is Julio gay? What about the alien muppet? The women dressed as drag queens? The letter Q?

 

Hulu wants me to celebrate Pride with Fantasmas, Ghosts.  The first episode is entitled "Cookies and Spaghetti."

Scene 1:  A boy sleeping, dreaming that he is a wizard trying to get out of a room, but all the entrances are blocked.  I'm coming out.  I want the world to know, got to let it show. 

Next dream: a crayon factory, where he tells the board that he wants to create a clear crayon.  They scoff: there's no such color. But he insists: not everyone plays by the rules of the rainbow.  Some things are different.  You're gay, I get it.

He wants to call his new clear color fantasmas, but they insist on a singular fantasma.

Scene 2:  I think this is real life.  The boy, Julio, gets into the swishy Chester's uber.  Sorry, Chester's alternative to Uber.  He has his own app.  

Chester tells him that the tv must remain on at all times, and it must play Melf, about a cuddly alien living with a human family.  One of the dads looks like Julio in drag, but they appear to be played by actress Sunita Mani.  On tv, Melf states that he loves cookies and spaghetti, thus explaining the title. Maybe another dream after all?

In the next scene, the wife almost catches the husband, played by Paul Dano, making out with Melf.  They have to be more careful.  Melf insists that he tell the wife about their affair.  

Scene with the husband leaving the wife for Melf, with a deluge of newspaper headlines: "Man leaves wife for alien"; "Children left without a father!"

Scene 3:  Julio awakens, having apparently dreamed the Melf plot arc,   His assistant, a small robot named Bibi, gets into the car.  He asks for tomorrow off to get his teeth cleaned, but Julio points out that he doesn't have teeth.

Bibi shows him some letters from the landlord, marked "Urgent!"  But Julio runs away, into a dream shop, where he buys an oyster earring, even though it's cursed.  

Scene 4: Cut to a nightclub, where a man and a woman or a drag queen are praising his earring. "This is going to be huge for you!" the woman or drag queen exclaims.  "Don't lose it!"  But Julio loses it!

He wakes up in Chester's uber, with a teacher and the woman/drag queen, Vanesja, with the J silent "like the poisonous flower."  She is his agent, but she doesn't do anything. 

Julio points out the building he's applying to live in.  They all gush -- it's nice!  But did they ask you for proof of existence?  Uh-oh, existential crisis looming.

They are a driver, a teacher, and a talent agent.  But what does Julio do?  He explains that he just Julios.  Actually, he's a consultant, using his awareness of the inner shapes of colors, letters, and numbers, like his development of a clear crayon yesterday.  

Another example:  Q comes too early in the alphabet, killing the mood in the room.  He should go on late, with the avant-garde letters X, Y, and Z.

Cut to Q, played by Steve Buscemi, on stage, singing "You're All Gonna Die" and "Your Zipper is Open, and Your Cock is Hanging Out." 

He's fired, and goes to work in a food court, where O asks him to lose the little stick thing and come to work as his assistant.  He's swamped.  And more of Q's stand-up career.  Z, played by Evan Mock, gets into the act.

Wait -- is this just going to be a lot of surreal sketches, with no plot, just the tiniest of hints that something is wrong in a real life that we never see?  Is Julio in the midst of a psychotic breakdown?  Is he dying, and seeing people from his life in a weird swirl of images?  Maybe Chester is driving him to the afterlife.

I was expecting a story about a gay guy who sees ghosts. I'm out.

Beefcake: None.

Gay Characters: Who the heck knows?

Drag Queens: The three female-presenting characters in the episode look like men in drag, but according to the IMDB they're played by women.

My grade: WTF?