I knew that filibuster reform thing was a ruse. After dickering about with a smarmy senator for what seemed like half the episode, the sequence beginning in the White House Situation Room and ending in that meltdown on the yogurt shop steps was one degradation after another for Selina Meyer.

Which is not to say the filibuster thread was out-of-place. It’s precisely the kind of issue an administration seeking to cloister its vice president would assign—dry, procedural, and doomed to whither on the legislative vine. In other words, typical Selina Meyer policy.

HBO/Bill Gray

It felt as though all the buildup last night was happening in the spaces behind Selina. Gary’s continual meltdown from some kind of swamp fever provided Tony Hale with some of the best body-horror comedy we’ve seen in a sitcom since, well, he was playing Buster Bluth. It was zombie-like the way the illness creeped from Senator Doyle’s own sneezing lackey to Gary and finally, to Selina, who suffered the disease’s worst effects only after being chastened out of the White House and shamed by the yogurt proprietors.

Actually, make that “yoghurt.” I’ll just chalk up the “old-fashioned” spelling to Veep‘s British creators. Still, the shop’s proprietors got some of the best lines in their roles as “the other D.C.,” aka our town. “I hope you don’t take this the wrong way but you look like an asshole,” the exasperated yogurt-maker tells Dan after Meyer fails to appear for what seems like several hours. Of course, he does look like an asshole—that’s his entire basis for existence, right down to his assumption that we all like frozen yogurt. (To his credit, there is an abundance of the stuff these days.)

Mike, the “gay Irish fireman” whom the shopkeeper deemed “OK,” had it rough this week. Did the sweat gag last too long?

But at least Selina was held up for weighty reasons for once—the president was suffering some kind of cardiac fit! Julia Louis-Dreyfus’ smirk at the news was almost a little too obvious, but when she arrived at the Situation Room, she was quickly overwhelmed. A more conniving vice president might have foregone the speechifying and half-assed prayer and launched a couple of torpedoes before the president recovered from his heartburn. Leave it to Jonah to offer his services only to return to his typical snootiness as soon as the crisis at the African barbecue was averted.

From there, it was a series of humiliations for Selina. Not only is she escorted from the war room, she bashfully gives back the briefing books and even her pen and is once again faced with an agenda on which yogurt is the most important item. Though I waited the entire episode for Gary to boot all over a conference table—or perhaps the yogurt shop owner’s wheelchair-bound mother—Selina shitting her pants was the inevitable punch line.

On the verbal insult front, there wasn’t anything this week as stellar as the debut’s “redact your fucking face,” though Senator Doyle’s description of his own colleagues was pretty apt. Getting the Senate to pass a filibuster reform bill would be akin to “persuading a guy to fist himself” in any reality.

And we finally saw the fourth estate this week, in the form of a combustible Postie named Leon West. His mistreatment of Dan was a hoot, and certainly the kind of approach one should take when dealing with young, smarmy executive-branch press aides. But the introduction of Leon—the “Beltway Butcher”—begs a few questions. Which Post scribe provided his temperament? And if you were covering a high-profile trip to a yogurt shop, would you see mint as something implying “freshness, trust [and] traditional values”?

And Jon, I know you’re quite keen on Malcolm Tucker’s sign-off of “fuckety-bye” in In the Loop. Was Anna Chlumsky’s exclamation of “fuckety-doo-da, fuckety-yay!” a worthy approximation?