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Ramy Recap: The Lord of the Bling

Season 3 Episode 4 Editor’s Rating4 stars ****

Photo: Jon Pack/Hulu

“Allah … wants to see you shine with the bling,” says Uncle Naseem in his new commercial for Dunya Jewelers. “Let me pregame you for Allah.”

Seconds later, Naseem is on his bed with a younger man (we later find out he’s been meeting young guys on a sugar-baby app) watching the commercial. He’s excited, but the guy he’s with isn’t impressed. So Naseem heads to work frustrated, where Ramy — who now has earrings now, officially certifying his fuckboi status — is behind the counter of Maktoub. Naseem goes over to tell him about the new commercial and ask him to join him over at Dunya Jewelers once again.

“Be my Topo Chico,” says Naseem.

Season three’s fourth installment is all about Ramy’s new life as a Diamond Club jeweler, and it seems like he’s doing pretty well. He doesn’t want to join Naseem again, and he even offers to buy Dunya’s remaining stock so that his uncle can retire and enjoy life, but Naseem is rightfully offended and accuses Ramy of not caring about anyone. The episode also introduces a bizarre cast of characters, leaning into absurdist comedy in ways that aren’t typical for Ramy and end up stealing the show. Despite that, Ramy’s new life as a big-time jewelry dealer is indeed the focus of the episode, and even with all the zany side characters, we still see how deep in the jewelry game Ramy has gotten — and there are hints that this won’t end well for him.

Ramy goes to meet with Salim, who tells Ramy he’s one of them now — better than Yuval, who’s a “dumbass.” Yuval appears to be missing a finger, and Salim says that, in Islam, they would have taken more than just a finger, reinforcing some pretty negative stereotypes. That’s when it becomes clear that Ramy has gotten himself involved with bad people.

We never actually learn why Yuval got his finger cut off. Instead, Yuval tells Ramy he’s back on his faith and offers to take the stone Ramy just bought and get it cut by one of his guys, who can do it that very night. And afterwards, they can head over to a massage parlor for a “rub and tug.”

“You just told me you’re back on your faith,” Ramy says.

“I’m going there specifically because of that,” Yuval insists. “It’s an arrangement between those women and myself because they know that men are meant to sin.” He adds, “I don’t mean to judge, but do you fuck with no rules?”

Ramy declines the rub and tug offer but trusts Yuval to get the stone shaped. Ramy’s choice to leave the stone with Yuval was a little nerve wracking because clearly Yuval messed up somehow. Hid did something to make the Diamond Club — his own family — cut his finger off, and now Ramy was trusting him with a valuable stone. There was no way this would end well. But Ramy is completely unconcerned, continuing to make careless decisions without any thought as to the consequences.

He rushes out to meet Steve and his new girlfriend, Lena, who is none other than Bella Hadid in the guest role we’ve all been waiting for. Lena is obsessed with The Office. And I don’t say that lightly. Literally all she talks about is The Office. She’s somehow a parody of every guy on Hinge. The three of them are at dinner because Lena doesn’t drive, so they had Ramy take them on a date. When we first see Lena, she’s tearing up her bread and rolling the pieces into tiny balls because apparently, that’s how she likes to eat it. And anytime any of them say anything, Lena chimes in with, “That’s what she said.”

How did the lucky couple meet? Well, it was on a Muslim dating app, even though Steve isn’t Muslim. They let anyone on there, he says, and they bonded over their mutual love for The Office. Although Hadid doesn’t have that many lines, she carries the scene, with everything from her body language to her deadpan delivery. When Lena leaves to use the bathroom, Steve takes that opportunity to tell Ramy he’s thinking about proposing, and Ramy immediately discourages it. He points out that Steve doesn’t even know why she doesn’t drive, and he just wants Steve to know everything about her before he gets married.

“You’re the fucking marriage expert,” says Steve.

Touché.

Ramy gets a call from a client and has to leave, but he brings the happy couple with him. Lena sits in the backseat with her headphones on listening to The Office podcast, of course. That’s when things get even weirder. Ramy arrives at the client’s house — a man named Silvak. Inside, a woman is dressed like a cat, wearing a leopard bodysuit, with drawn-on whiskers and a tail, as she paws at a human-sized cat scratcher. A moment later, Silvak emerges. He has pointy elf ears, and he’s just finished implanting the moldavite stone into his forehead like Vision’s Infinity Stone — or, more recently, like Lil Uzi Vert.

After Silvak pays Ramy, he offers to take him to some “influential elves” in midtown so that he can make even more money. Ramy immediately agrees, even though Steve and Lena are waiting to go to the wrestling match that he’d initially said he’d take them to before embarking on this elven side quest. The episode uses a few subtle moments like this to show us that Naseem was right, and Ramy doesn’t care about anyone except himself. We later learn that he hasn’t seen Steve in a year, and on the one night they spend time together, Ramy hauls his friend around the city, forcing him to wait in the car while he conducts business.

In the first episode of this season, I thought Ramy had changed. He was doing better. He was trying to save money for his family. But his family doesn’t even want his money. Ramy is deep in the jewelry game now, chasing after some elves and forsaking his friendships in the process. But, while it’s a bummer to see Ramy this way, the whole situation, mainly due to the bizarre cast of characters, is admittedly very funny.

After stopping for food with the whole crew (Ramy, Steve, Lena, elf, cat), Ramy almost gets into a car accident, and Silvak starts bleeding from his stone. He needs to recalibrate, he says, and when Ramy tries to take him to a hospital, Silvak says he can’t. He’s on a few “lists.” Instead, they go to Ahmed’s house in Jersey, where Ahmed examines the elf, and Ramy insists he can’t remove the stone because it “has to remain intact in order for Silvak to complete his journey.”

Mid-examination, Silvak asks to buy a prayer rug that’s hanging on Ahmed’s wall, but it’s not for sale. It was the first rug Ahmed and his wife prayed on together, back when she wanted kids — a quick dig at Yasmeena for not wanting kids anymore. Silvak says he can get him a child in exchange for the carpet. And right there, even though it’s played off as comedy, we get another sign that Ramy is rolling deep with some shady people. Silvak is not just a weird elf-man if he’s now offering to traffic a child for Ahmed. And, just by bringing him to Ahmed’s house, Ramy is again showing that he doesn’t care about his friends. He’s essentially put Ahmed at risk of losing his medical license.

Lena and Steve, meanwhile, have been waiting in the car this whole time, watching the wrestling match on a phone. They’ve missed the whole thing because of Ramy, and when Steve gets a shout-out at the match, the announcer assumes he must have died because he’s not there in attendance. Steve gets emotional with her about his disability and what people think, and Lena helps him meditate through it. Their meditations end up turning into the two of them “dun da da da da dun”-ing their way through The Office theme song. Somehow, it calms Steve down, though. Maybe they actually are the perfect little weirdo couple. After the last two seasons, this is certainly a refreshing change for Steve, to say the least.

When Ramy walks back to the car, Steve expresses his frustrations with Ramy’s behavior. At that point, we see Lena in the driver’s seat (she can drive?), and she says to Ramy that Steve told her all about him, and she’s team Zainab. Aren’t we all?

They leave Ramy alone on the side of the road, and perhaps realizing that he’s alienated all his friends, he calls Yuval and asks about the massage parlor. Ramy, fueled by a series of bad decisions, is back in his shame spiral, and he winds up at the sketchy parlor as a woman walks out and asks him what he’d like. The end of this episode feels like a turning point for the season. Ramy is finally feeling the consequences of his actions, but instead of dealing with his issues, he’s going back to his old ways, making self-destructive decisions and escaping into sex.

Pre-Gaming for Allah

• In the scene with Naseem and the younger guy watching the commercial in bed, Naseem is sitting on top of the bed with his shoes and his outside clothes on. I know shoes on the bed are common in TV land, but an Arab would NEVER. We don’t wear shoes in the house, and we certainly don’t have shoes on the bed. Did they not have a cultural adviser or something on set to catch that?

• When Lena returns from the bathroom, she says someone was in there on the phone, and it reminded her of Dwight’s office toilet. “That’s crazy. The bathroom reminds you of The Office?” asks Ramy. Steve says it reminds him of The Office, too. A perfect couple.

• I recently learned that moldavite rings were a TikTok trend last year, with the crystal girls swearing up and down about how much it improved their lives. The bit of information makes the episode’s detail about Silvak’s stone being moldavite all the more funny. I immediately pictured the elf-man getting his info from all the TikTok crystal girls.

• When Ahmed takes Ramy aside to ask what’s going on, Ramy defends Silvak and calls him a nice guy “who’s trying to help on the whole kid thing.” Ahmed responds, “I don’t want help from Lord of the Rings.” To that, Ramy says, “Don’t say that, dude. It’s super offensive. That’d be like if someone shouted ‘bin Laden’ at us.” Strange coming from the guy who two episodes ago insulted a woman for being a witch and then punched her boyfriend in the face.

• The Egyptian restaurant they go to in this episode is Zooba, one of my favorite Lower East Side locales.

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