Interior Chinatown – Season 1 Episode 3 Recap & Review

Tech Guy

Episode 3 of  Interior Chinatown opens with Willis finally inside the precinct building. Lana remarks, “Finally made it in,” to which Willis replies, “Guess I look the part.” Lana then shows Willis a file containing pictures of painted faces and a cassette dated the day Willis’ brother went missing. Because Lana has been helping Willis, she misses a briefing and is reprimanded by a superior officer, who threatens to have her transferred if she continues neglecting her duties.

Willis pockets the cassette and takes it home. Upon listening to it, he discovers it’s a recording of his brother’s phone call. In the recording, his brother mentions painted faces, someone following him, and cameras seemingly everywhere. Willis assumes it’s a surveillance tape and returns to the office, bribing officers with food to gain access to the evidence room.

However, instead of finding clear answers, he discovers an overwhelming number of boxes to sift through for clues about his brother’s disappearance. Determined, Willis decides to keep returning with food daily at lunchtime to continue his search. Meanwhile, Lana assists Green and Turner with yet another case.

Things take a turn when the evidence boxes are destroyed, leaving Willis with nothing to search. He soon learns there are digital records managed by the precinct’s “tech guy,” a stereotypical, invisible geeky character. The officers, now friendly with Willis, help him become the new “tech guy” by gaining control of the original tech guy’s glasses. Once Willis dons the glasses, he transforms into someone entirely different – the tech guy.

Elsewhere, Fatty continues yelling at white customers who order “orange chicken,” while Willis’ mother earns her real estate license. She successfully brokers the sale of the laundromat property and gains the approval of a seasoned realtor, Betty.

The Episode Review

As with earlier episodes, the show satirizes Hollywood stereotypes, with the “tech guy” being yet another nameless, invisible figure, typically of South Asian descent. The stereotype perpetuates the idea that anyone can be a tech guy as long as they’re Asian and wear geeky-looking glasses.

The episode also employs metafictional elements, such as Lana’s comment, “New case, new day,” to explain how Willis leaves the restaurant at night yet enters the precinct office in daylight. This highlights how diurnal changes in the world of a police procedural are dictated by the progression of a new case rather than by nature itself.

These hints lead viewers to question whether there’s any real mystery behind Willis’ brother’s disappearance. The details Willis hears in the recording—mentions of cameras, being watched, and painted faces—seem more like metafictional aspects of Interior Chinatown itself.

As the characters exist within the fictional police procedural Black and White, the cameras and the figure watching Willis’ brother symbolize the audience of the procedural show. Perhaps, there’s no mystery at all and that’s what makes it tedious to follow the show without a strong plot driving the events.