“Million Dollar Listing” Season 4, episode 6: May the force be with you

The Upper East Side, West Village and Cobble Hill, oh my! Our big three are at all corners of the city this episode selling, selling, selling —properties, themselves, dreams and bisexual fireplaces. Like the superheroes they truly are, they let nothing stop them: not naysaying developers, unrealistic buyers or even New York City traffic.

Onward, on “Million Dollar Listing New York”:

“People who live there want to die there”: Ryan is back with another building to sell out via developer Yvonne and shockingly this time they are simpatico on price. The Upper East Side boutique condo features six floors and four units, including a four-bedroom maisonette with a backyard, a 1,500-square- foot two- bedroom and two duplex units on the upper floors for a total of $16.7 million.

“Close enough but not too close”: Fredrik schools us in the West Village explaining it is one of the oldest areas in Manhattan and because many parts of it are historic, building upwards is prohibited. He’s there to sell a 1860s-era 7,000-square-foot townhome with six bedrooms and a dreamy roof deck. The developers Tom and Jared want $25 million for it but Fredrik advises if they even want $22.5 million they will have to go for over-the-top fixtures. He also airs concerns about its proximity to the MeatPacking District, while the developers feel it is the perfect distance away.

“I’m sitting in the fastest car on mother-[bleep] Planet Earth and can’t move more than five miles per hour!”: An underwear-clad Luis’ alarm malfunctions and he wakes quickly morphing into Alice in Wonderland’s infamous White Rabbit when he realizes he may be late for his long sought-after meeting with the elusive developer Gerard Longo. As he scurries to Brooklyn with less than an hour to get there, we see a rare glimpse of his hair sans product and are surprised to see his resemblance to Donald Trump. Spoiler: You can get off the edge of your seat; he makes it in time, but learns that the developer has an in-house brokerage team that already sold eight of the nine units in the coveted Cobble Hill luxury townhome cluster.

“I give up. I don’t give up”: When Fredrik arrives at his huge open house event for the West Village townhome and realizes the developers have not finalized the finishes, he just can’t even! But true to form he puts on his best “serenity now” face and states, “I am perfect under pressure.” Later he uses old-school viewfinders equipped with renderings of the building to creatively entice buyers saying, “You can sleep in that little machine and live there for $22.5 million.” He also offers us a bit of Freddie wisdom in the episode: While some may put on their figurative thinking caps when faced with a challenge, Fredrik takes off his shoes in order to think clearly. “I always take off my shoes when I think because the shoe is like a helmet on the brain.” Deep!

“I don’t want this to be an exercise in mental masturbation”: Luis, fresh off of paying homage to the White Rabbit and the Donald, now fashions himself Johnny Appleseed explaining that, “I’ve been planting seeds all around. I’m a fucking farmer,” knowing that Gerard will contact him. When Luis is subsequently invited to pitch his marketing plan to Gerard’s team and he begins, “Brooklyn is the New York version of Paris or Italy…” things fall flat. As he digs himself deeper, “Europeans see Brooklyn as the cheaper version of Manhattan,” Gerard calls it an ignorant statement and the developer’s colleague Laura shoots darts out of her eyes at Luis. Still undeterred, Luis suggests creating an event showing Brooklyn as Europe. Laura puts the kibosh on that by creating the world’s most complicated word problem: If “Europeans like Brooklyn because it feels authentic, why make Brooklyn feel like Europe?” which is the equivalent of saying, “If a tree grows in Brooklyn but falls in a forest, will anyone hear it?” Not wanting to be too gimmicky, they settle on Luis’ last idea of corralling New York’s real estate media sweethearts* into a room and convince them all concurrently to write about Cobble Hill. *Cameos by some of NYC real estate’s finest reporters.

“The force is with you”: When Ryan is faced with the same traffic nightmare that Luis did and is late for an important showing of his East End maisonette, he channels Cyrano de Bergerac and has his assistant, RD, don a Bluetooth so he can remotely feed RD love notes to impart to the potential buyer about the unit. When Ryan finally arrives at his open house event he does some showings himself highlighting a “party shower” and calling the gas and wood-burning fireplace “bisexual.” He finds out the maisonette got a full ask-offer, squealing, “Everything I touch turns to awesomeness.”