"Can't this have a happy ending for everyone?" I guess it was sort of inevitable that everything Amy believed to be true would wind up in the crapper. Whether it's the Abaddonn expose or her new relationship, it's hard for Amy to see the writing on the wall, even when it's blindingly clear that things are about to fall apart. Watching her for two seasons, it's always been noteworthy that the want to do right is usually a heavier, more satisfying feeling than the one that involves actually doing something. Not just because it's hard work, but because it means facing potential ugliness -- discovering that it wasn't like you imagined, or that you weren't looking for the right things in the first place. As Enlightened's second season reaches its conclusion, here we begin to see all the cracks appearing in Amy's foundation.
Every so often an episode of television makes you rattle and shake in your seat, its depth of feeling so beyond anything you're used to that you feel like you're having an out-of-body experience. Can television really do this to you? Can actors saying lines and characters experiencing heartache really hit you straight at the soul? And then you realize that it totally did, and that this is art. There's a scene here in which Amy has a rapid panic attack in front of her mother, hidden away in a bedroom while her date sits clueless outside. As Amy hyperventilates, Helen stands alert entirely at a loss about how she can help. Amy worsens, and all Helen can think to do is just grip at both of her daughter's shoulders and hold her tight. Falling onto the bed, Helen forces Amy to release into her, and Amy just wells up and breaks down in tears. It's the most vivid and painfully accurate depiction of a complete emotional unraveling that I've ever seen on television.
There's a fantastic scene in Six Feet Under's third season wherein Kathy Bates' jaded middle-aged caretaker encourages Frances Conroy to indulge in some light shoplifting, not so much because it's fun, but more because they may as well. They're women in their fifties that look their age, ignored by so much of society and rendered entirely invisible as a result. They won't get caught, nobody will even notice, so what the hell? It was a moment that Enlightened brought to mind this week, since it focused so tight on a character who has unexpectedly stumbled into the exact same circumstance: Tyler is so invisible as a person that he's practically a ghost.
A moment that really resonated this week was Amy's trip to a party being held by an acclaimed blogger, somebody who started her own corporate revolution from behind her computer screen. Even without the expected anxiety of showing up at a party where you don't know many of the other guests, Amy finds herself struggling to handle how technologically savvy everybody seems to be, how they're talking about things and doing things that have entirely passed by her social radar. She has that hope and determination to eventually understand it all, but it's still a huge gulf.
If The Comfort of Death represented the speedy efficiency that cancellation brings, then Sins of the Fathers is where things start to get a little muddled. In an effort to bring things to a close in time for the series finale, it's not too surprising that the writers are forced to cut corners and make previously ambiguous characters turn specifically in one direction, but the stuff this week with Sasha struggled to make any logical sense. With Victor Shaw seemingly out of the picture, Sasha is adrift on her own quest, but it's a quest that is hard to define. Does she simply want revenge? If so, why pursue it through a third party priest? It's naturally confused as an episode.
Let's talk about pacing. 666 Park Avenue premiered in September a lightweight supernatural thriller with a pulpy, reasonably strong premise. But it quickly became one of those shows that never knew when to pursue or retreat from arc-driven storytelling, ABC presumably wanting a series that could play as a standalone anthology show as well as a serialized drama. Because that always works out. In the end, however, like so many of those hybrid shows, the standalone elements were primarily weak, while the major story arcs were dragged out to such an extent that it became easy to drift away from 666 itself.
It's interesting to see how your reaction to In Treatment can frequently differ from your reaction to other shows, primarily when it comes to character motivation. Almost every patient this show has ever explored has issues rooted in how they were brought up, their parents' neuroses generally invading their own psyches and turning them into these troubled, vulnerable adults. It's a theme repeated constantly. On any other show, the use of the same plot device could frustrate after a while, the writers traveling to the same emotional hub over and over again. But there's a specialness about In Treatment that allows you to forgive that. Because isn't it based so much on truth? I would assume in most cases that the way we were raised had a significant effect on our adult lives and how we conduct ourselves, more so than our environments or our experiences outside of the home. It's such a cliche in itself, but also so horribly real.
There was a simplicity to last week's episodes, events aligning just right in order to allow Paul's patients to open up, or alternatively to allow Paul in. It was a real breakthrough week, but Paul himself had to step over the line more than once to get there, becoming so intimate and personal with his patients that there were few boundaries left anymore. This week was all about the emotional fallout, characters reacting mostly negatively to his sudden need to retreat. Couple that with a weeks' worth of canceled sessions due to his father's death, and bitterness naturally hung over the encounters.
