overnights

Master of None Recap: Pasta-bilities

Master of None

Finale
Season 1 Episode 10
Editor’s Rating 4 stars

After hours of couch and sweats, here we are. Dev’s last stand. Everything has been leading up to this: the pasta obsession, Rachel’s creeping dissatisfaction with her life, THE SICKENING.

“Finale†starts with a search for the perfect taco. Dev rides a modern emotional roller coaster — the high of finding the city’s best taco, the fall of having taken so long on Google to find it that the stand in question is out of tacos,  and the lowest low at the bend in the track … having to go for the city’s second-best taco instead.

Things turn darker, as they often do, with a wedding. Weddings either make or break the couples in the pews. In Dev’s case, the confidence of the starring couples’ vows spiral him into a vision of exchanging his own with Rachel. They’re poignant and disappointing, centered around the idea of mating for life with whoever happens to be your partner at the age when we’re supposed to do that. In a later conversation with his dad, Dev lands on the reason for his despair: As his dad puts it, he never could commit. The shadow of the taco looms. What’s a guy always on the hunt for the best taco to do with the disappointments of real life?

At the premiere for The Sickening, another disappointment: Dev’s been cut from the movie. Rachel gets housed at the bar and chews the director out for him. It’s a party foul, and Dev mopes through a homemade pasta dinner at the table in his very nice apartment. He finally tells Rachel she was out of line, and also, should they even be together?

Eventually, the two go their separate ways. Rachel to Japan, to satisfy her otaku high-school self. Dev to Italy, to cooking school. From the start, this was a story about soul mates. Much came in their way: parents, unconscious racism, death. Still, man and pasta prevailed. Reality may erode this love, too — but that’s for season two.

Master of None Recap: Pasta-bilities