The past can be a dangerous place. Certainly, reflecting on the past to better understand the present is a valuable habit of mind. A stroll down memory lane and reminiscing with friends is fine, too, but turning back to the past for long, repeated stretches, revisiting (and inevitably, revising) memories as if they were comfort re-watches, can soon shift the experience from being fun and/or psychologically healthy, to being the place a person visits to forget the present. One moment, they’re woolgathering over an idealized era of their life, and the next, they realize months have slipped past. Indulging in a Rip van Winkle-Lite experience is a tempting, seemingly harmless method of self-soothing, but oblivion is not the province of middle-aged people with to-do lists and responsibilities.
All of which is to say that Libby and Toby have been spending a bit too long wallowing in but not really thinking about their shared and respective pasts, and the strain is showing in their relationships with everyone, including with each other and with Seth. Remember when this series opened and Seth seemed like the immature, ungrounded man-child of the reunited trio? Now he’s the clear-eyed one considering what’s next in his career and preparing to take a thoughtful leap into marriage with Vanessa (who turns out to have not been upset about Seth’s job loss at all). Seth now seems like the one who’s always known and understood himself, who’s also known all along that his friends underestimate him and has been fine with it because who cares? He loves them, he’s enjoying his life, and that’s always been enough. It turns out that having a deeply secure sense of self comes in handy!
Of the trio, Seth is the one the most able to reflect on his past, identify what he’d like to change in his life, and then … do it. Toby finds Seth’s desire to move beyond his current state of total freedom, “to belong to people,†sort of dreadful. Seth’s observation that “there are no unconditional invitations in my life; they all necessitate being wantable, which is not the same as belonging†seems to Toby hopelessly naive. Toby can’t see that by extending his playboy years into his early forties, Seth has 15 more years of maturity over Toby upon getting married. Plus, he’s already pre-sown his wild oats, making him less susceptible to the discontents Toby and Libby have been prey to lately. Whatever happens in his relationship with Vanessa is going to differ significantly from any of Toby’s or Libby’s experiences.
In “Vantablack,†Seth likened Libby’s smoking to a rationale he’s heard about extramarital affairs. The point isn’t betrayal or even the illicit, novel thrills of getting involved with someone who doesn’t know all of one’s foibles but to find and return to the feeling of being one’s most authentic self. (Seth’s take reminded me that he was the one who had a vape pen and weed cartridges couriered to her house after their first reunion with Toby. He pays attention!) Libby’s intense desire to pinpoint where and when she last felt so free and powerful has been driving her to make some choices experts might describe as “misguided,†“harmful,†or even just plain old garden variety “bad.†To what end is Libby pursuing this? Unclear, even to her! Does she want to replicate some of those circumstances in the present? Simply to account for them and make peace with the dual insight that the past is gone, but is also eternally present because she carries it with her wherever she goes?
One of Toby’s challenges — which he is wholly unaware of as a challenge, making it even more difficult to overcome — is his skepticism that therapy would do him any good. To him, it’s just more time spent reviewing time gone by, which can’t help him move forward. All he wants is to get on with his life! Immediately! Toby keeps wanting to find the one thing that will turn everything around for him: a new long-term romantic partner, a custody arrangement that formally acknowledges him as the children’s primary parent, Bubbles the dog, that promotion to being division chief, something. He seems to feel he deserves a shortcut to happiness for being so special. He’s virtuous! Has good values! (Better ones than Rachel, anyway!) He is there for his children and is an excellent physician! Bumping up against the unfairness of having to be ordinary like everyone else brings his worst characteristics to the surface.
The unfair things are piling up pretty badly at the moment. Toby’s liver transplant patient, Karen Cooper, suffers a debilitating and likely fatal complication. He’s mommy-tracked out of the promotion to division head for being great with the patients but unable to put in the extra time the position demands. One of his fellows commits the terrible sin of pursuing a career ambition beyond being an attending physician like Dr. Fleishman. Worst of all, he mistakes the kindness and professional sympathy of another of his fellows for a faint whisper of romantic interest, only to be very firmly and kindly turned down. What can he do in response but joylessly inhale a massive bowl of pasta?
(This paragraph is going to be mostly about disordered eating; scroll ahead to the next paragraph if it’s better for you to do so.) The pasta-inhaling is a rupture of Toby’s oft-referenced, rarely shown, decades-long habit of eating in the most Spartan and least-pleasurable way possible. Food is strictly fuel for him. It’s usually played for laughs — later in this very episode, Seth will remark that he’s going to go find some diet ice for Toby to enjoy — but it’s a carryover from an intense diet regimen he embarked on in his teen years in an effort to make his body more socially acceptable. Being short is one thing, being short and fat is quite another. Was weight loss and its maintenance a solid one thing that turned his entire social life around? Arguably, no, but it lingers.
The contrast between Toby’s self-perception and what we see of his life and interactions with others has been steadily increasing. He thinks he’s suffered the torments of Job at Rachel’s diabolical hands, but the events that are throwing him for such a loop don’t seem terrible on a Biblical scale. In flashbacks to a particularly ghastly dinner party, Rachel is shitty to him, but it seems increasingly plausible that he goads her into it and relishes doing so. Being a good 20 percent nastier to her friends than he has any right or need to be is mortifying to watch, and Rachel is too vicious to resist taking the bait. Yes, her friends are boring and provincial, but is Toby — living in the same neighborhood and sending his children to the same school as these people he loathes — really that much better than they are? Is he more virtuous simply because he isn’t the Fleishman raking in the supersized salary?
Also! Had there been anything preventing Toby from making other friends outside of Rachel’s orbit? Having friends you love is an excellent bulwark against yielding to the temptation to be cruel out loud in a social context that asks only for you to be bland. Save up your zingers and text them to your actual friends later! The bar is so low! And as we’ve been seeing, Toby already has at least two other really good friends who he had been ignoring for years. All of this seems like fertile ground for him to cover in therapy, which he flatly refuses to do.
These many messy elements come to a head for Toby, Seth, and Libby at an annual reunion of people who went on the same study-abroad trip to Israel. Oh, hey, it’s an event arranged to provide opportunities to reminisce and reconnect with people from the past! Libby declares it her favorite night of the year, but that enthusiasm doesn’t last. It turns out that a slightly boozed-up (and slightly high?) Libby is a filter-free Libby who sends an angry, disbelieving Adam home without batting an eye, then turns on a dime to be cruelly dismissive of Seth and harsh (but fair; Seth agrees) to Toby. What do they know about her marriage? Or about anything at all? Toby only ever talks about himself, and Seth is still a man-child! Lizzy Caplan’s work in this episode is stellar, a rich portrayal of a very thoughtful person flailing around and thoughtlessly hurting the people she loves most. Okay, so. Their friendships are rekindled, and their honeymoon period concluded: now what?
“Now what†is Libby sharing an Uber with Toby in angry silence and then delivering a self-lacerating monologue about the paradox of getting everything she ever wanted only to realize that she can’t tolerate losing the feeling of longing that comes with wanting something, and wouldn’t you just know that as she’s baring her soul, Toby falls asleep. Ugh. Exhausted, so lonely it hurts, Libby does the same, and then she doesn’t go home the next morning. She doesn’t even text or call Adam, rationalizing her radio silence as the only logical response to knowing how badly she’s screwed up. (Stop me if you think that you’ve heard this one before.) She revisits some haunts and small rebellions of her youth — an indie movie theater, her old apartment building, the editor she had an affair with — eventually finding herself sitting on a park bench, listening to Aimee Mann’s gut-wrenching “Wise Up,†and looking at the person on the bench across from her. As she contemplates the new understanding that without even knowing it, she had surrendered the power of a life free from obligations in favor of a life of safety, she realizes that the person on the opposite bench is Rachel Fleishman.
Just One Tchotchke This Week
• The feeling Libby is talking about while Toby is falling asleep is saudade, a Portuguese word that describes a sort of pleasurable melancholy, knowingly longing for something that one may never have or which may not exist anymore. Her version of it is on the more agonizing side of saudade, but I hope she’ll figure out a way to let it mellow and be something she can live with.