Well, here we are, at the end of all things. At the end of one thing, anyway, which may turn out to be another thing entirely. Or even several other things. As ever with Fleishman Is in Trouble, it all depends on how you look at it. When I first watched the final episode, I saw three friends clumsily and sincerely make their way back to each other after seeming to write each other off. I saw two spouses going through a rough patch doing the same. I saw a woman who had seemed to be utterly broken return to her partner and children. That was six weeks ago. Rewatching last week, I saw the first two again, but not the third. I’m so curious to know how viewers receive and interpret “The Liver,†both today and down the line, after letting their responses mature (and especially if they have the luxury of rewatching it a few weeks later).
Let’s start with the finale episode title. You may recall that in the premiere episode, Toby mused reverently that the liver is such a forgiving organ, that it heals itself by growing new tissue. Naming the finale “The Liver†is an act of optimism tinged with ambiguity. It suggests that repairing fundamentally healthy relationships is possible (maybe even the norm) and reminds us that future damage necessitating repair is likely when the people in those relationships become aware that they’re capable of fixing what they’ve broken.
Libby’s exercise in self-lacerating storytelling continues, giving us a deeply uncomfortable and moving extended look inside the effects of the summer of 2016 in both her mind and in her relationship with Adam (Josh Radnor, by quick turns frosty, hurt, baffled, forgiving, and always, always trying). It turns out that Toby getting back in touch with her came at a particularly opportune moment: Libby had been feeling alienated from her own existence, chafing at the reality of being a confirmed stay-at-home suburbanite mom without being able to rely on her other, more fundamental identity as a magazine writer to balance it out. You know how a really sweet cake always tastes better with a tart citrus glaze? Same thing here. Libby’s restless, tartly questioning mind hasn’t gotten the memo that she’s living a sweet life, and it’s making her miserable. She can’t stop monologuing at her friends about feminism and what girls and women are allowed to do in our society, an outgrowth of her glum realization that her magazine would never give her the juicy assignments Archer Sylvan lands all the time. Her friends are indulgent, but ultimately they don’t really have time for so much navel-gazing aloud — they need to go home to make dinner.
After bumping into and learning from her friend Michelle that she’s divorcing and moving back to New York after rekindling her relationship with a long-ago boyfriend (“I feel like I’m me againâ€), Libby’s free-floating critique of “The State of Things for Women These Days†coalesces around clean slates. Potential. Possibility! Libby’s hypothesis that she could reclaim a little bit of possibility if she reconnected with her own long-ago boyfriend on Facebook ends swiftly with the realization that, unlike Michelle’s new-old flame, hers is now creepy and gross. Ugh, no thank you! And that’s the day Toby first calls. Maybe the clean slate isn’t about revisiting and reminiscing with an old romantic love at all; maybe it’s about renewing friendships with people who knew you way back when you were full of potential, who can remind you to be that version of yourself.
Throughout the series, it’s become easier to see that Libby — whether she’s aware of it or not — enacts Toby and Rachel’s most objectionable behaviors. She had the freedom to walk away from her magazine because of Adam’s lucrative legal career, and now she resents how small she feels her life has become. Like Rachel, she’s been incommunicado with Adam for days, and when she’s home, she may as well not be because she’s sleeping or vaping the day away while the kids are with their babysitter. Toby and Libby have been genuinely miserable; the difference is that Toby thinks Rachel is entirely to blame for his misery, while Libby knows well that she is the author of her own anguish.
That knowledge doesn’t yield understanding or insight just yet, resulting in a horrible fight with Adam at an otherwise convivial, chill neighborhood backyard barbeque. Conversations that feel too intimate and emotionally raw are such strong moments for Fleishman, and this one gives us the fully fleshed-out view of Adam we’ve been waiting for. He’s every bit as furious with Libby as Toby has been with Rachel, but his anger is rooted in worry and disappointment rather than resentment. What is wrong with her? What is she doing, disappearing for a couple of days with scarcely an explanation? Why can’t she perceive reasonable small talk among suburban parents as an on-ramp to deeper conversation? Doesn’t she know that ambivalence about life choices is a near-universal experience? And finally, he can’t help but notice that Libby barely looks at him these days — is she sleeping with Toby? The only question she can answer satisfactorily is the last.
For all her obsession with and longing for possibility — not to mention her regret at not recognizing what she had when she had it all those years ago — Libby is also aware that possibility is overwhelming and holds no guarantee of happiness. What Libby can’t yet see is that by divorcing, Michelle has shifted her menu of future choices, bringing back some that weren’t on the table during her marriage while simultaneously foreclosing on others. Reclaiming the possibility of moving back to the city with a new-old love requires a rupture; she’s leaving the town where she’s built a life and is adding considerable geographical and scheduling complexity to her child-care arrangements. Good for her for deciding to pursue what she really wants and needs, and also, she’s taking a huge leap of faith that her choices will pan out. Libby plainly knows and understands the uncertainty at work here and seems to think that, via her friendships with Toby and Seth, she can find a way to retrieve some of the potential of her youth with less risk.
At the moment, the person taking a big risk is Seth, whose lovely party becomes a surprise engagement to Vanessa. He’s given up on waiting to understand the world and his place in it before living his life and has decided that with his new mental freedom, he’d rather spend his life trying to be happy. Even hardened cynics like Toby and Libby can’t resist being touched by his optimism and the graciousness he summons to make sure they’re with him in this big moment. They all apologize and make up, testing the altered ground beneath their feet. One last time, Seth hits the nail squarely on the head, remarking that the evening makes him “feel like something’s ending, and I can’t take it all in.†Seth, you’re not alone!
Toby and Libby’s conversation turns to what’s next for her; maybe returning to writing would help her make sense of the paradox of being made miserable by having made so many good choices. She’ll write a book and “be better than Archer — I’ll tell a really good story, but I’ll tell all the other sides of it, too, not just the ones that I like.†Toby doesn’t object to her telling his story, even though he hates it: How does it end? They conjure a potentially happy ending that starts with Libby reckoning with her own life and reconciling with Adam then pivots to conclude with Rachel returning to the bosom of her family. Beyond that, Libby doesn’t have the imagination to say, but even as their eyes fill with tears and their voices catch in their throats, both Libby and Toby can see that it, too, has potential.
Libby’s ability to tolerate the loss of some of life’s possibilities rests on her ability to understand ambiguity as being full of riches. Life is not primarily about either-or choices; it’s messier and harder and sillier and prettier than pure dichotomies will allow. Life’s both-and-ness is all around her. It’s in the local dad band playing “Freebird†without a hint of irony at the neighborhood BBQ, where everyone is pleasantly surprised to see her, welcoming her arrival with a fruity cocktail. It’s coming home to the husband she’s had terrible public arguments with, who doesn’t fully understand why ambivalence is so hard for her, while also making sure she knows what he knows: Yes, she roams farther than is ideal for either of them, but she always comes back. She can roam hither and yon because she has the safety and security of knowing there’s something and someone to come back to, which gives her confidence to roam again, and on and on. To my mind, it’s not at all coincidental that here is where Libby shares that she’s figured out a way to transform her occasionally unhinged melancholy into something less desperate and more hopeful. Yes, our youth and its specific possibilities are getting farther away from us with every passing moment. We’re older than we’ve ever been, which means we’ll never be as young again as we are right now, and now, and now, and now.
Speaking of both then and now, on first viewing, I thought that the final scene was definitive, that Libby had correctly predicted Rachel’s return and that the Fleishmans, having stripped their relationship down to its studs, would see that it has good bones and would give it another shot. On rewatch and then re-rewatch, I thought more about how we only see Rachel in silhouette against the hallway lights as she enters Toby’s darkened apartment. Now I think that scene is Libby at work, drafting and revising every moment she’s awake, testing out her novel’s final scene as she drifts off to sleep at home in New Jersey with Adam. She’s imagining possibilities for Toby and Rachel Fleishman’s story but not choosing one. Not just yet.
Tchotchkes and Things
• Toby: I guess in Seth’s story we’re just the co-stars who help him make this big decision. Me: WOULD WATCH!
• The music cues in this episode are fascinating. The dad band’s cover of “Freebird,†Nicole Atkins’s woozy, bummed-out cover of “Dancing in the Dark,†“California Stars†from Wilco, and Billy Bragg’s album of previously unrecorded Woody Guthrie songs — all of these announce that we are deep into early 40s melancholy dad-band territory. Then, at Seth and Vanessa’s surprise engagement party, the joy is undercut by “Love Is a Losing Game,†by Amy Winehouse. That is a whopper of a choice and is the one hint that the newly affianced couple doesn’t know what may well be coming for them. It’s an impression then softened by the uses of Sade’s “By Your Side†and “Fade Into You,†by Mazzy Star, but if I needed to summarize how ambivalent and ambiguous Fleishman’s view of long-term romantic love is, I’d just play these three songs in a row.
• I’ll bookend my first recap invocation of Nora Ephron by recommending another great storyteller of domestic life among well-heeled Manhattanites, Laurie Colwin, whose novel Family Happiness must be a revered ancestor of Fleishman Is in Trouble.
• Intentional or not, every time I watch the now and now and now and now montage (through tears, of course), I can’t help thinking of the joyful, hopeful, anticipatory ambiguity in Molly Bloom’s final incantation in Ulysses: Yes I said yes I will Yes