In “Welcome to Panquil,†Fleishman Is in Trouble continues to plumb the depths of the existential crisis Toby only intermittently allows himself to acknowledge is happening to him. At the opening, we’re about three days into Rachel’s open-ended absence, and everything is rapidly declining. In a fun-to-watch way!
Not only is Toby growing increasingly reactive to events and uncertainties in his life, he’s struggling to maintain his strict adherence to his moral values regarding work and its remuneration. Over time, these beliefs — including the notion that practicing medicine is its own reward, that he’d never work for Big Pharma — have calcified from being reasonable to unyielding. They fuel his resentment of and disdain for Rachel’s gauche, grasping values (or what he thinks they are).
Toby’s idealism was probably very appealing at the dawn of the Fleishmans’ relationship. Now it’s the core challenge of their marriage, and Toby can’t relinquish or soften it. He has to be better than Rachel; if he isn’t, then their divorce must be his fault, which is simply not possible. They’ll all have to muddle through, somehow, until she gets back, sometime. That somehow entails wheedling a reluctant Mona into relinquishing one of her prized vacation days with her son, arriving home later than agreed upon, and then having the chutzpah to ask if she just happened, maybe, to have made dinner. Oh, dear. It brings me no pleasure to say this, but: Toby Fleishman is a Jewish Prince. An honest-to-god, passive-aggressive, asking-where-the-butter-is Jewish Prince. Poor lamb, he thinks he’s a prince among men (the greatest compliment a Jewish mother-in-law can bestow upon her son-in-law). I’m sorry, buddy, but no.
With no idea when (or if) Rachel will return, and no available babysitter, Toby is in the soup. He can’t tell his children the truth, in part because he can’t tell himself the truth: that he doesn’t have a handle on the situation. That Rachel may be in real trouble, and he hasn’t the first idea of what to do about it. That he needs her just as much as Hannah and Solly do. The kids want their mom, and all three of them desperately need her planning competence. Prior to Rachel’s disappearance, she had a very robust schedule planned for her week off with the kids; she’d coordinated it to overlap with Mona’s vacation, had arranged dinner and an evening at the theatre with Hannah and Lexie, and planned to take the kids to the Hamptons for a week (crucial for Hannah’s increasingly frenzied attempts to tend to her social life — without a phone, no less! — in the free-for-all of a middle-school summer among the well-heeled children of upper Manhattan). And she squeezed in an extra day at the yoga retreat when one became available! Respect!
Back in Toby’s apartment, he’s feeling deflated after having a great day at work and nobody to tell about it. He’s first in line to become the subdivision chief for hepatology. Dang! Mrs. Fleishman the Elder’s son, the doctor! His totally warranted pride in this accomplishment is second, by the faintest whisper, to his vicious pleasure in sticking it to Rachel. In fact, Rachel is the one person he tells about the potential promotion. Or he mentally rehearses telling her, anyway. The confirmation that “success can build, you don’t have to lunge for it, like an animal†is vindication that he was right all along, a pedantic high with a potency unmatched by manmade drugs.
Speaking of manmade drugs, now Toby feels even more right about having rejected a casual offer a couple of years ago to rake in “one mil annually before bonuses†as the head of a newly forming cannabis division at a pharmaceutical company. They’re not planning to get into the medical-marijuana business, mind you. As Sam Rothberg explains before the fireplace in his second home, his company needs an expert M.D. to provide an extra patina of trustworthiness to their marketing efforts dedicated to “debunking myths about alternative therapies.â€
Already feeling insecure and off-kilter in the rarified social world Rachel’s income gives them access to, Toby receives this offer as an affront, rather than the inviting opportunity Sam intended it to be. Rachel is baffled. What’s the matter with him? Doesn’t he want to be able to afford multiple homes, as the Rothbergs do? Doesn’t he want to work more reasonable hours, giving himself more time to spend with Hannah and Solly? And Rachel, for that matter — doesn’t he want to relieve her of some of the burden of being the high earner, so she can work more reasonable hours, too? You’ll be shocked to learn that whether or not Toby wants those things is not nearly as significant as venting his undiluted outrage at being emasculated by the preening and carefree whiskey-sipping bro in whose house he must now spend the next 48 hours. Rachel comments at one point in this argument that Toby is screaming at her, and I hope we’ll revisit this scene later, because the version of it that we see in this episode does not include him screaming.
The storytelling in this episode is all the richer for Rachel being onscreen so much more. With more complex and contradictory memories in play, we can see Toby and Rachel in both fondness and fury. The bad memories are gruesome, revolting. The good ones are lovely, and the sad ones have a confounding beauty. And now they’re all flooding his mind simultaneously, a barrage of feelings too overwhelming to process. Through a spinning-camera montage, we see a wistful progression of memories of all four Fleishmans in the car together, talking, singing, comforting, needling, and eventually sitting in stony silence. All Toby can see is a block-universe-theory version of his marriage: Everything that has or will ever happen in his and Rachel’s relationship is happening concurrently, always.
By this point, Rachel’s lingering absence threatens to knock down the entire structure of their lives. Toby’s inability to manage everyone’s schedules (and maintain the lie that Rachel will be home tomorrow, probably) combines with his insufferable public displays of good-values-driven parenting to add an extra degree of difficulty to everything, for everyone. Maybe nobody else in their milieu cares about public transit and the environment, but Fleishmans ride the bus. (Hannah: “Why can’t we take cabs like normal people?!â€) Perhaps every other 11-year-old of Hannah’s acquaintance already has a phone and apps galore, but Fleishman children don’t receive their own phones until they’re 12. (Hannah, weeks away from her 12th birthday: “Everyone is doing things without me, I’m being left out!!â€) Toby Fleishman would rather virtuously flail around trying to create a disruptive patchwork of child-care arrangements than just send them to day camp and aftercare for an extra week.
And listen, I’m not unsympathetic. I understand the struggles of navigating summertime child care way down in my bones. It’s extortionately expensive, but on the other hand, it’s also totally inadequate at providing all of the hours of child-care coverage most of us need to continue to do our jobs over the 9 to 12 weeks of summer break American kids have. Why would there be convenient, affordable, and comprehensive solutions to near-universal problems?
By the middle of the episode, Toby has impulsively fired the wonderful Mona by text for failing to prevent Solly from almost drowning in internet porn after inquiring if Google could perhaps show him some images of “girl bagina.†(Yes, this is after Toby was late arriving home and inquired about dinner.) He has no idea when Rachel may return, and the kids are close to full mutiny without their promised week in the Hamptons, so he takes them to the Hamptons. And then takes them back home again the following day when Rachel’s house sitter rats him out to the cops, who helpfully inform Mr. Fleishman that since the home now belongs exclusively to Mrs. Fleishman, and she cannot be reached to confirm that his presence is welcome, he has committed some light breaking and entering.
Desperate for a win, Toby buys Hannah’s love by acquiescing to her demand for a phone, and solidifies his hold on Solly’s by taking them out to a lavish breakfast for dinner. Once it occurs to him that sending Solly to overnight camp with Hannah would close his child-care gap, he’s completed a trifecta of throwing money at his problems. He’s always disdained such a course of action; that’s Rachel’s method, not his, and it makes him reflect a little shamefacedly on one of their worst fights, about whether Solly should join Hannah at overnight camp. Before they know it’s happening, the conversation devolves into a competition for the most vicious dig. Feeling bested by Rachel verbally, Toby hurls a piece of raw chicken at her, hitting her laptop instead. That is quite literally disgusting.
As is often the case in such situations, each partner is a little bit right and a little bit wrong, but that chicken-throwing maneuver is unambiguously terrible. How is Rachel supposed to stay married to this disrespectful, petulant guy? And now that they’re getting that divorce — Rachel finally suggests it herself late one evening, and it’s so touching to see them comfort each other — they’re still sleeping together, and Toby “literally can’t stop thinking about her.†Perhaps the shocking news, delivered by the smug, hot yoga moms, that Rachel is not just in town, but napping (!) in the park (!!) this very moment (!!!) will help banish her from his mind?
Tchotchkes:
• The Rothbergs’ Saratoga Springs mansion is named, without a whiff of self-awareness, Paniquil, “the antidepressant that doesn’t interfere with sexual arousal that made [Sam] very rich.†18/10 shameless douchery, no notes!
• Rachel’s napping in the park — her being in the city, but not within her family’s reach — is a little reminiscent of Anne Tyler’s novel Ladder of Years, in which the female protagonist abruptly walks out of her life while on a family vacation.
• Shout-out to app-driven sex partner of the week™ Nahid for her hilarious and increasingly fanciful FaceTime Sex scenarios. The horny building super whose currency of choice is oral; the fighter pilot who can’t focus on Russian bogies without his partner being front and center, as it were, in the cockpit; and the horny space-alien window washer. Ma’am, I salute your creativity and exuberance, long may you flourish!