Ramy has always toed the line between drama and comedy, and while “Merchants in Medina†was no different, it takes what’s perhaps an even more extreme turn into drama by the end while still maintaining a sense of humor. For the first time in several episodes, we’re focused primarily on Ramy and not his family, and we’re starting to see his downward spiral.
We begin with what seems to be an anti-drug commercial but then ends up being some kind of bizarre intro video for Sheikh Abu Bakr, the keynote speaker at the New Jersey Muslim Conference of America. The convention feels a lot like an evangelical gathering similar in tone to what we’ve seen on HBO’s megachurch spoof, The Righteous Gemstones.
The Sheikh comes out onto the stage — a white guy in ripped white skinny jeans. He’s hyping up the crowd like some cult leader who’s trying to make Islam look cool to the youth, but really he’s just peddling his brand of boxed water and some new Islamic donation app he invented.
“The Quran is the original blockchain,†he says, whatever that means.
But the presentation only gets better as the Halal Brothers, two corny-looking Arab guys dressed like parodies of early 2000s rappers, take the stage as an air-horn sound effect bellows through the room. The singers perform a song about abstinence and how a man and a woman are never alone. God or the devil are with them always.
“There’s always a third,†they belt out.
It’s news to me that God is down to be a third.
The conference is taking place at the same mall where Uncle Naseem and Ramy run their separate jewelry businesses. And it turns out Zainab is also at the convention, representing the Sufi Center of North Jersey, as Ramy watches her speech from afar. Apparently, the Center accepted a donation from an individual whose funds are under investigation, so now they’re under investigation as well. It seems like Ramy’s one good deed in season two — acquiring a donation from a rich Emirati man who drinks Mia Khalifa’s breast milk — has put the Center at risk. Throughout the series, every time Ramy tries to do anything good, it backfires, but maybe it’s because his intentions are never really good. Everything he does is for himself. The only reason he accompanied Zainab to get the donation that day was so that he could get into her father’s good graces.
But now, at this convention, Ramy has business to do. That’s the only reason he’s even there, since we know he hasn’t really been on his faith. He pays a visit to Sheikh Abu Bakr in his dressing room to give him a gold chain with “Allah†written in Arabic. The sheikh knows why Ramy is really there, though. After all, Ramy never has purely good intentions. The two agree to an Instagram promotion for Maktoub, with the sheikh getting a percentage of sales.
“Look at us, negotiating like a couple of merchants of Medina,†says the sheikh.
To seal the deal, the sheikh wants Ramy to pray with him on Instagram Live, and Ramy is immediately uncomfortable. He doesn’t pray anymore, not since he’s been questioning his beliefs. His discomfort makes sense, and I imagine that to him, it feels worse to pray sacrilegiously than to not pray at all. A part of Ramy still respects his upbringing, and praying without belief is almost like making a mockery of it. But they’re on live, so Ramy has to play along. The Sheikh promotes the store and asks about the source of the jewels. Ramy hesitates, not wanting to say Israel, and simply says they’re from the Middle East.
Zainab, meanwhile, is watching Ramy on Instagram Live on her phone when Naseem walks up to apologize about what Ramy did to her, even though Ramy never told the family what happened. He takes Zainab aside and says he’s been feeling a lot of anger and needs someone to talk to. He wants a curse lifted, and he thinks her dad can help. But, her dad is off the grid right now, traveling abroad on a spiritual journey.
“Come on, Zainab,†says Naseem. “We’re on the same side. Ramy is the devil.â€
But Zainab doesn’t want anything to do with Ramy’s family. When Ramy tries to find her at the Sufi Center table, she’s already left. It’s interesting to see that despite his phone conversation with Zainab’s friend in an earlier episode, Ramy still isn’t respecting her wishes. He wants to apologize, but I wonder if that apology is really for her or if it’s to clear his own conscience. Ramy thinks he’s doing good, but really he’s continuing on the same path he’s always been on, only thinking about himself. And then, just seconds later, he’s directly faced with the consequences of his past actions. Ramy turns and sees a poster at another table of a young boy with the words “Free Khaled†written across the top. It’s the boy that the IDF arrested because of him. He was never freed, despite Ayala’s promises.
This moment created a huge turning point in both the episode and the season as a whole. Of all the hurt he’s caused for other people, this is by far the worst thing that’s happened. His words and choices led to the imprisonment of a young boy by the Israeli army. We lose the element of comedy here, and even though Ramy often deals with serious topics, the episode starts to feel different after this moment. The show does a great job, though, of introducing this tone switch. It’s a little bit jarring at first, but intentionally so, as we end up trapped with Ramy while he plummets toward rock bottom.
He quickly calls Ayala and leaves a message, saying it isn’t about work, and she needs to call him back. From there, he heads over to the “rub and tug†massage parlor, and as he arrives, the woman he got last time is leaving. He asks her to hang out with him, though, and says he’ll pay her “very extra,†so she agrees and goes home with him.
Back at his apartment, he asks if she’ll hit him. The scene doesn’t come across as some fun kink, though. Instead, it’s just really sad. It’s as if Ramy wants to be punished for everything he’s done. He wants to feel pain because he thinks he deserves it, and maybe he does.
The woman gives Ramy a pill for “stress,†and he takes it, again going against his beliefs. Remember, in season one, he wouldn’t take Molly from Sarah. Then, in a bizarre and stressful sequence, the two of them sit in bed smoking cigarettes and watching old clips of George W. Bush, as snippets of conversation from earlier in the episode play over the scene. They do coke together, and the background sounds of the episode grow louder and louder, playing the Bush clips one after another, as the scene is spliced together to mirror Ramy’s stress and his high. The scene is difficult to make sense of. We see that Ramy is spiraling, doing things he never would have done in the past, but the clips of Bush are especially curious. In season one, the show did an episode on 9/11, with young Ramy experiencing racism from his friends and classmates and thinking that Bin Laden was his uncle. The clips of Bush feel connected to that for obvious reasons, but they also feel sinister, especially with the way the scene is spliced together.
In the next scene, Zainab is at home with another woman from the Sufi Center, her night deeply contrasting with Ramy’s. The woman tells her she should have spoken to Ramy and can’t let this hang over her forever. A moment later, in a shocking reveal, a baby starts crying.
Zainab has a baby, which means Ramy is a father and doesn’t know it.
The next morning, Ramy is woken up from a call by Mo, who wants someone to play PS5 with at 5 a.m. The woman from the night before is in bed with Ramy, but she gets up and starts yelling. Ramy’s dog Boomer got into the coke, which they left out on the table, and she isn’t breathing. The episode ends with Ramy trying to give Boomer some water, which they poured into the woman’s high heels, but he’s too late. As he looks back up, there’s true despair in his eyes.
There’s Always a Third
• Ramy was tasked with taking care of Boomer after her original owner, Dennis, went to jail. Zainab’s father and Ramy’s former mentor, Sheikh Malik, told Ramy that if he could be more like Boomer, he’d be on the right path.
• When Zainab is talking to Naseem, she tells him that she and her dad aren’t speaking because of some unknown disagreement. After the baby reveal, I wonder if that disagreement is her choice to have the baby.
• The post-credits sequence is a short music video of the Halal Brothers filming with the cool guy Sheikh, reminding us that “there’s always a third.â€
• After the convention, Ramy and Yuval sit in the car together, and Yuval confesses that he’s a recovering sex addict. Yuval decides to leave the jewelry business after spending the day among Muslims. He says he loved the sense of community, and it reminded him of Shabbat, but he now feels that the work he and Ramy are doing is immoral. At first, he thought Jews and Muslims working together and searching for God would be good, but they’re so caught up in the money that he has to get out of the business. He’s sorry to Ramy for getting him involved in the first place. But if we remember from episode one, the Diamond Club is like the mob. And they’ve already cut off one of Yuval’s fingers. Ramy says Salim and Ayala will “lose their shit†because Yuval still has jewelry to sell and needs to get the money by the weekend. But Yuval can’t be convinced. He’s leaving the business.
Correction: An earlier version of this recap occasionally misspelled