A quick review of tonight's You're the Worst coming up just as soon as I perfect the bum metaphor…
If last week's episode was a spiritual sequel to the season 2 party episode where Gretchen's depression became overt, “Men Get Strong” felt like an inverse of the that episode and others where Jimmy tried to get through to Gretchen in the midst of her depressive episode – and of the sorts of delayed catharsis stories so many shows do. Gretchen spends the entire half hour struggling to get Jimmy to have an epiphany about his father – not even really because she thinks it's the right thing to do(*), but because she doesn't want him to go on a crying jag during their cruise – and though he seems to come close a few times to a breakthrough,eventually he comes to realize that he's just fine with the loss of a man he'd already essentially lost decades earlier. It's a surprising, and yet very You're the Worst, way to approach the idea, and one that gave both Chris Geere and Aya Cash lots of good material to play, like her broad impression of his father at the English pub, or his near-explosion right before he farts instead of crying.
(*) Though there's definitely some sincerity in there, and in her later reluctant query to a clearly drunk and troubled Edgar about how his day went. But even Gretchen's most altruistic impulses only go so far, and she's relieved when he declines to share with her. (I wouldn't be surprised if an upcoming episode shows Edgar's POV of this story and some others, because he's in a bad place now.)
By making Paul ambulatory and pain-free again, the Lindsay corner of the show is in a healthier place, even though her own situation keeps getting worse, here with her discovering that she has a natural (bordering on supernatural) mothering instinct, even as she begins to understand how little she actually wants to have a child. This was mostly lighter than what was happening in the A-story – and I greatly enjoyed the brief intersection where Gretchen and Jimmy gawked in awe at Lindsay attempting to form a coherent thought – but ended in a much darker place with her rejected pass at the harried father at the baby store. As with Edgar, this seems destined to get a lot worse before it has any hope of getting better, but Becca's dismay over her inferiority to Lindsay, along with Vernon's desperate quest for toilet beer, kept things lively for now.
What did everybody else think? And how did you feel about Killian playing Peggy to Jimmy's Don Draper for a “THAT'S WHAT THE MONEY'S FOR!” homage?