Summary
“No Baby” grapples with the revelation of the previous episode while Paul and Ally also make a discovery about Luke.
This recap of Breeders season 2, episode 5, “No Baby”, contains spoilers.
You’ll recall that in the first couple of episodes of this season of Breeders, Luke was diagnosed with anxiety, something I’d forgotten until the opening moments of “No Baby” after seeing how well he got on in “No Faith” with becoming a vegan. This week’s title is, obviously, also a reference to that episode’s last-minute cliffhanger of Ally being pregnant, and it finds her fretting about how to tell Paul, with flashbacks to her telling him about being pregnant with Ava to justify her hesitation. He didn’t take it well, and on top of the stress of growing a human being inside her, Ally also had to deal with the child’s father treating news of its existence as the worst news ever.
Luke’s anxiety comes up because at the start of “No Baby” he’s being dropped off at his friend Leo’s very nice house for a party; later, Paul gets a call from Leo’s mum claiming that Luke was smoking in the gazebo, but he claims to have just been outside because he had a bit of a panic attack, and it was the other kids who were smoking. This is plenty for Paul to worry about since he also figures out on his own that Ally is pregnant, and Ava overhears a discussion they’re having about her previous pregnancy experiences, so it all gets pretty complicated pretty quickly.
Ally takes Ava out in Breeders season 2, episode 5, in part as an apology for not paying her much attention lately, but it’s a good opportunity for Ava to apologize for being a little vampire that sucked the life out of her when she was born — that’s what she overheard Ally saying — and to give her mum some warnings about the risks of geriatric pregnancy. I’m not entirely sure I buy that any ten-year-old would reel off potential outcomes of having a baby over the age of 35, or that the same kid would have a pre-prepared list of their own baby names, but it’s a minor quibble.
Elsewhere in “No Baby”, Paul finds a packet of cigarettes in Luke’s bag, proving his earlier story false, and he — despite the hypocrisy of being a smoker himself, which he acknowledges — goes ballistic. It’s the lying, he insists, that truly riles him, but it’s also the fact that Luke used his anxiety at least in part as a cover and then an excuse. Does smoking really calm Luke down, or does it just, as Paul claims, calm down the jitters he gets from not smoking? Would Luke necessarily be able to tell?
Speaking of not being able to tell, it turns out in Breeders season 2, episode 5 that Ally isn’t pregnant after all — she’s perimenopausal, entering the transition into menopause, which has the exact same symptoms as pregnancy but, I suppose rather cruelly, for exactly the opposite reason. Ally’s body wasn’t letting her know that she’s growing a new life inside her, but that she probably can’t grow a new life inside her. It’s a morbid note to end on, with both Paul and Ally deciding that while it’s probably a relief, it’s also pretty sad. The fact that they have this conversation while smoking and also lecturing Luke about not smoking only goes to show that emotions are pretty complicated, contradictory, and not entirely fair.
