Summary
Poppa’s House is a little better in Episode 7 thanks to focusing more on Poppa and Ivy’s relationship and mercifully sidelining Junior. More of this, please!
It took seven weeks, but Poppa’s House finally has a premise I can relate to — Poppa has a bad back. His sciatica has flared up and in Episode 7, fittingly titled “Brokeback”, Junior finds him on the bathroom floor. We’ve all been there! But we don’t all have our useless sons floating around begging us for money while we’re down there.
You’ll recall that the previous episode was about Junior being useless. Why is he always at his father’s house? Why does he never have any money? Why does he never know what he’s doing? None of these questions are satisfactorily answered in “Brokeback”, but that’s okay since the focus rightly shifts back to Poppa and Ivy’s burgeoning romantic relationship as if the previous episode never happened.
One of the gimmicks here is that Junior is waiting on his father hand and foot because he wants a loan. He believes he has lost his wedding ring, so he wants the cash to replace it before Nina finds out. As it happens, Nina took the ring to be cleaned, which she told Junior at the time, but because he never listens she has decided to teach him a lesson by letting him believe he’s lost it. I don’t imagine it’s a lesson he’ll truly learn, since the show hinges on him being a useless child, but you never know.
When Poppa inevitably tries to take the arrangement too far, Ivy takes over. And it’s genuinely striking how much better the show is even when Ivy fulfills the exact same function as Junior. It’s not transactional with her; she cares for Poppa willingly but with the intention of getting him to go to a doctor sooner rather than later since her own brother died by being stubborn in the same way. She cared for him too, and her comfort with it allows Poppa to open up about his own father’s fears of doctors, and how he, too, might have lived longer had he gone to the doctor immediately instead of putting it off for too long.
What’s this? Some actual character depth? Some progress in a relationship that is becoming meaningfully different instead of being held in stasis? See how much better this is? The romantic stuff is still bubbling in the background, too, though in decidedly unromantic fashion, the tension manifests as Poppa having a nightmare about Ivy that riffs on Stephen King’s Misery. But at least he goes to the doctor.
It is Junior who goes with him, to be fair, and it is Junior who gets him to open up just a little about Ivy later. From a jokey perspective, Poppa’s worried about a relationship with Ivy not working out and her taking half of his money. But fundamentally he’s worried about starting another relationship that he’ll inevitably ruin. Of course, Ivy overhears. So, we’re not there yet, but we are getting somewhere.
And by the end of Poppa’s House Episode 7, Poppa’s dreams are a little different. Ivy is still in them, but instead of breaking his ankles with a sledgehammer, she’s leaning in to kiss him during the podcast and he’s waking up next to her in bed. We might be moving towards a development that has been predictable since the beginning, but anything that reduces Junior’s screen time is fine by me.
