Summary
Continuing a peerless run of form for Shrinking Season 2, Episode 10 is a masterclass in dramedy development and culminates in a one-two punch of emotional damage that hits like a brick.
Watching an episode of Shrinking is hard work, sometimes. Here I was thinking that Episode 10 of Season 2, “Changing Patterns”, was an exclusively positive installment. It was all going so well! It’s Alice’s 18th birthday, she allows Gaby and Liz to throw her something resembling a party, Jimmy gets her the perfect gift — and meets a very nice-looking woman in the process — and everyone seems to be making good progress in their various personal predicaments.
And then ten minutes before the end it delivers such a succession of emotional gut-punches that I was left reeling. Why does it keep doing this?
It’s difficult to overstate how difficult this must be to balance from a writing and character development perspective. There are few times in my extensive history of TV hate-watching that I’ve ever genuinely loved a cast of characters this much, equally across the board. Nowhere is safe. There are happy tears, sad tears, confused tears, and everything in between. Everywhere.
Consider the early scene where Alice tells Paul she thinks she’s through with their therapy sessions. It’s a positive step, it’s good for both of them, and it symbolizes genuine growth. But Paul’s little damp puppy dog eyes make it absolutely crippling. And it unfolds with the audience’s knowledge that at some point — later in this episode, as it turns out — Alice is going to find out what Jimmy said to Louis and it’ll set her several steps back. And it does!
But most of the episode isn’t like this. It’s pretty upbeat, actually, even down to minor stuff like great gags at Elliot’s funeral, Brian interacting with a baby, and Jimmy tracking down a perfect old yellow Mini for Alice’s birthday present. There’s some significance in that — it’s exactly like Tia’s old car. And it’s being sold by Cobie Smulders.
It had never occurred to me until now, but Shrinking Season 2 has done a great job of slipping new characters in, and that trend continues in Episode 10. Think how much Louis has added despite his brief appearances, and how easily Derrick has assimilated into the main group, which is astonishing considering how indescribably annoying he is in Poppa’s House. Cobie Smulders’ Sofi is the same. She and Jimmy have a long, totally uninterrupted conversation where they bond over their dead spouses — hers isn’t actually dead, he just is to her — and it’s effortlessly riveting stuff. I can’t wait for her to turn up again.
Brett Goldstein and Lukita Maxwell in Shrinking | Image via Apple TV+
But what kind of mess will she find when she does? That’s the key question because there are still two episodes left in the season, which means there’s an extraordinary amount of time for things to go horrifically wrong. The one-two punch at the climax of “Changing Patterns” is brutal because it comes right on the back of a couple of really nice (though similarly emotional) moments that already have you reeling.
These two moments are Paul finally plucking up the courage to ask Julia to move in with him, despite the fact she technically already has — Harrison Ford crying got me again — and Liz finally snapping at Derek like usual, which brings tears of happiness to his eyes. For those guys, at least, things are going well. But for Gaby, Jimmy, and Alice, not so much.
Gaby, for instance, inspired by Paul’s bravery, decides to tell her mother that she doesn’t want her to move in with her. And Phyllis doesn’t take it well. Vernee Watson is great here, and I think she has a point, as I’ve mentioned a few times already. While I can see Gaby’s perspective, that’s her mother. And she has elected to let her down right in the midst of the moving process. I can see why Phyllis is annoyed, is all I’m saying.
And the same goes for Alice. While she’s heading out for her birthday in her nice new car, she gets a message from Louis wishing her happy birthday but telling her that it’s best they don’t speak anymore. Sensing something amiss, she immediately goes to see him, and after telling a brutal story about how after the accident he used to sit on the train station bench for hours contemplating throwing himself under a train, he confesses that Jimmy told him never to speak to her again.
Alice is furious, as well she might be. And Jimmy knows he has messed up. It’s going to be really hard for them to recover from this one, and now that Louis has been open about his suicidal ideation, I can’t help but worry that any extent to which he gets caught in the crossfire might tip him over an edge. It really does feel like there’s a tragedy in Shrinking‘s future, and given how emotionally crippling Season 2 has been thus far, I don’t know how well I’m going to be able to deal with it myself.
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