Summary
Stick relies on expository dialogue and predictable drama in Episode 4, which features no golf at all, and it feels like the show has made a fundamental miscalculation about whether we’d care enough to tolerate an episode like this so early.
I caught myself thinking during Episode 4 that Stick has made a pretty fundamental miscalculation. It expects us to care much more than we do. Thanks to the breezy episode runtimes and the deliberately comfortable and overly familiar vibe and structure cribbed from similar Apple TV+ hits like Ted Lasso and Shrinking, we haven’t spent enough time with these characters, or learned enough about them, for an episode like “Zero Sum Game” to work. Unless the appeal of Owen Wilson chasing after an increasingly disinterested Santi while doing quintessential Owen Wilson things is enough to keep you involved, I’m not sure this show is offering enough else that will.
Basically a half-hour string of strained conversations, this episode finds Pryce trying to get Santi to listen to him for long enough to hear that he still has some work to do if he wants to be a professional golfer. The lesson doesn’t take for a few reasons, the biggest one being Zero. Having already convinced Santi in the three-part premiere that Pryce is exploiting Santi’s talents to line his own pockets, Santi has decided that he can win every tournament he enters without any coaching whatsoever.
We already know he’s wrong, so his refusal to play along makes Santi fundamentally unlikeable, and that’s to say nothing of Zero. This character needs some development urgently. I really like Lilli Kay, but what she’s being asked to play here is just a bundle of Gen Z and social activism cliches – she introduces herself with her pronouns, doesn’t eat meat, and immediately intimates that Pryce is planning to abuse her when he tries to speak to her privately – without any real meat on the bones of the caricature.
And yet Santi is already helplessly head-over-heels in love with her, to the extent that she’s the only person – including his own mother – that he’ll listen to. Episode 4 of Stick is largely about Pryce realizing this and coming up with an outside-the-box solution for it, which is to pay Zero – or promise to pay her, at least – to be Santi’s caddy and relay the right coaching to him in a way that he’ll actually accept.
Lilli Kay in Stick | Image via Apple TV+
This isn’t a fundamentally terrible idea, despite how obviously it’ll backfire in some manner, but the fact that Zero is swayed by the promise of payment and Pryce’s Ryder Cup ring as collateral, and not because of her affection for Santi, suggests that all her anti-capitalist campaigning and performative mothering of him is a bit of a smokescreen for someone more self-serving. This is good. But based on how Stick has proceeded thus far, I’m not confident that it even realizes Zero is being a hypocrite here, so I can’t quite trust it to unpack how this deception – and it is a deception; her accepting the position in front of Santi is a big song and dance performance – will affect Santi when it’s revealed.
And it’s becoming really difficult to get on board with Santi. The ease with which Zero has completely altered his worldview is faintly preposterous, however much we know that young boys are liable to do virtually anything to impress girls they like. Even when Pryce is able to get a moment with him, Santi’s ultimate conclusion is that he’s so good at golf that he’ll simply play his way and win everything, and as with Zero, I’m not completely confident that the show realizes he’s misguided here. Because it hasn’t laid any groundwork around Pryce’s own golfing ability, it’s tough for us to buy into how much he has to offer Santi. An offhanded comment about how many golfing titles he won as an amateur – twice the number Santi was bragging about as justification for not needing him – is the only reminder that he was ever any good.
The real shame of Stick Episode 4, though, is that it relies too heavily on expository dialogue. The truth about what happened to Pryce’s son, Jett – he tragically died from cancer when he was just four years old – is relayed to Elena by Mitts, and Timothy Olyphant’s Clark Ross is introduced the same way. Mariana Treviño does a very admirable job of trying to sell the emotional impact of the Jett revelation, but it’s just the wrong context for something that serious and integral to Pryce’s character to be shared.
We’ll be back to some actual golfing in the next episode, I expect, and one can only hope that the show finds its footing a little more on the course, since as a conversational drama it’s coming in noticeably under par.
