Summary
Episode 5 of Stick is the classic “Oh, I get it now” installment, where all of the groundwork pays off, annoying characters become three-dimensional, and everything starts coming together.
I get it now. Stick has been an incredibly mixed bag so far, with a derivative vibe, two-dimensional characters, and diminishing charms that were really highlighted in a previous episode that didn’t seem to have any idea what it was doing. But Episode 5, “The Birdie Machine”, is surprisingly brilliant. It navigates most of the show’s problems in one swing straight to the green, adding depth and complexity to the cast and deepening their interpersonal dynamics, all while delivering some actual golf action. I genuinely struggle to recall the last time a so-so show won me over this quickly and this completely. I just hope enough of the audience stuck around for long enough to see it.
Take the cold open, for instance. Pryce giving Zero — and thus the audience — a basic golf primer pulls double duty as the first real evidence we’ve seen that Pryce knows what he’s talking about. Zero’s shtick is really tedious here, but it’s treated with so little fanfare that it’s obvious the point is that it’s all performative. Zero’s arc — and Zero gets a lot of necessary focus in this episode — is the Gen Z posturing sloughing away, and an earnest, human character emerging from beneath. And it’s important for us to understand this, since it’s important for us to understand how earnestly she feels trapped in the middle of a situation with no clear indication of whether she’s in the right or the wrong.
That situation is, obviously, being Santi’s caddy. “The Birdie Machine” finds him on the cusp of qualifying for the U.S. Amateur, but he needs to get through a few tournaments, and the only way he’ll do that is if he accepts Pryce’s coaching. Since he’s not inclined to do so, Pryce develops a series of hand signals to relay to Zero what he wants Santi to do, and then it’s her job to surreptitiously convince Santi to play along. Mitts, who isn’t convinced of Zero’s pronouns or her intentions, is adamant that this system is going to backfire eventually, and I’m inclined to agree. But it doesn’t happen here.
Finally, Stick Episode 5 takes us to a golf course. And while I still wouldn’t say the show has done a great job of putting across the sport’s finer points to a casual audience, it doesn’t really matter since the tournaments are just vehicles for characterization. It becomes clear early that Pryce is almost always spot-on with his advice and that Santi is his own worst enemy, constantly wanting to show off and prove a point instead of playing it safe, but Zero is able to rein him in and keep him focused.
Lilli Kay and Peter Dager in Stick | Image via Apple TV+
But it isn’t that easy. Between games, the gang all bond, and in a particularly telling conversation with Elena, Zero realizes that Santi’s relationship with his father was deeply compromised by manipulation around his golf game. She might be a genderqueer anti-capitalist post-colonial feminist — her words, not mine — but fundamentally, she can see that what she’s doing by subtly coaching Santi’s game is not altogether dissimilar from what his father did. And that isn’t a cycle she’s interested in perpetuating.
So, on a crucial hole, Zero indulges Santi’s ego, and he immediately makes a mess of things and slips down the leaderboard. This is especially interesting because it proves Pryce right, even though we know that Zero’s point of view is also very valid. It’s a classic rock and a hard place situation, where Santi genuinely needs the coaching and isn’t inclined to receive it from any other source, but the way he’s being coached is inarguably a betrayal of his trust. It’s obviously all going to come out eventually, but I’m legitimately unsure of which side of the argument the show will come down on. I suppose it depends on Pryce’s underlying motivations, which, as it happens, are also of some concern in “The Birdie Machine”.
Mitts is quietly the MVP of Stick. In Episode 5, he becomes increasingly dismayed by the setup, but mainly because he’s worried about how it will ultimately affect Pryce when it goes wrong. Mitts was there when Pryce’s son, Jett, who coincidentally would have been about Santi’s age by now, died of cancer as a child. He was there when Pryce torpedoed his career, isolated himself, and flirted with suicide. He thinks that Pryce’s newfound dedication to Santi is a misguided effort to reclaim what life denied him, and he’s worried that if it backfires, Pryce won’t be able to come back from it.
This manifests as an argument and then a shoving match that is pretty funny but also quietly moving; two older guys whose best days are behind them, nursing their own traumas — Pryce calls Mitts’ RV his late wife’s sarcophagus — and trying to protect one another from themselves. And I think Mitts is right, for what it’s worth. But seeing the entire gang taking turns driving the RV while Santi racks up qualifying wins is undeniably infectious, and I’m now fully on board with all of them. I can only hope that when it does all inevitably take a turn, all this bonding will be enough for everyone to recover from it.
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