Summary
Stick can’t help but feel a bit rushed in Episode 7, but it also delivers the most emotionally resonant performances and sharp, frank writing, so it all balances out in the end.
Grief isn’t an emotion you feel; it’s a prison you live inside. Sometimes it feels like home. It’s furnished and comfortable, and through the windows, you can see something resembling normality. But sometimes the walls close in and the windows darken, and it’s difficult to see a way out of that crushing cell. You can get stuck there. In Stick, Pryce has been living in that dungeon for years, snatching glimpses of a life he might have lived through the occasional cracks in its foundations. This is why Episode 7, “Dreams Never Remembered”, starts with a ten-minute dream sequence. The unreality is where Pryce lives, the what-ifs and what-might-have-beens his only company.
This entire cold open is wrenchingly sad. It starts like a typical, wistful flashback of Pryce playing with his infant son, Jett. But as each recollection fades into another, and Jett keeps aging, we realize it’s a fantasy. In the previous episode, Pryce lamented missing the mundanity of parenthood: the silly, pointless arguments, the toilets blocked with plastic dinosaurs, the ringside seats to fumbled first dates. That’s what he imagines when he’s at his lowest — unvarnished normality. The life that was stripped from him. Jett leaving for college, and Pryce begging him not to in fear of what’ll become of him in his son’s absence, is utterly brutal, and Owen Wilson sells it with the quivering jaw and soggy eyes of the great actor nobody realized he was.
We know why Pryce is down in the dumps, of course. Santi found out about his arrangement with Zero and walked out of the U.S. Amateur Championships, torpedoing Pryce’s sporting redemption arc and stripping him of the surrogate son he was beginning to bond with on a level much more personal than golfing ability. Now he’s back to square one, professionally and emotionally. That’s why he’s languishing in his imagination.
“Dreams Never Remembered” is essentially that bit in a romantic drama where the lead couple breaks up, usually for contrived reasons, and make their way back together again just in time for the finale. To this end, it’s about the core cast reaching their lowest ebb, sharing harsh truths with one another, and then deciding where they really want to be. On that level, it’s effective — sometimes extremely so. But where mileage may vary is in pacing. Because a whole third of the 30-minute episode is devoted to a cold open set entirely in Pryce’s head, the back half can’t help but feel a little rushed. Given how painful recent events must have been to justify how deeply everyone seems to be affected by them, it’s a little tough to accept that it’d all be resolved so quickly.
But on the plus side, Episode 7 of Stick contains by far the most emotionally resonant performances and frank, purposeful writing. It works initially by pairing the supporting cast off and just letting them converse. Santi and Elena make their way to the airport, and talk about Santi’s future, his past with his father, and his relationship with golf, while Mitts drops Zero off at the bus station while she’s still smarting from the unkind things that Santi said to her in his anger.
Marc Maron in Stick | Image via Apple TV+
Both of these stretches are very good. Mariana Treviño’s emotional turn rivals Wilson’s, and her insistence that Santi’s father loved him in spite of his flaws and his eventual abandonment of them suggests there’s perhaps more to this story still to be revealed. Peter Dager is also very good here, for perhaps the first time bringing a real depth of feeling to what might otherwise be mistaken for teenage tantrums.
But I think I liked Mitts dressing down Zero the most. In that entitled Gen Z way, Zero completely fails to acknowledge any broader context and insists that Zero’s words, especially the ones about her identity, were unforgivably hurtful. It takes Mitts telling her to shut up and listen and giving her some serious home truths about the realities of life to get her to reconsider her stance. And I like this because it makes a lot of Zero’s characterisation retroactively better. All that seemingly performative activist claptrap really was performative. It was a defense mechanism for a lonely person to use against anyone she perceived as a threat. If she could claim victimhood of some kind, she wouldn’t have to reckon with her own feelings and life’s messy realities. She has to realize her own unimportance to find her real value.
Towards the end of Stick Episode 7, Pryce finally catches up with Santi and Elena as they’re boarding a plane back to Indianapolis — again, just like a rom-com! — and tells Santi the truth. The best part of this whole experience wasn’t the golf. It was the pickleball, and Santi (badly) driving the RV, and everyone sitting around and playing games and having fun. It was the connections everyone formed. It was the one thing he craves the most — normality.
Helpfully, since there are still three episodes left, Santi still wants to play golf. But he can’t compete in the U.S. Amateurs, since he walked out. Luckily, thanks to his past performances, he has a zero handicap, making him eligible for a PGA event. All he needs is a sponsor exemption, which is perhaps just as well, since Pryce’s old nemesis, Clark Ross, is hosting the invitational. Even Mitts is excited by the prospect of pulling a fast one over their old rival. But it’ll require the whole gang — including Zero — to be on the same page. After an episode like this, chances are they will be.
