Summary
Platonic Season 2 takes some improbable turns in a finale that finds Will and Sylvia further apart than ever, then, predictably, right back together again — arguably where they started.
I can’t help but think that Sylvia and Will aren’t very good for each other. The point of Platonic is supposed to be the opposite, even though Season 2 has reinforced my theory constantly, and its ending in Episode 10 is tinged with the possibility of potential calamity (and, of course, a third season). I just can’t escape the notion that Will and Sylvia seem to do better in their personal and professional lives when they aren’t on speaking terms, and I really don’t think that’s supposed to be the takeaway.
But if nothing else, this show has proved that, no matter how bad the show around them might get, Will and Sylvia will always end up coming back together one way or another. “Brett Coyote’s Last Stand” pushes them further apart than ever, but it doesn’t take. Their perfunctory reconciliation immediately precedes the biggest gamble they’ve made, and it’s almost like they’ve both forgotten everything that happened in the interim. Will they ever learn? I suspect not.
The Grass Isn’t Always Greener
At the start of this finale, Sylvia is doing pretty well for herself. She’s the in-house party planner for Cabo Carrie’s production company. The only issue is that the travel demands are keeping her away from her kids, and she’s deeply unhappy. Going corporate wasn’t everything it was cracked up to be, but with Charlie having quit his job to be a novelist, she didn’t have much of a choice.
Things are going less well for Will, who’s still living with Katie. She’s mostly using him for grunt work — including unceremoniously dumping her mother in an assisted living facility — and is trying to get rid of him, which she eventually manages to do by sleeping with him and pretending to be clingy. Will moves in with Reggie and Omar, gets addicted to Celsius — it’s clinically proven to function — and hinges his future on a pop-up for his “Shitty Little Bar”.
This entails Will moving all of his brewing equipment from Sylvia’s backyard. She tries to help, despite not having addressed the small matter of him having been the one to tell Charlie to quit his job, and it all predictably goes wrong. Sylvia and the garden end up covered in beer, and the two of them have a nasty argument in which they both blame each other for all of their respective problems. The fact that this so closely resembles a break-up should be pretty compelling evidence that their lives are a bit too intertwined.
Reconciliation
Sylvia still isn’t on the best of terms with Charlie either. His writer’s block is delaying his efforts to finish the Brett Coyote novel, as is the fact that working from home has led him to masturbate constantly. But the two of them manage to reconcile in unlikely circumstances — the sale of their old minivan, which is teeming with old toys and memories of their life spent together bringing up their kids.
This I like. The more I think about it, the more I think Platonic probably works best as a slightly silly drama than as a full-on comedy, especially since the jokes always seem to revolve around the same two subjects (Will is an idiot, Sylvia is insecure). Sylvia and Charlie’s relationship really works, and yet Sylvia and Will’s relationship doesn’t, at least not as well. Their inevitable reconciliation feels totally inorganic. Will’s pop-up is an improbable success — despite the fact that he left Sylvia’s house with no beer — leading to him getting Shitty Little Bar off the ground after all, but he’s slapped with a noncompete from Johnny66, leading him to break down on Sylvia’s doorstep when he goes to pick up the mail.
Sylvia can’t help but support him, which I get. But the speed with which they forget about all of their issues is a bit ridiculous. Even after making up with Charlie, Sylvia is still judgmental about his book, and Charlie knows he needs to go back to work and let his career as an author be more of a hobby. That’s an imperfect but understandable outcome. Sylvia and Will are right back where they started.
New Business Partners
Sylvia’s advice to Will is to try and talk Jenna out of the noncompete, so she drives him to Johnny66’s offices so he can do just that. He marches into her office, and then scuttles back to the car to reveal that they had sex and she told him to leave. So, nothing is resolved, but there is a funny joke calling back to Jenna’s weird sexual proclivities, which I suppose is just as well.
In case it wasn’t already obvious where all this is going, it quickly becomes so when Will and Sylvia return to her place for a live reading of Charlie’s novel following his having it self-published. Charlie and Stewart are lawyers, lest we forget, so Will asks them for advice about getting around the noncompete. Stewart suggests partnering with someone else and letting them be the face of the company. Who could that be?
I’m not sure why Charlie would be okay with this. I’m not even sure why Sylvia would, other than the fact that she hates her current gig and working locally — in an industry she knows nothing about — would allow her to spend more time with Charlie and the kids. It just seems like a bad idea. But bad ideas are what sequel seasons tend to be built around, so maybe we’ll see how everything shakes out sooner rather than later.
