Summary
Shrinking Season 3 continues to explore the idea of professional and personal boundaries in “Depression Diet”, leading to often funny but also consistently complex outcomes.
It’s a testament to how consistently well-written the characters in Shrinking are that the broad sweep of “Depression Diet” is obvious, even when the episode itself is trying to pretend that it isn’t. We’re on Season 3 now, lest we forget, and we know these people on a level that we usually reserve for friends and family. That’s why Episode 8 is something of a fake-out. It begins with Gaby seemingly processing Maya’s untimely demise quite well, and ends with her utterly adrift and disillusioned, questioning everything that she thought she had decided about her future.
It was clear that was going to happen. The circumstances of Maya’s death – still nebulous, but unavoidably tragic either way – were tailor-made for Gaby to fixate on. Did she do too much or not enough? Did her overconfidence cause her to miss things? Is there someone else to blame other than her? These are all questions that rattle around her head in this episode; some remain unanswered because they’re essentially unanswerable, but others reveal themselves gradually, and she doesn’t like what she hears. So, let’s start with her.
Gaby’s Not Getting Back on the Horse
Gaby is making jokes at Maya’s funeral. Not in an insensitive way – though I’m not sure there is a sensitive way of doing that – but as a signal to the audience that she’s okay. The life of a therapist is fraught with failure, and sometimes that failure has mortal consequences. Maya had deep-seated issues. She may have been beyond saving. Some people are.
It weighs on Gaby, obviously. She doesn’t want to pig out with Derrick or watch The Lord of the Rings. But she can deal with it – until she can’t. When the couple who introduced her to Maya in the first place reveal that she had childhood abandonment issues, Gaby is thrown. How could she have missed that? And if she had known, how much could she have done differently? To make matters worse, that couple now wants to see another therapist, since their trust in Gaby has eroded. And thus begins the spiral of what-ifs.
Paul tries his best to reassure Gaby, turning up at her MMA meetings and constantly reminding her that she could have only acted on the information she had. But that doesn’t address Gaby’s lingering concern about why she didn’t have that information. Gaby’s unconventional approach to therapy has always been her calling card, and she expected it to translate to trauma-focused care. Her perceived failure with Maya suggests, at least to her, that her entire plan for her future is built on shaky ground. And this is far from resolved by the end of the episode.
An Awkward First Date
Not everything going on in Shrinking Season 3, Episode 8 is quite this maudlin. There are a lot of laughs to be found in Jimmy’s date with Sofi, for instance, which he’s now having a proper crack at after introducing her to the rest of his family and friends during an admittedly unconventional celebration of his late wife’s birthday. But it turns out Sofi can give as good as she gets in the field of unconventional dates, since her dinner with Jimmy is gate-crashed by her ex-husband and her son, who are both lounging around playing video games and not taking any obvious hints.
Sofi and her ex are firmly separated – he’s even remarried – but still have a lot of lingering issues that need to be addressed and boundaries that have become blurred. If only they had a therapist literally sitting at the dinner table! Jimmy isn’t keen on the idea of intervening, since even “Jimmying” has its limits, but he nonetheless stages an impromptu therapy session so that these two can figure out why they’re still doing all the mutually detrimental things that they’re doing.
This seems to go quite well, or at least well enough for Sofi to want a do-over of the first date immediately. It’s sometimes nice to be reminded that Jimmy is genuinely good at his job, and there’s a pretty large part of me that thinks any relationship built on this degree of eccentricity is pretty much destined for success.
Liz Steps Back
And finally, we come to Liz’s perpetual overstepping in Brian and Charlie’s efforts to raise Sutton, a situation complicated by the discovery that Ava has moved in with them and is avoiding leaving by not mentioning that she has a job at Olive Garden. Liz is concerned that Ava is blurring the lines and preventing Brian and Charlie from being a family of their own, so she drags Brian to the Olive Garden to confront her.
In true Brian fashion, he dips before the situation gets awkward, leaving Liz behind to lay out the reality herself. But in true Shrinking fashion, Ava turns the tables by pointing out that Liz is a hypocrite and is consistently doing the very thing that she’s accusing Ava of doing. It’s a fruitful conversation that leads to the only correct resolution – Ava steps back, but so does Liz. Her nanny services will no longer be free, and Brian and Charlie are going to have to be more assertive – yes, even with her.
For the correct people like me who think that Brian is the best character in this show by far, “Depression Diet” has an impressive slew of one-liners from him that are truly great. But it’s Liz who binds this subplot together with real depth of character. Boundaries are healthy. But I wouldn’t be surprised if Liz wants to test them sooner rather than later.
