Summary
The Madison shifts its focus from sad sentiment to anger and hostility in Episode 5, as the Clyburn returns to what they think is home, and find it unrecognisable from the place they left.
To be honest, I was expecting Paul and Preston’s funeral to be sadder. This isn’t a criticism, though. The Madison has delivered enough sadness already, and it’s about time people shifted to being properly angry and adrift instead. You can’t have grief without all the stages, after all, and Episode 5, “No Name and a New Dream,” is an important part of the process. It asks, essentially, “What next?” And that isn’t a particularly easy question to answer.
Fittingly, the action moves back to New York for a good chunk of the hour, but we’ll get to that. Before, we have to deal with Paul and Preston’s funeral, which doesn’t necessarily go as expected. The scene is set, and the vibes are right. Cade and Van do all the physical heavy lifting so that the family can do the emotional kind. You’d think it’d go better than it does.
The problem only really emerges after, succinctly summarised by the men as they lower Paul and Preston’s caskets into the ground. “Everyone deals with it differently,” one of them quips. “I don’t think they’re dealing with it all,” comes the response. And it’s correct. Nobody has anything to say at the funeral; no words to honour Preston or summarise their own grief. There’s no preacher to speak for them, so we have to be content with a few choice words of prayer that have been deployed to console innumerable families. Stacy doesn’t miss the perfunctory feel of the words, however appropriate they might be. The only authentic part of the service is when Abigail nastily blames Paul – talking through his casket, obviously – for Preston’s death.
But this is the point. Stacy’s family can’t wait to leave Montana – their flight is booked for that very evening – to pursue some kind of closure, which they’re not going to get here. Everything else, including the funeral and the impromptu wake that the locals organise after, is just biding time. No real grieving is taking place because that has to happen at home, and this place, at least to everyone other than Stacy, doesn’t feel like home. They have become aliens tentatively exploring an environment they don’t belong in. Even Stacy, on some level, recognises this, which is why she joins the others on the flight back to the Big Apple, where everything starts to get worse.
This isn’t intended to be a goodbye forever; Abigail even tries to sell Van on the idea that she’ll visit. But he knows she won’t, and that if she does, whatever relationship might develop between them will feel so strange and incomplete that he’d just be counting down the seconds until she left again. The fact that Abigail takes his preference to miss her rather than come to resent her as an insult shows that she isn’t ready for what she’s proposing. None of them seems ready for anything, except perhaps the volleyball tournament they’re missing, and the illusion of normality it exists inside of.
Therapy helps. A guest-starring Will Arnett turns up in The Madison Episode 5 and helps to break the grieving process down into frank, manageable terms. Staring wistfully at the Montana horizon is one thing, but what’s really necessary is a lot of crying and screaming, reassuring childhood treats, and familial support. It’s a process, and liquor helps to grease its wheels. By the time the session is over, Stacy and the therapist are both drunk. But progress has definitely been made, and Stacy is able to put that progress into practice immediately by reassuring Paige, who is having an emotional breakdown at home.
What does the future hold? Stacy discusses it with Liliana – does she want another apartment in New York, or to return to Montana? – and with Russell over a drink called an “Irish Car Bomb”, which isn’t the kind of thing you imbibe when you have work the next morning. He isn’t especially sure of his future either; he’s basing his decisions about having a family on Paige’s dress size. His idealised version of domesticity was Stacy and Preston, but now that dream has died, and he, like Stacy, has to come up with a new one to chase in its absence. What might that look like? And where might it take him? We only have one more episode – and, granted, an already-greenlit second season – to find out.
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