Maura and Vicki check into a hotel after hotfooting it out of the festival, the former tentative and slightly confused about the implications of the situation. The pair sleep spooning each other, and in the morning have sex – presumably Maura’s first time as a woman.
Also journeying home are Sarah and Ali, who make a pit stop at Maura’s old backyard. Josh, who is staying at the house, joins them, and the siblings play together in the pool. Later, lying on the sofa with her brother and sister, Ali spots the Berlin ring and asks Josh if she can have it.
Seeking playtime of a more adult nature, Sarah indulges again in the consensual power exchange she discovered at Idyllwild, paying for the woman from the festival’s spanking services before visiting ex-husband Len, and replacing the eyeshadow palette she took from his (now ex-) girlfriend.
Ali goes to the university to hand in her essay to Leslie, who gives her a choice: to either become one of her teaching assistants or her girlfriend. Josh goes to Shelly’s, but finds only his mother’s new beau, Buzz, there. The pair rescue an injured duck, and Buzz takes the opportunity to tell Josh he thinks he’s in shock from the loss of his father. Josh protests that it’s “politically incorrect” to mourn somebody who has transitioned – and besides, he never liked Mort anyway – but Buzz convinces him to acknowledge his grief.
Maura asks Vicki to accompany her to visit her mother, whom she reveals she hasn’t seen for 30 years, but Vicki declines, citing her boundaries. Instead Maura goes with Ali, and the pair discuss the events of the festival on the train, Ali revealing she might study with Leslie in the autumn, and Maura advising Ali to stay away from people “overly attached to dogma”.
Meanwhile, in the 1930s, Rose and her mother travel by boat to America (during which the latter reveals she has smuggled out the ring by encasing it in chocolate), before tracking down the family patriarch – who the pair discover living with another woman and their child. Finally, we see Rose in labour, her husband in the hospital waiting room loudly professing that the child will be a girl, before she gives birth to a baby boy.
This second – truly brilliant – season of Transparent has left us with a few loose ends: will Maura ever find out about Gittel? Will Ali choose Leslie’s love over the professional opportunities she can offer? And will the former ever make academic history by nailing the connection between Jews, vaginas, Nazis, patriarchy, inherited trauma, gender, exclusionary feminism and that ring?
Really, though, this season of Transparent has been admirable and genuinely educative in its efforts to broach complex topics – in Maura’s interactions with her transgender friends and in Leslie’s discussion of radical feminist doctrine, among other places – but always careful to do so through the prism of character, and with a cathartic humour.
Squaring pain and vulnerability with privilege (not just male, but material and generational too) is perhaps the conversation of our time, and it is one Transparent has expanded, detailed and helped to humanise. Long may it continue.
