It’s Yom Kippur, the “holiest day of the year”, says Sarah, which provides Transparent with another Jewish occasion around which to centre itself, and an opportunity for the eldest Pfefferman sibling to atone for her misdeeds. Her most urgent port of call is Tammy, to whom she delivers one of the smuggest and most self-involved apologies of all time: telling her ex that the reason their relationship broke down was because she was looking for a surrogate mother, having not been properly parented.
She might have a point: her Mr Irons fantasy also suggests she’s craving some kind of authority figure. Returning to Dr Steve’s place, she asks him to be rougher with her during sex (“I want you to rape me, but I don’t want it to hurt”), but the doctor declines, feeling in over his head. Also in hot pursuit of a matriarchal figure is Ali – and when Syd finds out that she spent the night on the professor’s sofa she begins nervously to question her girlfriend’s loyalties.
Davina’s boyfriend Sal supplies Maura with a cooler for her room, along with some advice on the facial feminisation procedures she might like to undergo. In the most blatant act of misogyny we’ve seen this series, Maura looks on in horror as she is boiled down to her constituent parts. You can’t help thinking there is perhaps an element of realisation there too: it was only in the previous episode that Maura told Sal that she was attracted to women and loved “every part of them, from head to vagina”. Later, Maura tells Davina about her and Sal’s conversation, and tells Davina she could do better. Her disgruntled host responds that without Maura’s family and material privilege she must make decisions according to her needs.
Shelly and Josh attend a Yom Kippur service at the synagogue, and the former takes a fancy to man-on-the-door Buzz. As one relationship begins, another ends: Josh alerts Raquel to his presence there, and also his confusion about their status. Raquel tells him it’s over.
The whole family – including apparent newest member Buzz – gather at Syd’s to break the Yom Kippur fast. Raquel’s whereabouts are queried – Ali forced to do the blessing in her absence – until Josh reveals that they have lost the baby and broken up. It’s a revelation that sends Shelly spiraling into anxiety, worried that she tempted fate by telling everyone about the baby when Raquel was still in the early stages of pregnancy. But Shelly’s not the only one made irrational by the loss: after Josh leaves, he goes to the supermarket and binges manically on meat and bread.
Talking points
Anxiety. We’ve already witnessed Sarah having an anxiety attack at her wedding, and this episode sees a couple more anxious events. Syd is getting a “PTSD feeling” about her relationship with Ali, worried that she will behave in the same way as Josh (she’s probably right to be concerned, the pair are increasingly similar: Ali even says she is only trying to be honest with Syd about her attraction to Leslie, the same thing Josh said to Raquel in the previous episode when telling her he didn’t want to try for another baby); while Josh has an anxiety attack at the synagogue and has to leave.
Meanwhile, the extent of Shelly’s anxiety is revealed when she panics about the baby, and also confesses she is worried that she is going to die or cause the deaths of others. Anxiety can be a learned behaviour, and Shelly clearly suffers from the condition severely, which maybe explains why Sarah and Josh do too. This idea of “passing on” anxiety is one of the reasons why it is closely linked with Jewish culture (partially thanks to the work of Woody Allen, Philip Roth et al), as adults who lived through the Holocaust would likely display signs of post-trauma anxiety.
Authority figures. Sarah and, to some extent, Ali are looking for parental figures in their romantic partners. Josh also has a history of this in the form of a teenage relationship with his twentysomething babysitter Rita, and it’s worth noting that as a rabbi, Raquel is also an authority figure. There is a suggestion that one of the reasons for the siblings’ behaviour is that they were never treated like children by Maura and Shelly: Ali, for example, is particularly annoyed in season one that as a 13-year-old child she was permitted to cancel her own bat mitzvah, and the flashbacks in the previous series suggested that the children had few boundaries.
