Josh confronts his mother about Colton, but Shelly maintains the family did the right thing by putting the child out of their “world”, and reminds Josh of the huge material privilege he enjoyed growing up. Back at home, Josh notices a rash on Raquel’s back. The pair are worried it could be measles – potentially devastating in pregnancy – and see a doctor, who tells them it isn’t, but that Raquel has miscarried. It’s hard not to think of the end of the previous episode here, when Raquel confided to Josh that she was overwhelmed by the stress of the Colton situation, and that she felt this internalised pain could be damaging to the baby.
Maura moves in temporarily with Davina, whose boyfriend Sal is about to be released from prison (where he has been serving time for a white-collar crime). Maura and Shea make Sal a lasagne – an act both quaintly domestic and futile, it turns out, as Sal returns with a bucket of chicken. Later, Maura – apparently oblivious to the evil looks Davina is giving her – grills Sal on his preference for trans women.
Ali tells Syd about her idea to focus on “Jew shoes” – a pair of shoes, one red and one black, with bells on, that Jewish women were forced to wear in the middle ages – for her admission essay to Leslie’s class, but ultimately decides to ask Leslie herself for advice. At the professor’s home, the pair smoke a bong in the hot tub, and Ali tries to seduce Leslie with her academic thoughts – specifically by telling her that a vagina is equivalent to the Holocaust. It doesn’t work.
Sarah visits Dr Steve, Josh’s dope dealer friend she has been sporadically patronising, with plans to enact the Mr Irons fantasy, but their role-playing is disrupted by a babysitting and increasingly fragile Shelly, who tells Sarah that one of her children has insulted her, and reveals that Maura has left her again. Raquel, meanwhile, is shaken by the miscarriage but optimistic about getting pregnant once more – until Josh tells her he needs time to “breathe”. It’s clear that Raquel can bear little more pain, and this is the moment she emotionally checks out of the relationship. When Josh returns from a music industry party that evening, she has moved out.
Talking points
Antisemitism. Having said that this series of Transparent is more Jewish than ever, it’s now clear that antisemitism is also an informing presence in the Pfeffermans’ lives. There are the Gershon flashbacks (a relative who – if Ali is correct – was ultimately taken to a concentration camp), while in the last episode there was a particularly uncomfortable point at which Colton’s adoptive mother, Blossie laughed uproariously at the idea that Colton was half-Jewish – as if somebody had told her he was descended from aliens. Meanwhile, Ali’s research on Jewishness is narrowing in on the topic, with her reading on inherited trauma and the “Jew shoes”. In her academic thinking, she’s also making connections between misogyny and antisemitism (“it’s like phallus is to crucifix, as vagina is to Holocaust”, she tells Leslie). It might seem like a slightly crude comparison, but there are some similarities, with both women and Jews frequently being othered by a world that presents them with no alternative home.
Self-interest. In the first series of Transparent, Maura mourned the selfishness of her brood – which seemed ironic considering some of the parenting choices she had made in the past. But it was always the Pfeffermans’ blinkered self-involvement that rendered them morbidly fascinating. This episode sees the family brand of narcissism come to the fore once again, beginning with Shelly’s cold take on Colton, and bleeding into the brutal behaviour of both Josh and Ali – who is angling to cheat on her girlfriend with Leslie – toward their supposedly loved ones. Interestingly, this kind of uncaring egocentricity is a traditionally masculine trait, but when characters put other people’s needs before their own in a self-negating, feminine way, that doesn’t turn out particularly well, either: the lasagne Maura makes Sal is rejected, while Raquel’s accommodation of the Colton situation has potentially harmed her unborn child.
