Hung’s first season is breaking down pretty clearly into three acts. The season’s first act (roughly the first four episodes) was all about how fantasy can override our realities to such a degree that the fantasy becomes the reality. The second act (roughly episodes five through seven) involved puncturing that bubble, revealing that beneath fantasy, reality is always still lurking, most significantly in Tanya’s reminder to Ray that he was still a prostitute and he shouldn’t be letting Jemma play games with him. Perhaps intentionally, these episodes focused the most on Jemma, who was the client of Ray’s that was most lost in a private fantasy that could never quite be fulfilled. And now, in its third act, starting tonight, apparently (unless I’m woefully misreading where this is going), we’re seeing how reality and fantasy can be made to intermingle, to coexist and cohabitate.
Reality wins out most in the story of how Jemma and Ray’s love affair comes to an end. Jemma, whom Ray had fallen for, dumps him completely out of the blue, and he’s unable to figure out why, exactly, though he has to have his suspicions. But when she pays Tanya for the whole endeavor and says that she just wanted to let down a guy with no explanation and break his heart, in the way her heart had been broken so many times, we see that she finally got her ultimate fantasy. In Ray’s case, though, reality intrudes. He may have made her genuinely happy (or so she claims), but he had fallen for her, after all, and no amount of cash or understanding that he had helped her heal some sort of deep-seated pain is going to overcome that broken heart. Instead, he turns to that ultimate facilitator of flights of fancy (though, on its flip side, it can help us see brutal reality once we hit the bottom), alcohol.
Ray, for a guy who knows just what to say to make any woman happy, often seems to have no idea what to say to the people who are closest to him. He regularly misreads Tanya, and tonight, he prompts a conflict between Jessica and Ronnie. He asks just why Ronnie thinks Jessica left him to be with Ronnie in what seems to be a mostly honest attempt to figure out how to fix the Jemma situation. (On a show so interested in the divide between fantasy and reality, it’s fascinating that the central character is someone who regularly takes everything said to him at face value and seems to present himself to the world completely at face value.) It’s possible that Ray had another motive here, but it sure seemed like he was just trying to figure out what it was about him that could make a woman not want to be with him. But Ronnie, like most of us, reads between the lines, sometimes too much, and that leads to a rift between him and his wife. (Though it’s not hard to see why Ronnie reads between the lines like this. The tone Ray takes IS pretty deeply patronizing and seems insulting, even if he doesn’t quite grasp that that’s how he’s acting. And, again, I interpret his actions as genuine in this scene, but I can see where it would be easy to read this as an attempt to undermine Ronnie or something.)
All in all, it’s not a very good week for Ray. He’s getting dumped. He’s causing unneeded strife in his ex-wife’s life. And when he goes to the bar, he runs into someone who hates him from his days as a high school athlete and takes him out, in the rain, to pitch to him. Ray’s still able to hit every ball tossed his way, just like he could back then, but now, doing so feels almost deeply sad. Nothing else in his life is this straightforward, this … easy. As much as we try to make sports into some grand metaphor for life or turn them into our ultimate fantasies (as in that big game montage from a few weeks ago), nothing in real life is as simple as standing behind the plate and leveling a pitch hurled your way over the fence.