Both “Liberty Down” and “The Long D” find Mickey and Gus moving in opposite directions, and there’s a whiplash quality to the two of them together. In the first, it’s Mickey who is on the road to enlightenment; in the second, it’s Gus. Mickey’s frustration means her old, destructive habits make a damning reappearance, just as Gus finally gains some self-awareness. The brutal sequence midway through the episode hammers this point home: Gus sits at an Al-Anon meeting, listening to people tell stories about caring for their friends and family struggling with addiction. Then we cut back to Mickey, in the throes of pleasure with Dustin, having skipped out on a SLAA meeting to spend time with him. We’re witnessing a betrayal, yes, but also a regression.
“The Long D” is about habits, and how people become habits for one another. Take Bertie, for instance. Thrown into crisis when her shopping cart gets hit by a car in a grocery story parking lot, she decides to dump Randy. It plays out in the most awkward way possible, with Randy’s brother emerging from the bathroom mid-break-up and subsequently begging her to take his sibling back. But it turns out those pleas were not in vain, because by the end of the episode she’s in bed with Randy, looking disgusted as he talks about her “smell.” We don’t see the circumstances leading up to their reunion, but we assume it was a mix of Bertie’s sympathy and Randy’s desperation that led to sex.
Gus’ problem throughout the series is that he has been totally oblivious to his own failings, convinced that he’s always in the right. But that finally comes to bite him in the ass here. After Mickey rejects his plane ticket, his loneliness is so palpable that a family invites him to join their table at a diner. He thinks he may have finally found company when Arya’s dad Steven invites himself over, but Steven just really wants a place to do cocaine with an extra. Even in his own room Gus is isolated, and ends the night puking by himself.
But that’s not even his lowest point, the one that finally provokes a change. He gets kicked off the set of Arya’s movie. Ambition is one thing, understanding the time and the place for such ambition is quite another. Gus seemingly believes that, although he’s just a tutor, he’s entitled to the attention of a director of a big budget action film. In a way, his bratty workplace actions only illuminate his equally petulant way of dealing with Mickey. He exists in a world in which he never questions that he could be the one at fault for anything going wrong in his life. That is, until a half-hearted attempt at visiting a church leads him to an Al-Anon meeting. As he hears how other people deal with the addicts in their lives with compassion, there’s visible shame on his face. It’s perhaps the beginning of a new Gus, but he’ll be coming back to the old Mickey.