I know the theme of tonight’s episode was Cathy’s role as an object of desire, but to me it was also “Things You Could Get Into Serious Trouble For.” A teacher watching porn on her computer at school. A girl letting a boy touch her breasts on a bright sunny day on a busy athletic field. A guy causing a quasi-violent scene in a civic office. A teacher showing her freshly-denuded vagina to the school hallway. Cathy went from being the lady who naughtily smokes cigarettes on the sly to the lady who could get arrested at school for lewd behavior.
The episode starts off with Cathy at the garden center, admiring the titular irises and pulling the cancer card when some lady tries to cut her off in line. When she gets the flowers home, she finds Adam watching porn in his room. She attempts to be useful by looking at the porn with him and “educating” him on it but like most of Cathy’s attempts to parent progressively and proactively, it just gets weird.
Cathy meets Paul for dinner to discuss whether Adam’s having sex (which he doesn’t think is happening.) Paul points out that it’s funny that she watched porn with their son when she’d never watch it with her husband. Then Paul embarks on one of his little speeches where he tells Cathy how boring she is: “I like to stand out and you like to blend in.” I’m not quite sure what to make of these times when Paul tells Cathy about herself: why would he be with her if he found her so charmingly bland? Why doesn’t she stick up to him for all these nasty little backhanded compliments, especially if she has nothing to lose?
Back home, Cathy starts planting the irises and Sean sneaks up behind her and burps in her ear. He complains about all the bees in the world getting killed by pesticide before he requests that she make copies of some charts he made to save the building he’s squatting in. I’d really like to see Sean’s character expanded sometime soon because now he’s squatting in cliche-ville. At the very least, maybe he can admit why he hangs out with his boringly evil sister so much? I think we know why but let’s hear him say it.
Cathy tries again with Adam, giving him condoms in case he needs them some day. Gabriel Basso was quite good in this scene, trying to smile and act like he knew what his mom was talking about in order to get her out of his room. I could see some viewers taking issue though with Cathy’s advice to Adam that “Women like attention, even if they act like they don’t.”
Back at school, Lenny (played by Idris Elba, who finally gets to speak in his natural accent) is painting a cheesy school mural when Andrea hits on him. I like that Cathy’s exploring her sexuality finally but sometimes the writing of the show lacks a little subtlety, like when Lenny compliments Cathy’s skirt after Paul notes how much she dislikes wearing skirts because they show off her legs. Feeling restless, Cathy looks up “sex” on her generic search engine while her students work on an assignment.