Welcome to The A.V. Club’s Transparent binge-watch. From Friday, December 11 through Sunday, December 13, A.V. Club contributor Shelby Fero will be watching and reviewing every episode of Transparent’s second season. Though she’s working straight through the season, she’ll be taking some breaks, too, posting three reviews on Friday, four reviews on Saturday, and three reviews on Sunday. You can weigh in on this episode here, discuss the whole season on our binge-watching hub page, and track her Pfefferman-addled mindset on Twitter (@shelbyfero).
As she sits in one of her however-many-number-of-classes-now, Ali’s professor flashes an image of a solar system overhead. As he expounds on distance and how far the light must travel before we see it, the image magnifies so we’re pulled into the vastness of it all. Stacked between Sarah’s tired face as she and Len battle for custody, an ultrasound of Josh’s new baby, and Maura confronted with her storage-unit life, all four of these images conjure a feeling of directional loss; both the lows and the highs inherent.
The human condition forces the question “Who am I?” to shape our lives at some point or another (along with its offspring: “What have I done?” “Why did this happen to me?” and “Where do I belong?”) and acts as a central theme in Transparent. For some people, the exact root of self-questioning seems obvious, such as Maura’s transness, while others don’t know why they’re lost, like Ali and her opaque restlessness. It’s in pursuit of answers that things become gritty; when destroying and building both make a mess, it’s hard to know which is which. In the second episode of the season, characters trade off wielding the chisel and being carved into, for better or for worse.
For Sarah, this means both living the pitiful troped life commonly reserved for single dads–battling for custody, looking like crap, renting a sad one bedroom apartment, getting too drunk at the party–and getting accosted by her clearly-doing-much-worse jilted lover. She’s at once doing very, very well, and barely holding on at all. Raquel, bless her, too finds herself oscillating wildly: One minute she’s ecstatic over an ultrasound with Josh, the next she’s trying to reconcile her ideals with the insane family she’s tangled herself into. It’s a testament to her character that she makes a strong, kind choice in the end…how it turns out is yet to be seen. Seeking her own place in this universe, Ali finds herself back on Syd’s doorstep, and, later, in her arms. It’s like a knife to the gut watching the two connect, remembering the built in power-imbalance of their once one-sided relationship. You hope for the best while dreading the worst.