You’re the Worst Review: From the Beginning, I was Screwed (Season 4 Episode 11)
On You’re the Worst Season 4 Episode 11 “From the Beginning, I was Screwed,” Gretchen spends time with Boone and his daughter, Edgar opens up about his experiences, and Jimmy tries (and fails) to market himself as a serious author.
A word that keeps resurfacing when thinking back on the latest run of You’re the Worst is ’empty’. This last chunk of the season feels vaguely empty and hollow.
It’s filled with these small, broad character moments that shouldn’t add too much, but do anyway. Whenever a character like Jimmy or Gretchen did something on the series, there used to be this colorful vibrancy to it.
You may not have agreed with their reasons for doing something, but you always got why they’d want to. There was this psychosis to their decision making that was oddly relatable. In this season, the end goal seems very much to get Jimmy and Gretchen back together by realizing that they’re better off together than apart.
While this is an intriguing idea and certainly one that falls in line with the overall tone of the series, the way it’s choosing to get there is, as stated, rather empty.
At a certain point, it all becomes too much. It could have been interesting to have this as an arc examining the differences of Jimmy and Gretchen as people on their own versus a couple instead of something that feels like it’s suffocating this season. It’s too prolonged; the series had already gotten their point across and now it’s just repetitive.
The individual episodes and moments have been compelling, but, stepping back a bit, it’s not adding to anything particularly substantive.
More than that, though, is there’s a level of cruelty to towards Gretchen and Jimmy that never seemed to exist before, almost as if the show hates them for being what they are. It hates Jimmy for being this pathetic loser and it hates Gretchen for being a self-destructive mess. It’s not funny or endearing anymore, just nihilistic.
This carries over to Edgar finally opening up about his experiences as a soldier to his friend Max (Johnny Pemberton) who proceeds by getting himself reassigned so he doesn’t have to work with Edgar.
You’re the Worst has spent the last two seasons building Edgar up into a more emotionally confident person and to kick him down like this feels mean-spirited in a way that the series hasn’t been in the past. All of this isn’t to say that the series can’t pull itself back up in the last two episodes because it most certainly can. It won’t change the trajectory that they’ve taken in this last chunk of the season and the unsettling changes in its tone.
Stray Thoughts:
- Lindsey needs to run, not walk, away from Paul before she gets sucked into his current awfulness.
- Good riddance to Max and his hipster mustache.
- Ben Folds confused why the table he think is a piano isn’t making any noise is a classic moment.
- Can’t we just let Gretchen do her job for once?
- “I lost a rotisserie chicken in here and I can’t find it.”
What did you think of this episode of You’re the Worst? Share your thoughts with us in the comments below!
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You’re the Worst airs Wednesdays at 10/9c on FXX.
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Drew Koenig
Drew has an ongoing, borderline unhealthy obsession with pop culture, but with television in particular. When he's not aggressively trying to get out of a perpetual state of catching up, he can be found passionately defending the ending of Lost. More of his online work can be found at The Lost Cause and he also co-hosts The Lost Cause Pod.