You’re the Worst Review: Like People/ It’s Always Been This Way (Season 4 Episode 12 and 13)

You’re the Worst Season 4 Episode 12 and 13 “Like People” and “It’s Always Been This Way” pair rather nicely together as one continuous arc: Jimmy deciding to leave L.A. and Gretchen deciding what she wants her relationship with Boone (Colin Ferguson) to be.

This fourth season has been a long-burn reconciliation of Jimmy and Gretchen as a couple and that’s where it’s main fault lies. The writers had a prearranged endpoint for the season, a place that it needed its characters to be in, but it also wanted that to last an entire season.

What has resulted from that is what amounts to little more than time-wasting and stalling on the show’s part. This is bad in both theory and execution, the result of which is pacing that felt wildly off and disjointed.

The show is right in one way: watching Jimmy and Gretchen unleash on each other and come back together is cathartic and moving in ways that fans have always known the show to be. The only problem with that is these are scenes that we needed much earlier in the season.

You’re the Worst wanted to show us what it would like for Jimmy and Gretchen to be on their own. Gretchen, it turns out, does pretty well for herself, provided she gets out of her own way every now and then. Jimmy, on the other hand, is a complete mess. Unguided, directionless, and completely out-of-sorts in this city he used to love and fit in with.

Gretchen doesn’t need Jimmy; Jimmy, however, needs her. L.A., which used to feel so inviting and warm, in a sickly awful way, now feels like it’s making way for people who are decent in comparison. Without Gretchen, he’s being rejected by the city like a bad organ transplant.

There’s this undeniable thread of cruelty that has run through most of the season that has affected every single character to the point that the show’s done a lousy job with its supporting characters — anyone that isn’t Gretchen or Jimmy — that they feel inconsequential and almost a parody of themselves at this point.

Lindsey is basically a joke now, convinced that she can help people simply because Lou Diamond Phillips told her she was good at it once upon a time. Spoiler alert: She’s not good at it, even if her advice to Gretchen is spot-on, and there’s no universe in which Paul should be a father.

More than that, the series seems to despise Jimmy and Gretchen more than it ever has before, Gretchen specifically.

The main thrust of the season has revolved around Gretchen and the show’s general need to kick her while she’s down. It’s been slowly chipping away at her throughout the entire season as she’s rejected by friends she used to have or constantly getting the impression that she is someone unlovable.

Character exploration is one thing, but this is something entirely different. It’s mean-spirited in a way that the show has never been before, as if the show really wants to demonstrate all of the ways in which Gretchen actually does suck.

Even ending back up with Gretchen at the end doesn’t feel like a victory to any substantial degree. If anything, it confirms what Lindsey warned her: she’ll mess it up somehow (probably because of Jimmy) and a little girl will get hurt in the process.

Granted, however, we are entering the final stretch of the series with only a final season left. Perhaps when it comes back again it can break the characters from the destructive cycle that the series has forced the characters and plot into.

What did you think of this finale 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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