You’re the Worst Review: The One Thing We Don’t Talk About (Season 5 Episode 3)
How does one become a successful adult? What does it look like to be a distressingly tragic excuse for one? That’s what You’re the Worst Season 5 Episode 3, “The One Thing We Don’t Talk About,” attempts to get at.
We get two separate styles of being an adult. There’s Jimmy’s way, which entails doing something that you have absolutely no interest in so that you can get a paycheck out of it.
For Gretchen, it involves aggressively avoiding your problems with any possible distraction, only to try to convince everyone down the line that this was your plan all along.
An argument could be made that neither way is what someone would consider to be healthy. Jimmy only sets out to write the screenplay for the adaptation of his novel because he needs to pay off the ludicrous amount of credit card debt that Gretchen has amassed over the years — because Gretchen, apparently, does not understand how credit cards work.
Sometimes it is truly shocking that Gretchen has survived for as long as she has.
The discussion that Jimmy has with the producers over the screenplay of the movie and his interpretation of the character Kitty (who’s an analogue for Gretchen in his novel) is really quite telling — about him, about how he often approaches his relationship, and about Gretchen as a person.
He believes that Kitty is a wretched, selfish person that is the human equivalent of a tornado; she’s a character that he hates. All those qualities are things that the producers love about the character and things that Jimmy supposedly loves about Gretchen.
He’s on more than one occasion claimed that their love is messy and complicated, which by extension makes them both messy and complicated. There’s a cognitive dissonance there that he loves that about Gretchen yet hates it about Kitty, a character he based on her.
That begs the question: Does Jimmy actually love Gretchen, or is she something to him that he constantly has to clean up after in some fashion or another?
At the same time, Gretchen really is the tornado that sweeps in, wrecks things, and offers no apologies in return. She spends the entire episode tormenting her interviewees for the publicist position just so that she doesn’t have to call her mom.
Simultaneously, Gretchen consciously — or rather drunkenly — makes out with a guy at a bar and has to wonder aloud if she slept with one of her applicants. At the same time, Jimmy is forcing himself to write a screenplay that he has no interest in actually writing at all because Gretchen is too dysfunctional to deal with her finances herself.
Granted, these are just extensions of her character that have always been present. But it’s hard not to connect this back to You’re the Worst Season 4 Episode 7, “Not a Great Bet.” That was another example, like this, where the depiction of Gretchen really flirts with being too cruel to the character.
Overall, “The One Thing We Don’t Talk About” is a solid episode. But it brings up some valid, if unintentional, questions about how this is all destined to end for the pair at the center of our story.
What did you think of this episode of You’re the Worst? Share your thoughts in the comments below!
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You’re the Worst airs Wednesdays at 10/9c on FXXThe.
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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.