You’re the Worst Review: A Very Good Boy (Season 5 Episode 5)
You’re the Worst Season 5, Episode 4, “A Very Good Boy,” sees the characters moving in a positive direction — except maybe not.
With You’re the Worst, it’s often one step forward and three steps back. Jimmy and Gretchen get engaged, but Jimmy runs away. Jimmy and Gretchen move in together, but Gretchen has crippling depression. The show is fond of this kind of illusion of personal progress that only serves to be undone in one way or another.
Similarly, there is this (very likely) false sense of improvement that runs throughout “A Very Good Boy.”
The thing here is that even if there wasn’t an undercurrent of foreboding doom hovering, this episode would feel so incredibly hollow in the grand scheme of the show and where these characters are going to end up by the time this series ends.
Things are certainly not helped by the flash-forward at the beginning of this episode showing Gretchen, who appears to be operating under a fake name in the future. Combined with the previous flash-forward showing Jimmy selling his house that he’s supposed to be sharing with Gretchen, it all begins to feel rather bleak.
It’s hard to get invested in Jimmy’s struggle to accept that he is a “good boy” or Gretchen faking her way through a promotion that she feels woefully unprepared for because the backslide feels all too present over these characters’ lives.
After five seasons, there should be a bit more attachment for this relationship and the space these people inhabit in each other’s lives. But — and maybe this is from feeling a bit left cold by the previous season — that just makes us want to get to the bottom of the page a bit quicker.
This could also be a by-product of not trusting this series as implicitly as we once did and not fully believing that this will feel at all satisfying in the end.
For instance, there was a time where we would have faith in You’re the Worst exploring the concept of an open relationship, like it seems to be teasing at the end. That could be rather interesting if done well, but it’s not entirely clear that it can nail it at this point.
A big fear that’s beginning to develop as we get closer to the end is whether this would have been a stronger outing if the final season had been shortened rather than its standard thirteen episode run. Of course time will tell, but it’s beginning to seem like the show is spinning its wheels until it can get to a point that it really wants to.
What will that point be? No one wants to feel like they’ve wasted five seasons watching a show that will go back on the central relationship that it’s spent so much time over the series run building up. But more and more, that seems to be where we’re going.
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 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.