You’re the Worst Review: Magical Thinking (Season 5 Episode 10)
You’re the Worst Season 5 Episode 10, “Magical Thinking,” sees some character dynamics shifting across the board.
More than perhaps any other episode this season, “Magical Thinking” is the one where you can truly feel the age of the show. On a show that so often revels in the idiocy and ridiculous behavior of its characters, this is the one where you can fully feel the maturity and growth that’s been endured over the course of the series.
It’s the running theme of this episode: how far the characters have come but also how far they still have to go as functional adults.
The bulk of this is felt with Jimmy and Edgar. Theirs is a friendship that has been consistently one-sided, with the former taking advantage of the latter and little-to-no pushback in return. It’s interesting to see the outcome of this after some quiet development on Edgar’s part this season. He’s finally becoming a fuller version of himself that isn’t so reliant on Jimmy’s approval.
Their walk-and-talk through the park as Jimmy attempts to justify why he doesn’t feel the need to share copious amounts of his life with Gretchen is the kind of blusterous, faux-intellectualism that we’re used to from him, but there’s a kind of gentleness that feels fresh. It feels like a conversation that two longtime friends would have with each other.
Jimmy so often would talk down to and belittle Edgar and his opinions. But here, there’s a genuine exchange of thoughts and feelings. It’s honest and real and something so dissimilar to so many of the other dialogue exchanges that occur on this show.
Then of course there’s Gretchen, whom the show takes this perverse joy in taking down a notch whenever she is starting to feel a bit too good about herself. This takes the form of her taking more and more pills to cope with her job and slowly spiraling down as she tries to balance the duties of that job.
The insistence the show has on never letting Gretchen feel on top of things for too long is, quite honestly, concerning and doesn’t speak well at all for how the series plans to resolve her character by the end. Under this model, it would make complete sense to leave her at the lowest she’s ever been, because that’s how they’ve always set her up.
There’s a kind of give-and-take between Jimmy and Gretchen that often feels disconcerting. If one is doing well, the other has to be suffering in some way. Too often they don’t feel like they’re operating on the same level. It reminds us of a line earlier in the series: “If one person is in the hospital bed, the other person has to be sitting in the chair next to it.”
If anything, that feels like an all too apt metaphor for their relationship, because that’s how it always is with them. And they’re constantly switching those roles.
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.