You’re the Worst Review: We Were Having Such a Nice Day (Season 5 Episode 12)
Some harsh truths are shared on You’re the Worst Season 5 Episode 12, “We Were Having Such a Nice Day,” with the series’ penultimate outing.
“We Were Having Such a Nice Day” is an episode perfectly suited for the end of this series, in both good ways and bad.
On the one hand, this is an episode that’s filled with the kind of explosive moments that are all too appropriate for the final lap of the series. At the same time, there’s a kind of sense that the only reason we’re seeing a lot of this is due to the imminent closure.
The big interactions that really make this episode interesting are good, but there is a level of manufacture to them that there’s no getting around. It’s the curse of final episodes. You have to fill them with with these big moments by necessity, because you’re never going to get a chance to do them after this.
This episode can be boiled down to two main interactions that run throughout: Jimmy and Edgar, and Gretchen and her mom.
They both play into each other nicely and illustrate rather efficiently why this relationship and marriage is simply doomed to fail. They’re both broken people, and that’s always been part of the conceit of the relationship. But at this point, one is far more broken than the other.
Jimmy’s a dysfunctional person, but there’s a kind of method to that chaos. He can get up in the morning and do what he needs to do, but it’s ultimately on him. That is not Gretchen. If she messes up — as she does frequently — she knows that Jimmy is there now to pick up the pieces.
That’s where their disparity as a couple comes in. As Edgar points out, they look at their dysfunction like it’s some high watermark for their relationship, but it’s just toxicity disguised as something more wholesome.
The problem is just how Edgar lays it out. Jimmy has improved and grown over the course of the series, but Gretchen is more or less the same mess of a person she has always been. She continually makes different variations of the same mistakes over and over again, her therapy and desperate wishes to be different notwithstanding.
There’s a scathing indictment here on her mental state that maybe Gretchen isn’t able to move past the place that she is in emotionally, but that does seem to be her reality. Depressing as this may be, that is who she is: Someone who tries so hard and still fails.
Jimmy’s continued existence in her life is a hamper to that and therein lies Edgar’s point. They will both stagnate as long as they stay together and will probably crash and burn together, as Jimmy himself says.
Both of these sequences are, too their credit, beautifully acted by everyone involved. What we see is years of bottled up emotion and catharsis released all at once, and it’s rather breathtaking in the manner of a nuclear bomb.
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.