On Becoming a God in Central Florida Review: Birthday Party (Season 1 Episode 8)
Emotions are often magnified in the presence of their opposite, and On Becoming a God in Central Florida Season 1 Episode 8, “Birthday Party,” pairs an unsettling exploration of trauma with a raucous day of mayhem.
While there are some laughs to be had in the latter portion of the episode, it often feels like filler — whereas Ernie and Krystals scenes, centered around dealing with PTSD and anger, are some of the show’s most compelling.
Cody is an amusing character, and Théodore Pellerin is typically adept at toeing the line between buffoonery and honest ambition.
In this episode, though, Cody’s antics feel tiresome.
Watching Cody blunder his way through the most straightforward of assignments, it’s hard to imagine how he could have amassed such a significant downline in the Garbeau system.
Being in charge of other people, even men as deluded as Travis, requires a certain amount of charisma and a believable aura of competence — and Cody possesses neither.
If Roger is a scalpel, carefully deployed to deal with delicate situations, Cody is the unwieldy rubber mallet in a game of whack-a-mole. His reckless approach to every situation is such an obvious problem, especially from a business standpoint, that Obie’s confidence in him defies logic.
Then again, Obie himself is the most erratic character on the show, and “Birthday Party” finally makes it clear that much of his strategic success should be more properly attributed to his wife, Louise.
The method Louise employs to reign in Krystal — a psychologically invasive piece of theater that she terms “therapy” — is more subtle and infinitely more dangerous than anything we’ve seen from Obie.
It’s a form of brainwashing, designed to manipulate women into serving FAM’s interests by exploiting their insecurities.
The sequence in which Louise forces Krystal into a ball pit, demanding that she imagine her own birth, is one of the show’s weirdest scenes yet — and is certainly the most horrific.
Rather than helping Krystal deal with past trauma, Louise’s practice is designed to create and compound it.
Krystal: I feel like your husband just bought my job out from under me, and I came here to grovel for it, and I physically fought myself out of a vagina tub for no goddamn reason.
The white robes, the hypnotic instruction, the glowing pink walls of the chamber — these are only set pieces designed to camouflage Louise’s true purpose in this scene: the strategic infliction of pain.
An emotionally dismantled version of Krystal, one who is no longer capable of harnessing her rage as motivation, poses less of a threat to the Garbeaus.
There are tears in Krystal’s eyes by the end of the ritual, and her the set of her jaw has visibly slackened.
Maybe it’s because Louise’s arguments have swayed her, or maybe she’s just tired of feeling angry, of fighting and being thwarted at every turn by Obie and his cohort, by her own comparative lack of resources, by the pain of being disbelieved and disrespected over and over again.
It’s hard to know whether we should root for Krystal’s continued defiance, or if we should simply hope for an end to her pain.
There something eerily enticing about the pantomime of domestic bliss at the end of episode, when Krystal sits meekly rocking her daughter in the nursery, waiting for Cody to come home. There is no conflict, no tension to be felt. It’s simple and easy.
But when Krystal reaches for Cody’s hand, and he in turn kisses Destinee’s balled fist, there’s also no emotion to be found on either of their faces; the gestures are devoid of feeling, and the entire scene is rendered meaningless.
On Becoming a God in Central Florida is at its best when it focuses on that space of uncertainty, tracing the muddy path between pain and tenderness and the footsteps of those who walk it.
What did you think of this episode of On Becoming a God in Central Florida? Share your thoughts in the comments below!
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On Becoming a God in Central Florida airs Sundays at 10/9c on Showtime.
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Ariel Udel
Ariel fell in love with storytelling on the night Flight 815 crashed on a mysterious island, and has been blogging about television ever since. She has an affinity for messy female anti-heroes and an enduring love of Battlestar Galactica, Xena: Warrior Princess, Lost, and Halt and Catch Fire.