The fourth and final season of "Crazy Ex-Girlfriend" wrapped last week, so it's time again for 7 Posts. For those not quite caught up, I'll alert you when I get into finale spoilers.
I found the car trip episode, well, honestly a little like a car trip with someone you generally haven't been alone in a confined space with for a long stretch in a while. It was partially an excuse to create usual character pairings. Paula and Josh have known each other a while. For a while Paula was so team Josh it was, well it was definitely not healthy. And in the way of friends, Rebecca and Josh have figured things out and come to a good place, and Paula, the dedicated friend who had fought for him, had felt just as invested in him, but of course got none of the apology directly, was still meh on Josh.
Rebecca of course hangs out with Darryl all the time. Her concern here is that Darryl is the best friend to have when you want to dive deep into your feelings and therefore, as she warned him, not the best friend when you want to have a day where you pretend everything is okay. And of course it was fair for Rebecca to state boundaries, but also endemic of these weird parameters we try to establish to maintain social norms. Saying let's go on a trip but please don't be yourself is not super fair. Rebecca is entirely within her rights to establish topics about herself that are off limits. But they were both asking too much of each other in the end and probably would have both been better off not trying to piece together a trip that was never going to live up to their imagined version of it.
Nathan and Heather obviously know each other and have mutual friends, but of course, Heather is a straight shooter to say the least, and Nathan is a pretty shallow well most days, so his interest in knowing who Heather was was pretty minimal. I felt the Nathan turns out to have a deep connection to the nanny the weakest part of this. It's a challenge because most of the time in this show goes to Rebecca, so Nathan's daddy issues had been clear and he certainly didn't have a good relationship with his mom, and it makes sense given what we know about his family that there would be a nanny. I just found the jerk has a squishy underside not as powerful as I felt like it was supposed to be. However, it's very possible that this was the point. Tons of shows have a character who seems mean, or shallow, or whatever suddenly reveal secret pain. ("Grey's Anatomy" even riffed on that, having Alex ask in an early season if he should reveal his secret pain to make everything okay.)
Nathan then spent several episodes telling people he was nice now. And the other characters reacted to that with a healthy amount of skepticism. Knowing he had secret depths of emotion for this one person in his life helped, but it didn't address or undo all the other behavior he had engaged in. And it shouldn't.
So much like a real car trip, there was good, there was bad, and we learned some things.
