This review series was requested by Carson Rebel. Many thanks to Carson for supporting Post-Credit Coda through our Patreon.
Other Reviews in This Series --- Assume Spoilers
Eulogy
The episode after "Two Storms" was inevitably going to scale back. You can't blame a show for peaking at the peak. We return to our 'monster of the week' format with a Dad-centric episode. In a way, we are relieved to fall back into the familiar narrative shape, and the prominence of his perspective last episode makes it feel as if we ought to get to know him better.
Can't they just talk to their Dad? Now Hugh (Timothy Hutton) approaches each of them in such a kind, open way. Stubborn, but gentle. The siblings' disgusted rebuffs of him may read as cruel from the outside, but the show is eager to contextualize. They cannot just talk to their Dad. Because he couldn't just talk to them.
Hugh's masculinity (Henry Thomas) is the crux of the flashbacks. The big, throbbing crux. Like many men, he has a Christ complex. He is committed to saving those around him as if appointed by heavenly mandate. He flips houses. He hyperfixates on Hill House's unexpected mold problem. He even insists that he can contain a family unit that is spiraling out of control. This pays off in perhaps the best scene of the episode, certainly Olivia's (Carla Gugino) best scene yet. "It just snuck up on me all of a sudden," she moans about her recent breakages. The cut to her contorted face is one of the most startling edits in the show.
The police who bookend the episode remind Hugh of his difficult position. This incursion of the law into their space belies a community beyond the walls of the house, one that is suspicious of abuse. Yet Hugh remains ever-determined. "I can fix this" is essentially his catch phrase. To wit: Hugh's masculinity. Unhealthy masculinity restricts men (and women) to a strict code, one that is confusing and impossible to adhere to. Men must believe that they wield the phallus, but the phallus does not exist. Not to be crass, but men who are insecure about their own manhood are clinging to the ghost of a cock that never was.
The only way through this is to have a relationship with your own lack, which Hugh characteristically refuses in his war against the infrastructural black mold. Any good war needs recruits, and his eldest son Steve becomes the pawn in his battle with atrophy. Steve just wants to help. Given how much subliminal anxiety his Dad passes along to him in this scene, we can see how a desire to help can become a compulsion to fix. This comes to boil when Hugh sticks his hand into the moving blades of a fan, having just asked Steve to unplug it. In a bit of perspectival tomfoolery that invokes Flanagan's haunted mirror film Oculus, the fan was still running despite both thinking otherwise. Now Hugh's wound reminds him of his fallibility, and Steve fails to live up to a standard that his own father fails. A standard that fails them both.
This episode contains fewer banner moments, and is relatively uneventful. It fills out the picture of a man who let his family decay because he believed it never could. Fixers fixate to get their fix.
7.5 / 10
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