In Treatment: Week four in review

As usual, I'm going to review all five of this week's "In Treatment" episodes together, giving a general overview of the week, followed by brief thoughts on each patient. Spoilers coming up just as soon as I get some pastries...

This is the midway point of season two (which is seven weeks compared to season one's nine), and so we see many barriers broken. Mia and Oliver both find themselves dining in Paul's kitchen, though only one of them is invited. Paul takes April to chemo (finally!). Walter shows up dressed casually, his career ruined. And the fifth episode is the first of the series to mostly break with the usual format, featuring three vignettes instead of one -- though all three are, in the series' usual style, two-character pieces. (Even Paul with his dad is a two-hander of sorts.)

And as various social and procedural barriers are broken, Paul and Gina start breaking through to their patients. Paul gets Mia to start thinking seriously about her relationship with her father. He gets April to put off her mother and finally place herself first in her own life. He starts talking to Bess as a person and not just Oliver's mother. And Gina finally gets Paul to go see his father, just this side of too late.

Amazing performances from everybody this week. Only three weeks to go. It seems to be going by awfully fast with this scheduling, doesn't it?

Mia

"That's pretty good. I thought I was just sleeping around." -Mia

Mia's been trying to push past Paul's own professional barriers throughout the season, but here it's not about entitlement, or about trying to justify the scenario she's built up in her head where Paul is the man responsible for her abortion. Instead, just like Alex hooking up with Laura last season, this is Mia trying to send a warning to Paul that she's in a real crisis and needs his full attention. And unlike a year ago -- perhaps because of a year ago -- Paul notices this time, and calls her on it.

And we get some more insight into Mia's self-destructiveness and how her relationship with her dad plays into that. He didn't molest her, apparently, but he held her emotionally closer than a father should, and it's messed her up.

Perhaps the most interesting part of the Mia story this week is what Paul says to Gina in the fifth episode: that, under different circumstances, if Mia could deal with her issues, she's the kind of woman he'd be interested in. That tracks with his attraction to the similarly-difficult Laura, and with the rapport he shows with her in the moments when she's not being an enormous pain in the rear. Where Paul's great with kids (even a young adult like April), there's often a greater tension between him and his grown-up patients, but there are moments when he and Mia are remarkably at ease with each other, and not just because they go so far back together.

I don't expect, or even want, Paul to wind up dating her -- he makes that clear to Gina, and I don't think he or the writers are foolish enough to go down that road twice in such rapid succession -- but I'm wondering what the ethical rules are here. Is he forbidden from ever seeing her romantically? I would think so -- he has so much power over her as her therapist that there's just too much possibility for abuse, for him to subtly mold her into someone who'd be attracted to him -- but I don't know, and I know we have some people with serious therapy experience (from either side of the couch) in the audience who might want to weigh in on this. It seems like a Paul/Mia relationship, down the road, would be much healthier than Paul/Laura, but it still seems inappropriate.

April

"What if I come with you to the hospital?" -Paul
"Would you?" -April
"Yes." -Paul
"Now?" -April
"Yes. Right now." -Paul

Thank. God.

Again, on the subject of ethical boundaries, I spent so much of this episode -- really, so much of the last two or three -- wondering where exactly the line is for Paul in this situation. He even admits to Gina, "I know it was wrong" to take April there, and I can see the reasons why under ordinary circumstances -- if April can't bring herself to go on her own, then Paul's just a crutch creating another emotional problem for her -- but these are desperate times when ordinary standards can't, or shouldn't, apply. April was slowly killing herself, and isn't Paul obligated to keep his patients from doing that?

The rest of this episode, in which Paul realizes April is doing this in part to avoid being stuck as Daniel's caretaker, was also incredible, but those last two minutes... damn. That's the strength of this show, and these performers, writers and directors: four weeks in, less than two hours total of this story, and I felt enormous relief at seeing Paul take the steps he took, and seeing April follow him to the doctor.

Oliver

"The moment they saw Oliver, it's like their daughter disappeared." -Bess

It's interesting that so much of this episode featured Bess solo without Oliver -- just as several of the Jake/Amy episodes featured one but not the other -- because the more we see of this story, the more obvious it becomes that there isn't a damn thing wrong with Oliver. He's in a terrible circumstance, and he's shutting down because of it, but the patients Paul needs to fix are Bess and Luke. Improve the situation -- improve how Bess and Luke behave with each other, and with Oliver -- and maybe Oliver will be bullied and deal with the other angst of a kid that age, but overall, he'd be fine.

While the stakes here aren't as high as with April, in some ways Paul inviting Oliver into the kitchen for a sandwich was just as satisfying as Paul taking April to chemo. The kid needs to be rescued, and if Paul is maybe setting up a dangerous situation where Oliver invests too much in Paul as a surrogate father, at least for that moment, Oliver was happy. (And he was eating.)

Walter

"Let's face it: death is just the final acknowledgment. The show's over." -Walter

Well, at least Walter's aware he has problems now.

Of course, he's primarily focusing on his external problems -- loss of a job, the ongoing public humiliation, the strained relationship with his daughter -- and only vaguely aware of all the inner torment that was really causing the sleeplessness that originally brought him to Paul's office.

Like Mia, and April and even starving Oliver, Walter seems perilously close to giving up on everything. And he's old enough and stubborn enough and powerful enough -- or, rather, has lost enough power -- that I don't know how Paul is going to stop him.

Tammy/Gina/Paul's dad

"We both know what it's like not to be there at the end. It's something you don't get over -- ever." -Gina

As with the April episode, I'm tempted just to dwell on the last couple of minutes, with Paul talking to his dying father and saying "Dad" over and over again, his voice getting weaker each time. (I defy the people who mocked Gabriel Byrne's Golden Globe win to watch that scene and still say he doesn't deserve awards for this performance. I'm not saying Jon Hamm isn't brilliant; just that Byrne is, too.)

But the rest of the episode was great, too, from all the time cuts in the deposition to how quickly the bloom went off the rose in Paul and Tammy's relationship, to the way Gina slowly but surely got Paul to do the one thing he had to, while he still could, in the same way that Paul went to save April.

Now, just as Paul taking April to chemo once isn't going to cure her emotional problems (let alone her physical ones), Paul going to see his father isn't going to fix all his family issues. But it's a big moment for him. What comes next?

What did everybody else think?