In Treatment: Season 2, Week 5

One line I keep coming back to from the first season of In Treatment is when Paul says he could never be an author because he would want to give all of his characters happy endings. Paul has a deep-seated desire to fix people but he's such a mess himself that he frequently ends up letting his own personal need to be fixed get in the way of helping his patients. And of course, there's always the question of whether or not people can really ever be fixed in the first place.

All of this season's patients may very well be beyond the point of fixing. For most of them it seems to be more an issue of mere survival. Mia is certainly in way too deep to ever fully recover. Her bombshell for the week (and this was a week full of them) is that the wild weekend she described in her last session has resulted in the world's most ironic pregnancy. She's now in a twisted version of the same situation that brought her Paul twenty years ago. Does she keep this baby as a last bid for motherhood, or does she abort because of her obvious emotional issues? No matter what she decides there is some pretty heavy baggage that comes along with it. The question now is how deep she's going to pull Paul into this drama.

Paul himself has had other things on his mind lately. We learn that there was actually a gap of an extra week between all of his sessions because his father passed away. Each of his patients reacts to his necessary absence in a different, though equally selfish way. For April the shock was especially difficult. Now that Paul has allowed himself to be April's guardian throughout her chemo, she places an extra burden on him that clearly crosses the line for a therapist/patient relationship. April comes into her session with a mix of anger for perceived abandonment and a clearly unhealthy mental concept of Paul as a father figure.

Oliver's session occurs sans Bess, which I can't say is a surprise. Momma-Crazy has extended her vacation for an extra week, obviously thrilled to not be a mother for the first time in over a decade. In the interim, Luke has had to deal with the repercussions of having Oliver around for more than a couple days at a time. He's fighting with his new girlfriend because of it and he can't keep up with his previous attempts to over-compensate with Oliver. Still, Luke is the more sympathetic parent in this story. He's got his own daddy issues to work through, unlike Bess who is just nuts. As for Oliver, he comes bearing yet more depressing news about his daily life. Paul has started to take the petty schoolboy assaults on Oliver personally, most likely as a way to have a sort of surrogate son in Oliver.

For Walter we get a change of venue. While Paul was away, Walter attempted suicide. Paul visits him in the hospital and gets to meet some of his family, including the prodigal daughter, Natalie. Walter is such an interesting character because he's a pragmatist, but one motivated by deep emotional scars. He describes how he set up his own death to make it look like an accident so he wouldn't cause his family any extra duress. On the other side of Walter, he's hopelessly idealistic. He has gone to such great lengths to convince himself that all of the people in his life are spotless and amazing that he neglects to even inform Paul that his wife is a struggling addict. Paul has to get that news from Natalie.

How Paul can manage to be a therapist to his patients when he's so busy with his own dramas is beyond me. In the ongoing malpractice suit, Paul's insurance company is offering a settlement. Alex's father has asked Paul to write a letter admitting that he is to blame for Alex's death, promising to take the settlement in exchange. Doing so might save Paul's career, but at the cost of his own mental well being. Paul's session with Gina focuses mostly on his father and just how misplaced Paul's anger toward him always was. As Paul describes his perceptions of all the people left in his life, the only thing that's apparent is that he is hopelessly confused and increasingly alone in the world.

Week Rating: 4.5/5- There were so many good moments throughout each episode and things are getting delightfully twisty, though I can't help but feel this season is tying itself in knots that it just doesn't have enough time to unravel. With only two more episodes left for each patient, it's going to take some pretty heavy stuff to make these plots resolve in a satisfying way.