![]() But, when Farid confronts his uncle for lying to him about her phone calls, Amir claims he was just protecting the boy from a woman “who mutilated her own son.” A flashback to Farid’s early childhood in Iran, in which his mom accuses him of putting his dad’s life in danger, seems to confirm that she was no perfect parent. And this is where things start to get really dark.įarid was already in rough emotional shape before he discovered that his mother had lived long enough to leave messages on Uncle Amir’s answering machine when Farid was still a kid. Still, his personality has been so broad and abrasive in previous episodes that I’m grateful for the new complexity, even if it feels somewhat inconsistent.Īs Ramon and Ashley consider the future, while Duc takes the next step in a career devoted to helping people make exactly those kinds of decisions about their futures, the older generation spends the episode stuck in the past. The monologue is, in fact, so eloquent and insightful that it threatens to contradict, rather than deepen, Duc’s character as we know it. For a glorified life coach who talks in self-help slogans, and whose repressed trauma apparently manifests itself as chronic diarrhea, he turns out to have a surprisingly healthy worldview. This is, by far, the most astute observation that Duc has ever made on the show. The idea of being a good person is just that - an idea, an abstraction. We are the sum total of our actions yesterday, today and tomorrow. We are not static, unchanging in our natures. I think living only in the present can be a cop-out. “How can we ignore our past? Those things happened. “But if we care only about right now, how do we move forward?” Duc asks. He acknowledges that Greg’s insistence that focusing on the present as the key to being a good person is tempting, because dwelling on the past fills you with regret, while an obsession with the future invites anxiety. This is all solid character development.ĭuc’s response is pretty great. So, when he finds out that she hasn’t told him about an opportunity that could have huge implications for their family, the conflict between the spouses finally (but inconclusively) explodes. Ashley’s recent, tentative embrace of her black identity also has her questioning her marriage to a white man. His lack of ambition clashes with her Type A personality and longing for a more exciting life than the one she has with him and their daughter, Hailey. Tensions between the two of them have been mounting since the premiere. One person Ashley doesn’t consult about the offer is her husband, Malcolm. Ramon, whom we’ll return to later, is facing a similar choice: Should he take a job with a company that might one day develop his game, even if that means starting at the bottom and working on other people’s projects first? Duc suggests that she may actually be scared of getting what she wants. They want to close her shop so that she’s free to help them build “a tool so that every shopper can create their own perfect store.” She tells her brothers that she’s worried that if she becomes someone else’s employee, she’ll lose control of her own life. In her first story line since the series premiere that isn’t primarily about her race, Ashley fields a larger company’s seven-figure offer to buy her clothing business. That reflection gave us a bit of welcome, if overdue, insight into the two Bayer-Boatwright kids whose ham-handed arcs have frustrated me for most of the season. It was also the first episode in which many of the characters were forced to think seriously about their futures. Although it didn’t actually feature any coldblooded killings, the episode, which is the penultimate chapter of Season 1, was the show’s darkest and best hour to date. ![]() “Get ready for the future: It is murder,” the prophet Leonard Cohen warned in one of his bleakest songs, “The Future.” That lyric popped into my head midway through this week’s episode of “Here and Now” and lingered there for quite a while afterward. ![]()
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