As Monday night’s episode opens, Paul is sitting in his office with his elaborate tea set, waiting for Sunil. He leaves message after message for Sunil and then Julia, but no one is getting back to him. So we begin this week instead with Frances. What a thankless job Debra Winger has taken on as Frances, the garden-variety narcissist. To add insult to injury her disorder has become so banal and over diagnosed that last week it was officially dumped from the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental  Disorders. And now no one really wants to hear about the poignant deathbed resolution with her sister because we’re wondering where the hell Sunil is. This is too bad. The Frances finale is actually quite a subtle and moving examination of issues most of us will be facing at some point in our lives, if we haven’t already — how simple living wills are in theory, and how difficult they often are in practice.



Frances has made some decisions that have probably extended Patricia’s life longer than Patricia might have wished. As a result she’s on artificial respiration. Izzy is angry, and Frances is now torturing herself with guilt, and to her credit, significantly less self-pity than usual. Paul is really wonderful here, both empathetic and clearheaded. He’s able to help her forgive herself, but get back on track, and this episode is a great reminder of what a good therapist he can be.



Frances is not a compelling character in her own right, but there is something compelling about the dynamic between her and Paul. Sure there have been some flirtations and fuzzy boundaries, but of his women patients so far, Frances is the one who he relates the most as a friend. They’re the same age, they share so much — divorce, grief, difficult children, and deep loneliness and unhappiness. There’s something touching about the way Paul gets her through this crisis. Frances rephrases some of the questions she had last week. Is she a narcissist? Is she curable? These questions never get answered, but it doesn’t seem to matter. What’s important in this episode is life and death, and doing the best we can do with our faulty personalities. At the door Frances asks Paul if he was in love with Patricia. “I cared about her very deeply,” he says. “She was a striking woman.”  Obviously he would probably say the same about Frances.




Finally we return to Paul’s office where he is now desperately trying to get in touch with Arun. According to Arun’s secretary on Friday night Sunil was taken into custody and is now being held in a detention center. Paul goes to visit him and the Sunil who is led into the visitor’s cubicle has a very different energy than the Sunil we’ve known in Paul’s office. There’s a depth and intensity to his gaze that is quite chilling, and it’s hard to tell whether Sunil is happy to see Paul or not. 



It turns out, after Paul called Julia to express his concern for her safety, Julia called the police to charge Sunil with assault over the bookcase-pushing incident. When Sunil refused to show the police his papers he was arrested. Both Julia and Arun seem to have abandoned him, and he is now awaiting deportation back to India. Paul is, needless to say, distressed. He offers to do what he can to clear up the situation, but Sunil refuses his help. Gradually it dawns on Paul that this has been Sunil’s plan all along. After Arun refused to let him go back to India, Sunil hatched up a plan to convince Paul and Julia that he was dangerous. This was, tragically, not as difficult as it should have been. He knew that once he refused to supply his identification papers his deportation would be inevitable.



Paul is furious, in part because he’s been used, in part because Sunil’s plan seems to self-destructive, but also no doubt because he was so focused on Sunil and Julia’s relationship, and what he imagined about it, that he never worked on what Sunil really needed: a realistic plan towards finding some dignity and community in this country.

Sure it would have been nice if Paul had taken a more practical approach and encouraged Sunil to join a cricket club, make some friends in the ex-pat community, or get some work as a math tutor. But there’s a dignity to Sunil’s craziness that’s impossible not to enjoy. The price for his return to India, however, is the alienation of what is left of his family. He has probably lost his chance to ever see his grandchildren grow up. And when Paul mentions this it’s hard not miss the deep pain in Sunil’s eyes. But he can’t live like this, infantilized, disrespected, under the control of a woman he so clearly loathes

There’s serenity and an authenticity to him now, as though we’re seeing him as he really is for the first time. “Something has opened in me,” he says and Khan’s performance here is magic. People will probably be arguing over Sunil’s true intentions and speculating over his fate for years to come. We do find out that Malini was pregnant. Maybe Sunil will visit her family to make amends, or maybe he’ll visit her watery grave. He’s enough of a self-immolating romantic that it’s easy to imagine him following her there. But he’s also a canny survivor. “I’ve been voted off the island,” he says to Paul at one point. As he sings the farewell song to Paul, an exotic, and heartbreaking gesture that shows both the strangeness and the strength of their connection, it’s clear how deeply Sunil has changed Paul’s sense of the world. He may have been banished, but he’s very far from ever being forgotten.

What is real today, however, is Jesse’s sadness. This disappointment with his birth parents, assuming they have actually contacted him, seems to have muted his usual anger and forced him to confront his feelings of abandonment. He sounds a little more mature. He asks Paul how Max is (when he left, the kitchen was on fire, which Jesse assumes Max set on purpose). He also recognizes that he shouldn’t have shown up at their house.

Jesse’s plan for his birthday is to ride the glass elevator alone at the Marriott. He likes the peaceful atrium. Paul has some legitimate concerns that spending his ”national gay holiday” birthday alone at a hotel might not be the healthy option. Jesse invites Paul out for ice cream. But Paul seems to have developed a stronger sense of boundaries since last week. He knows that being a substitute dad for Jesse is not a healthy option either.

Jesse asks Paul again how Max is. Paul looks alarmed and very relieved that Max is now living in Baltimore. Paul insists he call Roberto and spend his birthday with his adoptive parents. Whatever difficulties they’ve had understanding Jesse, this couple has been a rock for him, always there, continuing to pay for therapy no matter what (yes I’m talking to you, Julia).  Renewing his relationship and respect for them does in many ways seem to be the best path for Jesse to be on right now.

But Jesse seems resistant. He has a new reparative fantasy. He will use the pictures he took of his birth brother in the wheelchair, and his whole birth parent abandonment story, and make a portfolio to apply to the Frick program. Suddenly we’re back to the possibility that this is all a very effective performance piece. Next week is the last episode and we find out whether Jesse is heading in a new more self-aware direction. Or if this is the first time Paul has been unable to reach one of his younger patients.


Yesterday I confessed my fantasy that Adele was raising test tube babies with Julianne Moore, and that this would make Paul look like even more of a narcissistic goof. So when it looked as though Adele had Paul on her mind so much that she was calling him first thing in the morning, I reset my fantasy meter for an erotic-counter-transference jackpot session. And whoa, baby! Talk about penultimate episode payoff!

After some early therapy/date chit chat about Paul’s psychosomatic Parkinson’s, Adele starts to gently hound Paul to “take action” in his life. Therapy seems to be the one place on the planet where men fall passionately in love with women who start their relationship by nagging them to be more pro-active. Paul wants to know why it is she called him. Adele says that she’s worried that she didn’t give him enough time to discuss the situation with Sunil. And that she’s worried because there are “young children” in the house.

Paul is a bit surprised she’s worried enough to call him from her home at 7:30 in the morning. When Adele starts to dig a little for more details about this week’s session with Sunil, Paul deftly turns it around to a discussion about his “fantasy.” Adele looks a little disingenuous when she says, “Which fantasy is that?” The one where they discuss their difficult patients, says Paul. When Adele repeats the fantasy back to him she remembers the candlelight but adds a glass of red wine. Paul catches the slip and starts to move in for the kill. He says he just wants to know “what is happening here.” Adele encourages him to keep going and tells him, softly, to “tell me what you think is happening.” Then the phone rings. Adele forgot to turn the buzzer off, and when she gets up to do so, she instinctively rubs her belly in a way that makes it suddenly obvious that she’s pregnant.

Paul is p-i-s-s-e-d. He doesn’t want to talk about his fantasy anymore. He feels that she’s deliberately set him up for humiliation. He accuses Adele of being a “Freudian ice queen” who has been deliberately egging him on for her own narcissistic gratification. He imagines that Adele is in a  “happy relationship with a grown family.” We know this isn’t true, since there’s no way a grown family is living in Adele’s sparse apartment, and her bed seems a little small for her and a partner. But we now have an alternative explanation for why she was calling Paul so early in the morning. Maybe she was having one of those pregnant woman intuition dreams.

I’m still not convinced Sunil is dangerous to Julia, and Paul has some legitimate concerns that, unfortunately, Adele doesn’t give him a chance to explore, now that she’s the protector of young children. Whatever Paul’s flaws, he does have 20 years of experience, so there is reason to trust his instincts. But Paul has, mysteriously, never broached the possibility that Sunil might be experiencing suicidal feelings. The first thing Sunil ever said to Paul was a carefully rehearsed story about a man in his parents’ village who hung himself with a feces-smeared sari. Back then Sunil insisted he wasn’t crazy like that, which in therapy talk usually means he’s crazy like that.

Unlike Adele, I respect Paul’s gut decisions. But I’m worried he might be in denial about the reason why he’s so desperate to protect their therapeutic bond: that he has a blind spot when it comes to suicide because of his mother. Every season Paul has almost lost a patient to suicide. And there’s good reason to believe that he lost Alex, even if the case was thrown out of court. If Adele knew more about Paul, I wonder if she might realize that this is where his negligence usually lies.

Paul accuses Adele of taking Julia’s side, which is ironic since that’s pretty much what Paul has done since Week One. But Adele’s not pleased that Sunil has handed Paul a “weapon,” the menacing cricket bat. Or that Paul is doing nothing about it. She makes a pretty strong case for the possibility that Paul may be sabotaging his own career by allowing a potentially dangerous situation to explode. Maybe she’s right. But maybe she’s falling into the Gina trap of seeing Paul as an incompetent.

His confidence shaken, Paul goes home and calls Julia. This I hope will come as a relief for viewers who believe that Julia is at risk. In the best-case scenario she is safe and Sunil will have made enough progress to understand why Paul did what he did. Hopefully Paul will have handled this in a way that won’t damage their trust. But if Sunil shows up in the Hudson with rocks in his pockets, this plot development didn’t come from left field. That possibility was always obvious.

 In the meantime, as a distraction during the  very long week until the finale, I am now taking bets on which kind of creature Dane DeHaan will play in “True Blood.”  I think we can safely rule out werewolf. This leaves fairy, warlock, vampire, or were-panther/methhead. He’s such an impressively versatile young actor this is a true crapshoot.

One thing that I’ve always found a bit strange about Paul’s strategy with Sunil is that he’s encouraged Sunil to express his anger, but contrary to what Julia imagines, I can’t remember a single time he’s ever sympathized with it. In fact, usually he’s too quick to see Julia’s side. We can see that in this session, when Sunil starts to tell his side of the argument. The hostilities began when he couldn’t bear seeing his grandchildren watch ”Finding Nemo” for the 18th time, and decided to teach them a Bengali folksong. According to Sunil, Julia came into the room furious. Paul immediately interjects with, “Well, as I remember, she had asked you not to teach them Bengali.” Sunil points out the obvious. “It’s a song.” No less dangerous to their language  development than 18 viewings of the same movie. Finally, six weeks into his treatment, Paul grants Sunil the dignity of having a reason to feel insulted. But soon enough we’re back to  pathologising Sunil’s anger whenever it come up. 

Did Sunil accidentally push her into the bookcase, as he was rushing to get out of the room, as he claims? Or was there some intentionality behind it? Sunil tells Paul that this Bengali “Goodbye Song” was one he used to sing to Arun. But now Arun has sided with Julia and they have told Sunil that he’s going to have to live in the basement and can’t be around the children anymore.

Sunil looks lost, hopeless, humiliated and at the point of complete despair. He asks Paul to keep a broken cricket bat he’s found in the Park “to remember him by” (suddenly I hear Adele in my head, “You even brought a prop.”) But instead of focusing, even just a bit, on Sunil’s sadness and shame we’re back to Julia’s safety.

Finally Sunil says that he wants Paul to keep the cricket bat because he’s afraid he might hit Julia with it. Great. Sunil has admitted to violent thoughts. Now we can institutionalize him and take away his $25 allowance, the unhealthy candy, and what tiny little scrap of dignity he has left. If nothing else, he’s handed Paul a reason to ensure that he will continue therapy.

Maybe I’m wrong and he’ll kill Julia. But Julia doesn’t strike me as the kind of woman who would hesitate to call the police if she really believed she was in danger. Paul begs Sunil to return next week. Sunil leaves with an ominous prophecy: “You will have one more chance to help me. I assure you.”

Next week: Sunil hurts himself or Julia. Or hopefully, Sunil and Paul figure out that the final check can be split into a bunch of sliding scale payments that would allow Sunil a few more months of treatment until he eventually finds himself a cricket team.



Before the session with Frances, we get a glimpse into Adele’s private life. Damn, there goes my fantasy that she’s living with Julianne Moore and raising sperm donor babies. Wouldn’t that make Paul look silly!  But the first thing Adele thinks about when she rolls out of the sunny bed, in which she seems to sleep in alone, is Paul. At the breakfast table she phones him and leaves a message that she suddenly has an extra appointment free if he wants it. She punctuates this with one “okay” too many. Then she girlishly draws up her knees, and looks like she’s going to sit there and wait for him to call.

Finally this week I realize what a great acting job Debra Winger is doing. I still don’t like Frances, but there are enough human moments here to make it very clear that Winger has been giving a very unselfish performance. It must be hard to play such an unflattering narcissist. But she’s committed.

The narcissism is finally a topic raised directly in Paul’s office. Daughter Izzy has been reading Alice Miller’s “The Drama of the Gifted Child” (which Frances calls “The Gift of the Dramatic Child”) and has decided that her mother perfectly fits the role of self-absorbed, emotionally empty drama queen. Of course no woman who has ever read that book didn’t end up thinking her mother was a narcissist but, still.

Also, Patricia is in the hospital. You’d think this might be information Frances would lead with, but Paul has to prod it out of her. Frances has been to see her. In fact Frances even missed curtain call of opening night after Patricia left a phone message. “I’m sorry, Franny. I think this is it. I need help. ” Frances rushed over to her apartment, lifted her out of a puddle of urine, bathed her and tended to her until it was clear she needed to call an ambulance. The sisters share a moment of genuine affection, and Patricia tells Frances she loves her. Paul gets choked up. Makes you wonder if he’s thinking about the dying father he avoided last year until it was too late. But there’s something suspicious about France’s sudden decision to quit the play and move in with Patricia full time. Almost like caregiver is a new role she never expected to get.

Paul gently suggests that this may be more about her own needs than her sister’s. Frances returns to a discussion of her relationship with Izzy who thinks Frances is wasting her time in therapy because true narcissists can never get better.

Frances asks Paul flat out whether he thinks that’s true. Paul says: “Well I think that it’s…” and then there’s a knock on the door. It’s Izzy. Patricia has gone into I.C.U. after a seizure. Izzy, though a little snarky, seems suspiciously solicitous of her mother. This gives me hope that Frances is not an incurable narcissist. With some work Paul may be able dial her down to a merely annoying narcissist. 



Another reason to watch tonight: Dane DeHaan (Jesse) recently tweeted that he’ll be on next season of “True Blood.”  

As Jesse suspected last week, they are “kinda assholes.” Although this may be somewhat genetic, since Jesse then proceeds to offer them blood, or organs, or whatever it is he suspects they might want for their “sickly child,” in exchange for tuition to art school. This is when, according to Jesse, they “kicked him out.”

Why do I find Jesse so endearing? Why do I laugh when Jesse complains bitterly about the fact that he dressed up and even wore the prep school tie that Nate gave him, because Nate didn’t want it anymore after Jesse tied him up and “got cum all over it”? How does Dane DeHaan make that line sound so childlike and goofy? And how does he make Jesse’s self-loathing so incredibly visceral? I’ve read talk about Irrfan Khan’s performance being Emmy-worthy this season. But this scene on the stairs, where Jesse falls apart, realizing how deeply and maybe irreparably self-sabotaging he is, just broke my heart.

The fire alarm goes off. Max is standing over a flaming batch of pancakes. And Paul finally realizes that his office/apartment/mole cave of blurry boundaries, provocative teenagers and angry fathers-in-law from exotic complicated countries, does not, right now, feel like the best place to raise a 12-year-old.  
He drives Max to Baltimore, to Max’s gorgeous new house with his very competent mother and loving architect soon-to-be stepfather. Then he drives back to his session with Adele, arriving late with a brown paper bag containing a just purchased bottle of pain killers. These he plans to keep in her medicine cabinet to celebrate her new therapist/fantasy-girlfriend status.

For five minutes he’s the traumatized heroic father who must give up his son because, he claims, that’s what his son really wants. But as Adele starts to dig she gets a little closer to the truth: that he gave Max up after realizing the mistake of over-bonding with the kind of patient who refers to Max, in a moment of rage, as “your fagotty son.”

To avoid further digging, Paul decides that this would be the moment to accuse Adele of neglecting the important issue of his romantic transference. As promised last week, Adele allows him to explore these feelings, but only until  4:47 p.m., around the time that Paul is imagining them having a candlelit dinner conversation about whether or not Sunil is homicidal. At which point, Adele visibly expresses her profound irritation, and reminds Paul that their session is almost over. 

Paul starts freaking out because three minutes is not nearly enough time for Adele to decide whether or not Sunil will kill Julia this week. Then he becomes enraged because he is sure that if one of his patients was a therapist with a possibly homicidal patient (who Paul obviously does not actually believe is homicidal) he would give him or her at least five or ten extra minutes.

Now Paul only has enough time to reveal that last week he stood outside Adele’s office for an entire hour to see if she had any other patients after him. Adele gets a fleeting look of alarm on her face, as though any minute  Paul might start muttering in Bengali and start threatening to “smother her laughter.” Except she’s not laughing. She’s taking Paul’s obstinate refusal to look clearly at himself, and his increasingly disturbing behavior, seriously.

And then, because it’s already 5:55 she kicks him out of her office and tells him to take the painkillers with him. Ouch.

It’s a disturbing episode on many levels. Arun has left for several days on a medical conference and Julia has let it be known that she doesn’t want to be alone with Sunil. Paranoid about Julia and the Pale Fox, Ethan Barr, Sunil believes he hears them laughing about him on their way out to another evening event  (Do New York agents really spend this much face time with their clients? Or are Sunil’s suspicions somewhat justified?). He talks about wanting to “smother” her laughter, and Paul grows alarmed. Later Julia strokes Barr’s face when saying goodbye, and Sunil thinks he hears her locking her bedroom door. Sunil is incensed on Arun’s behalf. Julia is “humiliating” his family. He has a nightmare about protecting them from some dark haired woman. When he wakes up, he goes to check on his grandchildren and then out of curiosity checks to see if Julia’s bedroom is indeed locked. It is. Paul confronts him on what he would have “done” if the door hadn’t been locked. Sunil doesn’t say. My money would be on the probability that he was going to look at her again, like he did last week when he watched her and Arun sleeping. Or maybe even not open the door. I don’t think he would have killed her.

I’m basing this on some informal research, since I don’t like assuming someone is capable of murder just because of my spotty North American knowledge of his culture. From what I read last week, honor killings in contemporary Bengali culture are rare to non-existent. According to Human Rights Watch, it’s a serious problem in the north of the country, not in the south, where Sunil comes from. The region does, however, lead India in suicides. Even if it didn’t, over the course of four sessions Sunil has mentioned two, the man who strangled himself with the feces smeared sari of his aunt, and Melini killing herself, Virginia Woolf style, with Sunil’s coat.

Interwoven with all his menacing, but possibly figurative language, are all the classic signs of someone who is a high suicide risk, in particular Sunil’s deep feelings of helplessness and his stubborn tunnel vision. Paul obviously senses this since he has told Sunil to call him anytime of the night and urged him to come more often. But the really classic pre-suicide sign, as we learned with Alex two seasons ago, is a sudden suspicious sense of renewed optimism and drive.

Next week is the penultimate episode. My guess is that we will learn what Sunil means when he says, “you have no idea what my life has been like.” This hints at some deeply shaming secret he has been carrying around. But if Sunil walks in and out of that office looking like he suddenly has a new lease on life, that’s when I’m really going to start panicking. 

I wish I could care this much about Frances. As her episode opens, she is finding it difficult to tolerate a few moments of silence with Paul. Perhaps this reminds her of the emptiness inside her, the place where people normally keep their souls.

Are the TV gods punishing me for last weeks request for more “In Treatment” sex talk? Do I really want to hear about how Frances finally got laid? This, right after her daughter texted her that she should go see her dying sister, Patricia, who “looks like a skeleton.” Yes, sadly, I do because it’s hard to ignore the magical way Gabriel Byrne pronounces the word “breasts.” There are many reasons to repeat this word. Frances takes delight in the fact that the 25-year-old cast member she followed home still likes hers. There are tests results that Frances hasn’t had the courage to read yet, but she insists no matter what they are, she’s not having that double mastectomy, even if it leaves her daughter motherless. Paul reads the results, which are negative. They rejoice.

And then we find out that avoiding discussion of the test has all been another excuse to avoid seeing her dying sister. Because, of course, now that she’s going to live, she can’t possibly visit her because that would be like rubbing it in her face. 

“You’re very angry with your sister,” Paul observes. Frances counters, nastily, with what she thinks is a huge dramatic revelation. Her sister was in love with Paul! Yes, just like every female patient he’s ever had, even without a reason for Paul to keep saying breasts. Paul tells her she needs to see Patricia before it’s too late. Frances runs out. Where? Who cares if it’s not to her sister’s bedside?  

Please TV gods, if you’re listening. You can take the sex talk back in exchange for one week without Frances and a double session with Sunil. To show my good faith, I’ll  sacrifice “Sarah Palin’s Alaska” for the rest of my life, and not watch the Ponderosa bonus online scenes from “Survivor: Nicaragua.” 

Although just to be clear, this covenant would obviously only take effect next week, after tonight’s session with Adele. And, yes, I know he’s not real, but please keep an eye on Sunil, and watch out for his fictional monsoon-stricken family.