Season 3, Episode 8, “Ice Chips”

(Editor’s note: A recap of episode nine will be published July 9. This recap contains spoilers.)

It’s recommended to make a fun game out of this (though you probably shouldn’t): Take a shot this season every time Natalie asks someone “Are you okay?” or “Are you good?” She feels that this is the job she has to do in this world – to make sure everyone around her feels comfortable and taken care of. Because if they don’t, they can activate it. And all the years to come will end, and she’ll be back where she started: in Dee Dee’s territory, helpless to keep the beast away. There’s a reason everyone calls it sugar.

In the first part of “Ice Chips”, he is the person who is neither okay, nor comfortable, nor taken care of. She’s been completely rejected in rush hour traffic, her trunk is full of C-folds and a baby has just struggled out of her womb. Pete is on a plane, and no one at The Undergo is answering his phone. So Nat tightens her literal and figurative belt and decides she’s moving in for a long, long era.

Articles about society with borderline character dysfunction – and Donna Barzato is a textbook case – are that they need to be wanted and so they want to be sought out. Their love is of the egotistical, suffocating kind, and it comes with more fables than a spider’s web. And at times, the only way to resign with your sanity intact is to break off the relationship altogether – especially when the person ends the scene driving a car through the wall of their private area.

However, I’ll give it to Dee Dee: She doesn’t have to struggle with sneaking up on you. “Honey! Honey! Honey! Honey! Honey!” She scatters around the sanatorium parking lot, getting louder and louder until she pounces like a vampire on her daughter, who has finally received the invitation she’s been waiting for. She starts shouting further, “Alas! Hi! Hi!” Immediately into Nat’s ear, which does the opposite of calming his uneasiness. And we haven’t even made it into the lobby yet.

At no stage in the episode does Donna take her palms off Nat’s, essentially squeezing his shoulders, caressing his hair, and tempting his palm. However, its meaning changes when she finally learns how to stock up on her daughter without suffocating her.

Episode director Joanna Callow films “Ice Chips” usually in the final close-up, which cuts back and forth between the mother and daughter’s faces. The effect is almost unbearably intimate: we can see every rivugle of mascara melting under Nat’s gaze and Donna’s mouth furrowing deeply every time she furrows her brows, which happens slowly. .

It also gives us a chance to observe the excellent performances of Jamie Lee Curtis and Abby Elliot in the forensic feature. Like her personality, Elliot has always been a peaceful, reserved supporting player to pass on, Which is initially a performance about male intimacy. On the other hand, this episode is more or less ready for a legacy than what happens among Michelin-starred chefs. Where Carmi’s emotions are packed as tightly as layers of mille-feuille, her sister’s emotions always seem normal. However, this doesn’t make a perceptible accumulation of nets ruthless – and Elliot is generous in revealing as much of her personality as she hides.

She and Curtis feed off the power of each choice so beautifully that the years of affection and rancor between them feel genuinely touching. From her handshake to her innocent laugh, Curtis’s Donna feels more like a possession than a performance. (If anyone is “haunting” Season 3, it sure isn’t Fat Neil.) Speaking as someone who — full disclosure — grew up with a marginal parent, his personality But its impact is at a terrible level.

Nate may be the person who is about to give birth, but in the sanatorium room, it’s the D-D display. She is telling the carer the story of the night she gave birth to Mickey, back when obstetricians were only “men who said such things”. The reason is that she lacks the ability to have a child? She wanted someone to like her the way she “appeared at Jewel with all those complacent mothers blocking the aisles with their strollers.”

Horrified by the position she’s put herself in, Nat says something like this: Hey, any words of respect from Pete? (I know you’re trying to do everything, but don’t let this woman stop you from yelling!) Donna calls when Nate says she doesn’t need an epidural. Which might be totally effective, if its underlying motivation weren’t so scary: “Why not see if I can take the pain?” Wow!

After all, that pain is an accumulation. Joanna Callow makes us really realize the price of each contraction, as Nate finally hands over the “he” (managing a café doesn’t waste a lot of time for Lamaze classes) and it turns out that Good looking, efficient. Emotionally, Donna may be a child, but she knows what she’s talking about when she talks about getting by hard. And yes, Nat probably gets that epidural along with a side of Pitocin.

To distract herself from the pain each inflicts and to distract her mother from asking questions she is no longer able to answer, Nat investigates the story of her brothers’ births. They were both difficult: Mickey was “twisted” inside Donna, and Carmi’s supplies were “messed up all over”. (This tracks with how any one of those tormented souls might have preferred to remain in the womb, safe from the slings and arrows of the outside world.)

In the past few episodes, Mikey has waxed poetic about how the most special moments of the year revolve around food. And while a plastic cup of ice chips isn’t exactly Christmas dinner, it’s clear from Nate and Donna’s smiles that this is the most productive meal they’ve shared in years. As the deep ice between them begins to melt, Dee Dee asks her daughter if the reason she didn’t tell her about the baby was because she didn’t want him around. Not so, no longer modest: Nat wishes she had a mother in this child’s year; He just doesn’t want the stuff she brings with her. “I don’t want him to be scared like I was.”

If there’s ever a year when Donna can have the receptive abundance – and calm abundance – to accept her daughter’s explanations of the techniques she does, this is the year. Nat admits that she always thinks society is angry at her, that she always puts the wishes of others before her own – especially her mother’s. Donna thinks it’s candy, even though it’s out of sugar: “No, it’s not sweet. This is messed up, mom! I made myself sick to make you feel better.

And, miraculously, Donna gets it. he is The reason why Natalie lives in a constant state of anxiety – and why she’s terrified that when this baby is born she’ll replicate the cycle of abuse. BPD is a disease that can spread quickly if you’re not careful, and it’s often passed from mother to daughter. (When Nat mentions that she doesn’t listen to her grandmother, Donna says irritably, “You don’t want to do that.”)

Then Nate asks to hear her personal story. There is nothing demonstrative about the smile that lights up Donna’s face when she describes the dream she had the night her daughter was born: It’s about a beauty worth noticing on a playground. Is in where no one else thinks of coming and there is less than that. The proportions that look good with another person. It’s almost less to be understood, and in the case of being understood, less to feel rejected. And this is just some extra accumulation from the ordinary Seven fishes

By the time Pete arrives to find Donna holding Nat in her arms, either of them swaying to the Ronettes’ “Baby, I Love You”, the gravity within the room has changed: The First Generation. For this year, Natalie is the center of her mother’s world instead of the alternative method. This is the best reward that Dee Dee could give him. And she knows that Pete’s arrival is a sign of her abandonment – ​​because, heartbreakingly, Nat’s dream of “something really good” being born to the newborn can only be fulfilled in her absence.

In “legacy,” Carmi told her fellow chefs that the only way for them to truly feel like they’ve left a favorable mark on the world is to ”treat everything and everyone the same.” Her For, it is a pipe dream; However, for the women of their society, at least nowadays, this is the practice.

I expected “Ice Chips” to be off to a bad start and, at worst, like “Fishes.” (I don’t know about you, but I was pretty sure Donna was lying when she assured Nate that she called Pete.) But Callow and episode editor Christopher Storer Give us something far more cathartic—and far more unexpected.

stray observations

• It’s horrifying – and telling – that the first person Nat thinks of naming Pete after is not Carmi but Sydney. Despite the fact that she has known Sid best for a few years, Nat trusts him completely. Her brother, the boy who wanted to stay in the womb as long as possible, is no longer so.
• That’s Richie’s voicemail message”Yo! Not available” just seems so reasonable.
• It may be a small thing, but when a caregiver is on loudspeaker calling for a mother needing “hands” to revive her, it doesn’t seem like an afterthought. A sanatorium is a massive kitchen, the best part infinitely high.
• “It’s not calming me down!” “It is. It’s calming you down.” I’ll no doubt be discussing this mother-daughter treatment the next day.
• Because Donna doesn’t know the meaning of boundaries, the back massage she gives Nate turns into a brief grope. “You have your father’s ass. He had a nice ass.

• Speaking of Barzato’s patriarch, he is a looming presence in the room by his absence. He was MIA for Mickey and Nate’s delivery, but he was there for Carmi’s delivery – and he made things pretty bad.
• Those ice chips actually taste delicious.