Shrinking tidily closes out Grace’s story
This week’s episode also highlights how anger can be both a catalyst for positive change and self-destruction.
Photo: Apple TV+
At the heart of Shrinking is a simple truism: All of us (therapists included) struggle with how to be good people. And sometimes, as many of the characters in this Jason Segel/Harrison Ford comedy do in this latest episode, that involves yelling out “Fuck you!” to those we love the most.
It’s that fuck-you attitude that opens the episode as Jimmy (Segel) tries to talk some sense into Donny (Tilky Jones). As it happens, the once-abusive husband who was thrown off a cliff by his wife, Grace (Heidi Gardner), has no time for conciliatory language—not when he’s still in physical therapy hoping to regain walking capabilities. He cusses out Jimmy and storms away. It means Jimmy doesn’t have the best news when he and Brian (Michael Urie) go visit Grace in prison, as she awaits word from the county as to whether the charges will be dropped or not. The two encounter a despondent woman who’s all too resigned to paying for the horrid thing she did. And not even learning the charges are dropped gets her to perk up. She believes she should be punished. What has the world come to if she can’t pay for trying to kill her abusive husband? (Note: This is a rather sunny vision of the American justice system, which doesn’t, IRL, seem to be so lenient to women in Grace’s position.)
Back at Jimmy’s office, and with her sister in tow, Grace insists she can’t really forgive herself for what she did—a challenge Jimmy is all too eager to take up. Because, of course, there’s no part of a patient’s life this therapist is not eager to meddle with. But all of that gets threaded with a simmering rift between Jimmy and Brian, a tiff that began when Brian realized his BFF hadn’t shared anything about his on-and-off hookups with Gaby (Jessica Williams) and which he’s now clung to as proof the two of them aren’t really all that close.
I’ll admit that little subplot felt particularly thin, an excuse to give Urie and Segel a chance to volley off one another insults (and a slap!) that were nevertheless designed to bring them together as they help Grace move on—something made all the harder when they see she’s gone back to Donny, thinking that caring for him in his current state is the atonement she needs. Ultimately, it’s Brian who manages to knock some sense into Grace when he shares the many character witness statements he’d gathered for the court where everyone had noted how selfless Grace could be and how that part of her had long been dimmed and wounded by Donny. In an all-too-tidy conclusion to her storyline, Grace seemingly painlessly extricates herself from Donny and heads up to Vancouver with her sister in a moving van. Tidy and neat seem to be how Shrinking balances out those “fuck yous” that litter its storylines this season.