‘Better Things’ Recap: Royal Flush Medical exams, mask-party dreams and the joy of shitting — welcome to the show’s most surreal, scatological episode yet But Max goes too far when she says Sam no longer knows what it’s like to be a woman.After another typically lovely opening scene, in which Sam fitfully performs Elton John’s “Someone Saved My Life Tonight” for an audience of herself, she’s off to run yet another gauntlet. Sam meets her friends for Father's day, and each say how they broke up with their partner. Please do not use ALL CAPS.
When Sam’s lips begin to form words, we have no idea what she’s going to say, but “cunt” isn’t the first thing to come to mind. It is, like the Xander scene last week, crackling with ambiguity, while also serving as an effective distraction for Sam from this cancer scare. As all of the Fox women (minus Phil) take a moment to admire Duke’s poise while cradling a wild animal, it’s hard not to think of what it’s been like for Sam to raise these girls on her own. The card-playing fivesome discusses #MeToo and consequences—Gloria recognizes her father’s bad behavior, while Phil shrugs off the advances of her former co-workers, insisting it was all part of the way things worked back then. Because it’s a way to feel powerful at a moment when the wait for her test results have left her feeling utterly powerless? But Sam’s also passed down her nurturing side, though Duke is the one who has primarily demonstrated it this season. Sam’s famous sense of humor kicks in as she takes in the image of this epithet-filled showdown with her eldest. After Duke swaddles the owl that found its way into Sam’s room, even her mother stands in awe of her. Max is being unrelentingly selfish, chiding her mom for everything from not doing enough laundry to not telling the girls she hadn’t gotten to all of the laundry, the run-in with the owl and Pepper’s injury notwithstanding. She’s struggled with peri-menopause, if her El Camino purchase is any indication.
More ‘SHE’S FIFTY’ In the night’s second episode, Sam’s minivan is stolen from a mechanic’s lot, and she’s not-so-secretly happy about it. Save. The Season 4 finale will air as scheduled on April 30, because the full season had finished filming ahead of coronavirus-related network production shutdowns. But she can take some comfort in knowing that she had a hand in Duke’s Dr. Dolittle ways.Sam shares Patrick’s raunchy, vaudevillian sense of humor—we already know how well she handles herself among swaggering men—but she’s dropped by to collect some spit, not to shoot the breeze. And the sigh we let out as viewers isn’t just relief that the argument is over, but that it took place.Sam has dealt with unsettling news and unpleasant bedside manners from doctors before; it wasn’t that long ago that one physician bluntly told her that she was aging out of (reproductive) usefulness. She more than holds her own against her TV mom, showing the same infinitesimal shifts in her expression when she hears that word lobbed at her for the first time (from her mom, anyway).