2x06 Let's Face the Music and Dance

[7.7/10] This is a great Abe episode. His world falls down around him. We see the aftermath of him witnessing Midge’s act: his inability to speak, his sudden distaste for tomato juice, his sullen mood at breakfast the next day. Tony Shaloub does a great job selling the roiling frustrations of the man beneath his disciplined demeanor.

That extends to the scene between him and Midge on the patio, where he’s aghast at his daughter’s choices and swears her to secrecy from her mother over it. He’s clearly in shock for all the obvious reasons, and someone like Abe would plainly view comedy as a useless frivolity. But Midge stands her ground on it as a profession, even as she acquiesces to “laying low” from her mother.

I gotta be honest. That sounds like a bad idea. Keeping Joel’s attempt to return from Rose already sent her packing to Paris. As chagrined as she’s going to be upon learning that her daughter is a comedian, it’ll be that much worse on a second go around if she discovers that her husband and her daughter were conspiring to keep something from her again.

Despite all the dramatics of that, there’s some good comedy with the staff. I love the fact that when Susie was off at the Concord, the rest of the Steiner sStaff were doing an all out search for her. You can tell that this is a Daniel Palladino episode because a lot of the humor tends toward the broad, but it’s definitely worth a laugh.

The same goes for the staff’s end of year show, with a questionable depiction of countries around the world, grief from the Jewish audience at depicting “the cossacks”, some amusing faux-Brazilian shimmying from an out-of-place Suzie, and one last mouthed “criss cross” from her unbidden partner in crime.

We also get more glimpses of the elder Maisels’ awkward buffoonery. Shirley’s an inveterate mahjong gambler; Moishe makes more off-color jokes, and the two of them have public discussions about their lovemaking. It’s cheesy, but it works as awkward relative humor. For an episode as dramatic as this one, there’s lots of laughs.

Much of that drama comes from the fact that the Weissmans’ other child has a big secret too. Abe gets a phone call that Bell Labs is funding his proposal which is big news, but a revelation spoils the mood. He’s been trying to talk up his son for a position at the company, and doing it so insistently that the lab basically has to gather an amusingly buzzer-worthy conga line of representatives to tell him that it can’t happen because his son is a top secret government employee.

There’s a lot of fun outgrowths of that. For one thing, it hits bae at the exact worst time, because he already feels like he doesn’t really know his daughter and now he feels like he doesn’t really know his son, the kid he was closer to and felt like he understood better. His chagrin and efforts to extract a confession are funny, but at the same tie you feel for Abe. Much like his daughter, he thought he knew his life. He thought he knew his kids. Then it turns out that everything’s topsy turvy with both of them doing what they want regardless of whether he would, let alone does, approve.

That said, the comedy still flows with Rose using the combination of her daughter-in-law’s fasting-addled mind and desire to impress her mother-in-law to extract the info that Noah is, in fact, a member of the CIA. (Perhaps if The company needs some extra interrogators, they could borrow her.) It’s amusingly crafty, and she and Abe’s reactions to it all are great.

Things move apace on the romantic front as well. We see Joel breaking down and taking his dad’s advice to talk to the girl sitting next to him at the bar, striking up a cute enough conversation that doesn’t have the same spark of idge and Benjamin. Speaking of them, the pair have an amusing exchange over who has whom’s number and how to get in touch.

And the episode closes with Midge and Joel sharing one last dance before giving into the symbolism by noting it and drifting off to dance with their new partners. Palladino lays it on a little thing, but there’s melancholy in the gesture.

Overall, this is a momentous episode for all the characters, Abe in particular, as the family’s time in the Catskills comes to an end, and the Weissman patriarch suddenly feels like a man without a country. It’s hard to have your world leveled like that, and it’ll be interesting to see what steps Abe takes from her to try to control the uncontrollable once more.