Breeders
Season 4, Episode 10: “No Matter What: Part Two”
What do I know about this series going into it?
I had never heard of it before. From the bits of text that caught my eye while loading it up, I know it’s a British dark comedy.
Recap
We open at some sort of party. Outside the party one man is crying into the arms of – ooh, it’s Martin Freeman! The captions identify Martin as playing a character named Paul.
Cut to Paul sitting in a coffee shop, talking to somebody named Luke. Paul has sorted things out with Luke’s college so that Luke can defer for two years and then resume his degree.
Turns out Luke is Paul’s son – and Paul’s wife Ally is not happy that Paul did this without consulting her. She believes that Luke, who has a newborn baby, will never return to university if he defers now.
(There’s enough information now to draw a little bit of a family tree. Paul and Ally have a son named Luke, a daughter-in-law named Maya, and a newborn grandchild. They also have a houseguest of some sort.)
During the conversation, Paul gets an incomprehensible text message from his father. Ally said it might have to do with his mother’s health, so Paul leaves to ask his father what’s up (instead of calling?).
We cut to two women eating in a fish-and-chips place. They decide to take a trip to Brighton.
Paul arrives at Jim’s house, who says his wife – Paul’s mother – is growing dangerously senile, searching for her 40-years-dead dog and not noticing she left the gas on. Jim will need to care for her, they establish, including cooking for her. This leads to Paul getting frustrated as he fails to teach Jim how to chop an onion. Paul’s mother intervenes to keep them from killing each other.
She says Ava (who’s Ava?) will teach Jim to cook instead.
Later, Paul and Ally are having dinner with Maya’s parents. The two pairs of in-laws discuss how to provide financial help to the young couple and the grandchild, whose name is Jay. Paul jumps at Maya’s parents’ offer to pay the young couple’s rent, which Ally later objects to in private. But Paul says that between paying for Ava’s university tuition soon (who’s Ava?) and potentially needing to send his mother to a nursing home, they need all the financial help they can get.
Aha. Ava is Paul and Ally’s other child, I discover when she shows up at Jim’s house to teach him to cook. She was also one of the two women in the fish-and-chips place earlier; the other was Ava’s girlfriend.
Ava’s cooking lesson is successful, but while she and Jim are busy her grandmother disappears. Paul and Ally are called, and there is a panicked search for fear she wandered off in her senility. It turns out to be a false alarm, as she had merely gone to the supermarket. She is indignant at their mistrust – but Jim finds dog food in the shopping bags.
It’s the naming party for the grandchild, Jay Nikam-Worsley. Which I don’t understand, as he clearly already had a name before the party? During the party, there are random conversations between characters I know and characters I don’t:
A man tells Ally that he and Siobhan are engaged to be married. I don’t know who either of those people are.
I finally discover that Paul’s mother’s name is Jackie.
Jim is taking to cooking like a duck to water. The day before the naming ceremony he had made a roast chicken breast, chips, broccoli. To the party he brings a cake with “Jay” on it in icing. And he wants to try making bread and oysters (not together).
A woman tells Ally how wonderful her life is without familial relationships.
Ava decides to end her relationship with the woman from the fish-and-chips shop, and confesses her love to somebody at the party named Grace.
Paul leaves the party to get Jackie’s sweater from the car. As he does, he passes Luke outside, who is failing to get Jay to fall asleep in his stroller. Luke snaps at the constant crying and yells at the child.
Cut to the sobbing hug we saw in the opening scene; now I recognize Luke as the other man in the hug.
Luke feels guilty, but Paul assures him that it’s normal – children will drive you crazy and then some. He volunteers to take Jay for a few nights so Luke and Maya can have a break.
It’s later. Jay is crying, and Paul and Ally wake up. It’s 3am. They debate whose turn it is to take care of the baby, and decide to get up together.
Unresolved questions
Who was that houseguest staying with Paul and Ally?
Who is the guy with the twins who got engaged to Siobhan? Who is Siobhan?
How strong was Ava’s relationship with the woman from the fish-and-chips place, and why did she so suddenly fall in love with Grace instead?
The show is called “Breeders”, the implication being that it’s mostly about having children. But there’s only one child in this episode – a newborn at that. What was the rest of the show about? Maya’s pregnancy? Was she a much more prominent character in the rest of the series, then?
Wikipedia called this a dark comedy (I can’t help but absorb small bits of text as I scroll past them to identify which episode I need to watch), but this was far more of a drama. Were previous episodes more comedic, and they decided to lean into the drama for the finale? Or is this a type of British humor I’m not familiar with?
Ratings
Story: 8/10. There isn’t very much of a plot here – but what there is is highly effective. The episode expertly illustrates the generational squeeze represented by Paul. He had children at that perfect stage in life to be hit with two massive economic responsibilities at once: supporting both the generation above and the generation below. The economy isn’t set up for Luke and Maya’s generation to be self-sufficient at an early age; simultaneously, Jim and Jackie’s generation are living longer, requiring care that is expensive in both time and money, and they didn’t have a large number of children among whom they can split that burden. Paul is stuck in the middle, supporting both, and the episode does a phenomenal job of putting us in his shoes emotionally.
Dialogue: 8/10. Not only well-written, but with the intent to deliver meaningful messages on how relationships work. Jim and Jackie sit silently together because there’s no need to say anything; it’s not that they have nothing to say to each other. Paul and Ally argue because they both want what’s best for their children; it’s not that they have an unhealthy relationship or are getting a divorce. Luke lashes out out of desperation; this doesn’t make him a bad person.
Production: 9/10. The direction was expert, and the score was pitch-perfect according to the requirements of each scene. Stellar performances too from most of the actors. Martin Freeman is excellent in everything he does, and this is no exception. I also want to single out for praise Joanna Bacon, who played his mother Jackie. I genuinely cared about her and found myself saying “oh no” out loud when she was missing.
As stated above, I am slightly confused that this is billed as a comedy; this episode seemed to me a drama, and a very good one at that.
Characterization: 3/10. I got to know Paul very well. He is self-sacrificing, understanding, flawed, temperamental. He struggles to provide for the generations above and below not just monetarily but in donating his time and energy as well. In the span of one episode he proves willing to give of himself to teach his father to cook, and to give of himself to take care of his grandson at his most colicky.
The other characters aren’t very well developed. I know little about Jim and Jackie, though there is depth there. Luke and Maya, despite being ostensibly the center of the drama, didn’t appear much in person; Maya in particular was a complete nonentity and I wonder if she was even a main character in the rest of the show.
Clarity: 7/10. It took a long time to learn most characters’ names but I got there in the end. A number of side characters showed up for one scene each, and I had no context for what was going on there.
Closure: 1/10. I didn’t get the feeling that this was the end of anything – just one more step in the road of the characters’ lives. The only character arc that was brought to some sort of close was the guy marrying Siobhan, and I don’t even know his name. In a distant second is Ava is leaving the fish-and-chips woman for Grace, but there’s nothing to indicate yet that Grace will be a long-term, permanent partner.