Fleabag: "Season 1, Episode 3" and "Season 1, Episode 4"

(This is the second installment of my weekly recaps of  Fleabag, the Prime Video series that aired two seasons in 2016 and 2019. I love the show, and I wrote these reviews in 2020 when exploring the idea of doing a paid version of the newsletter. As such, they don't have all our regular features, but I hope you enjoy them anyway. These recaps are only available to paid subscribers, except for this premiere write-up.)

"Season 1, Episode 3"

It’s striking to me to realize just how much Fleabag, to this point, is flirting with the conventions of the romantic comedy, only to constantly get sidetracked by the mystery it knows it is in its heart. In most versions of this story, Bus Rodent would be the guy Fleabag eventually realized was perfect for her, the guy she had been too hasty to judge based on his appearance. When he turns up again in this episode and accompanies her on her mission to buy Claire a present, most versions of this story would turn that into a moment when Fleabag realizes she was wrong about him.

This is not most versions of this story.

Instead of realizing that Bus Rodent is somebody she judged too quickly, Fleabag doubles down on her instinctive distaste for him. When she goads him with a joke about how she always carries her vagina with her in the sex shop – he’s referring to a sex toy; she’s referring to the real part of her anatomy – it’s not in the spirit of getting to know him or even to build camaraderie with this man who’s joined her on this very strange errand. No, it’s mostly to snark the shit out of him.

By this point, the audience is so thoroughly in Fleabag’s point of view that it can be easy to forget that Bus Rodent, as ridiculous as he is, probably has his own concerns and thoughts. But Fleabag is not a show that allows for these sorts of human moments, at least not consciously. The genius of Phoebe Waller-Bridge’s scripts and Harry Bradbeer’s direction is the way that they do allow for the actual humanity of the other characters to peek through here and there, even if it quickly shuffles away again when we’re submerged all over again in Fleabag’s suffocating view of the world.

What’s interesting in this episode is its careful dissection of the way that Fleabag constantly tries to get other people to be like her, rather than trying to meet them halfway. Fleabag is convinced that her sister is sexually repressed – hence the sex shop birthday gift. From all we can see, she’s correct, but also, the show goes to great lengths to suggest that perhaps Claire isn’t sexually repressed. Perhaps she’s just got different priorities around sex from her sister.

It’s here I’ll note that whatever lessons Fleabag learned about boundaries in the wake of her mother’s death (and then learned doubly over in the wake of Boo’s death) seem to have provoked the opposite reaction in Claire. If Fleabag has no boundaries, then Claire is all boundaries. She’s a series of rigid walls that perhaps do need to come down, at least a little bit. Maybe Fleabag can use Claire’s bricks to reconstruct some of her own boundaries.

"Season 1, Episode 4"

One thing I love about Fleabag is the way all of its episodes feel like episodes. So it goes with this installment, in which Fleabag and Claire go to a silent retreat, and things go about as well as you’d imagine. The retreat itself is the organizing idea of the episode – much of the action is taken up with the characters getting there and then living in that space – but it also serves as a way for the series to inch forward some of its serialized plots, like whatever fallout might exist for Fleabag after Martin clumsily came on to her in episode three.

Fleabag, of course, doesn’t deserve any blowback for what happened, because it is in no way her fault. Martin kissed her, and she did not in the least reciprocate. But because of who she is, it’s all too easy for the people around her, and especially her sister, to draw the conclusion that she is not being upfront with them.

And, of course, Fleabag isn’t being upfront with anybody about a lot of things, least of all herself. Sending her to a silent retreat functions as a way to force her to keep spiraling ever deeper into her subconscious, getting closer and closer to the live wire that is Boo’s death. Sitting alone in silence is rarely a great way to keep ignoring things you mean to ignore. Instead, it’s a great way to finally start to see yourself.

Even though Fleabag is constructed of individual episodes, it’s remarkable how they add up to a whole that keeps pushing Fleabag deeper into her own psyche. I might normally dislike this kind of storytelling, which can become too psychologically simple – Fleabag is self-destructive because she hates herself or something similar. But I think it works here both because the “mystery” is well-constructed and because the show steadily forces Fleabag to confront all of the things she’s wrong about.

Yes, if you have been wondering if the show subscribes to Fleabag’s misanthropic point of view, then this fourth episode is solid evidence that it does not. At the silent retreat, Fleabag runs in to the bank manager that she tried to get a loan from in an earlier episode, and it’s a heartbreaking, human moment. The show doesn’t play either his pain or Fleabag’s slowly unfurling pain for laughs. Learning to look at your pain is the first step toward healing; learning to acknowledge it is the first step to learning to look at it. (The sexual harassment scandal at the bank is the sort of thing that has perhaps soured a bit in the years since this aired, though not fatally so. It’s always clear that something needed to be done, but also that Fleabag’s attempts to take advantage of the bank’s worst tendencies isn’t somehow cheeky or fun.)

And, as always, the story slowly zeroes in on the relationship between sisters. Claire has gotten an opportunity in Finland she’s not sure she wants to take. Fleabag, always trying to micro-manage her sister, pushes her to take it by telling her about Martin’s pass at Fleabag. In a season full of bombs, this is the first to definitively blow. The next episodes will see who gets hit by any shrapnel.

Next week: Hey, season one is already ending, as we find out just what pain is hiding in Fleabag's past with the season's final two episodes. See you then!