Why Wouldn't Maria Have Great Talks With Christian When He's Obviously So Easy To Get Along With?

Have...Maria and Christian actually had sex?

Not to be Max Joseph about it, but given the subject matter we're dealing with, I feel like it's a fair question. I know that in the last episode, Christian had a TH in which he seemed to shut down any talk of physical intimacy because it's not something that's ever discussed in Romani culture, but I wonder if that was also a convenient way of sidestepping the fact that Maria is super-not ready for sex. Not to say that a seventeen-year-old is automatically too young, but this one (a) apparently still sleeps with a stuffed animal and (b) is married to someone who plainly hates her. Granted, given what we've seen of this extremely patriarchal clan, one might wonder if both Christian and Maria have been raised to believe that sex is something a husband can demand of his wife whether either likes the other or not. But given how vocally grossed out Christian is in their first scene together when Maria dares to touch her eye in front of him (to put in her contact), and how he makes her leave the room before he gets dressed, it just seems like something's...off.

Do the Millers own non-disposable cups?

In the last episode, I thought we were seeing them because it was the day after the wedding and everyone was so tired they didn't feel like doing dishes.

Apparently not!

Meghan's in a post-grad program?!

I have no idea what one does with a Master's degree in Administration -- and, given that Meghan later says "Since I'm now a wife, it's my duty to cook," I'm not sure she plans to do anything with it but have really organized cabinets -- but I have to say, the news that she's pursuing a post-graduate degree is a big shock to me and raises her maybe 4% in my estimation. Does she later lose that bump by eating generic Smartfood in bed? Sure. But she can have the satisfaction of knowing she enjoyed it once.

Are "the best marriages...when you're friends before marriage," Nina?

I mean, I think they are? But if you do as well, maybe you shouldn't have accepted a five-figure dowry to match up your prized eldest son with a girl he had barely ever talked to before he entered into an apparently undissolvable union with her? JUST A THOUGHT.

Why wouldn't Maria have great talks with Christian when he's obviously so easy to get along with?

The rest of this week's episode is, obviously, prelude to the big blow-out fight that closes it, when Maria confronts Christian about playing videogames all the time and ignoring her. It's clear from the start that his father's advice to, like, try being nice to Maria didn't quite soak in, as Christian's first response to her criticism of his behaviour is to default to what I assume are the sex roles he's been taught his whole life are the norm: "I can raise my voice at you, you can't raise your voice at me." (Which she doesn't, anyway, except to dare to speak to him.) When he complains, "You don't do nothing for me! You don't talk!," she notes, "I try to talk to you but you cut me off," and he...totally proves her point by stomping out on her.

I don't think I had a full sense of the terrifying isolation of Maria's situation, though -- not even Maria sharing her unhappiness with her OWN SISTER, who eloped in a love match, only to hear back that the only thing that matters is that Maria's married, the subtext being that she should quit being such a baby about it -- until Nina comes down to try to mediate the fight.

Everything about Nina screams her lack of empathy for Maria even before we get Nina's TH, in which she explains that she doesn't want Maria to leave Christian both because it "goes against God," and also because it will be bad for her younger sons' marriage prospects if Maria leaves and it gets out in the community that Christian couldn't make it work with her. (Nina doesn't say that she and her husband would also have to return the dowry, but I wonder if that's a factor.) But since Nina raised Christian into the little shit he is, she doesn't really have any useful advice for getting through this scrap other than

But like...does Maria have ONE OTHER THING to do than focus on Christian? Nothing we've seen suggests that she's in school, and I'm pretty sure that, as a married woman in the Romani community, she's not allowed to have a job. Once she's finished shopping for and preparing the family's three daily meals and plated them on Styrofoam dishes, Maria's got about twenty-two other hours to spend doing nothing but wondering if the next seventy years of her life are going to be as miserable as the past month has been. Christian's probably right that Maria's not a great conversationalist, but it has obviously never occurred to him that it's not her fault: the fact that they came into the marriage with nothing in common is a bad start, but also having no day-to-day experiences of any kind to talk to him about doesn't help. I mean, not to say that if she could tell him about her day working the counter at a convenience store or her visit to a planetarium, he'd be interested anyway, but it's a moot point, because she can't. And I assume he's not that interesting to talk to either, since he evidently has nothing to do all day but play videogames as a means of escaping interaction with the wife he loathes.

The producers who framed the shot of Christian stomping back into the fight to say nothing he hasn't already said before about how bored he is by Maria, by the way, deserve Emmys. Maria's describing her fears that she's been matched with the wrong person to the Arranged crew -- practically the only people on the block, from what we've seen, who speak to her kindly -- when Christian returns, his face burning an imprint of his seething rage on the mirror behind her.

Maria's life is a fucking horror movie. If you know Queens at all and can figure out where the Miller torture chamber is based on the location of the gas station across the street, please go there and save her.