Michelle, This Is Not 'Nam. This Is A Public Field. There Are Rules.

What could be more dispiriting than going to your very first appointment for couples' therapy -- undertaken to address the sexual dysfunction in your marriage -- and then coming out of it knowing that all the bad feelings the session stirred up are just going to hang around you both, like an acrid funk, for the whole rest of the weekend? Such is life for Brett and Michelle. Wisely, they resolve together not to discuss anything they've just spent the past hour (well...it's therapy, so fifty minutes) hashing out, painfully, in front of a stranger; instead, Michelle asks Brett to think of what he'd most like to do with the rest of his day, if he could do anything. His answer -- going to a Barnes & Noble to drink tea and read Dune -- is maybe a bigger bummer than anything that happened in therapy (not that I'm his wife, but it certainly killed my lady wood), but she has an idea of something they can do together: gather a bunch of their friends and play kickball! All she'll have to do is go stake her claim to the field by sitting on it, while he texts their friends to assemble for the game. There's just one problem: there's a formal process for reserving the field, and someone else has used it to secure the space, well before Michelle's spontaneous notion. Michelle tries negotiating with the opposing group's designated spokesperson, suggesting that they share the field; Larry, once he shows up, offers extremely generous gift card options and, when the members of the group refuse, straight-up cash; and finally, Michelle stomps over and proposes that her friends play the newly arrived youngsters in their game of Kick The Can. It's capitulation enough that Michelle's antagonist agrees, setting off the main action of the episode, and because we've all seen TV before, we can probably guess how it's going to end. But should it?

I am not a crackpot. I just think Michelle should respect the integrity of the reservation system.

Don't even come at me with your "it's all a metaphor" nonsense. I know it's a metaphor! The primary issue, apparently, in Brett and Michelle's marriage is that they've both come to a point where it's been so long since they've had sex that they're both paralyzed at the thought of it. Brett did his part in the last episode by spontaneously booking them a hotel room, only for the pressure of the stolen moment to overwhelm them both and end in a disaster big enough that it convinced them both that they needed therapy. This is Michelle's opportunity to demonstrate that she, too, can be spontaneous, even though in her version of spending time with Brett, they're in public, surrounded by their friends, and distracted by an activity that keeps them from relating to each other in any real way. When Michelle notices David, her charter school-starting crush from "Insanity," and they figure out how to use the sprinklers to distract the hipsters and hand Michelle her big moment of winning the game, it actually succeeds in doing the thing that saves relationships by making her partner see her in a new light. We, the audience, are seeing her in a new light, too: confident, determined, focused, and resplendent in her victory as the water arcs around her. And she luxuriates in this triumph knowing that she looks like a fearless champion not in front of Brett, but in front of David. It's the kind of complex moment, pivoting on a look, that this show does so well, and I can't wait to see what ripple effects it has in the episode to come.

So, see? I get all that. All I'm saying is that when you get to a field you just decided, on a whim, to try to play kickball on, and a girl tells you that she's already reserved it? Then you either find another park, or you all go get chicken wings instead. Hell, they're on the east side: even if half or more of their party are raw vegans, there are probably fifteen restaurants to accommodate them that they can walk to from there.

These little assholes are obviously terrible -- Mr. Members Only Short Shorts should definitely be on some kind of watch list -- but that doesn't change the fact that they reserved this field fair and square. They wanted to throw a birthday party for someone named Sailer (also unacceptable), so when they came up with the idea of building it around a kids' game they could play out of some mix of irony and nostalgia, they planned ahead and made a reservation to make sure their day would go off without a hitch. Just because their own marital difficulties aren't going to happen for another ten years doesn't mean they don't also have a perfect right to enjoy the plan they made. Michelle's need to turn her own kickball afternoon into proof of her capacity for fun and joy is 0% their problem.

Furthermore, if the secondhand shoe had been on the other foot and Michelle had made a reservation that these dicks then showed up and tried to wheedle her out of? Ohhhhh, the bougie rage that would rain down on them. If Michelle makes this big a federal case out of a field she has no claim on, can you imagine how fiercely she'd defend it if she did? Head Hipster (seriously, that's how she's credited on IMDb) would end up strangled to death with her own suspenders. We may not always like it when our own attempts at spontaneity are foiled by one system or another, but that doesn't automatically mean the system itself is invalidated. Once Michelle found out the field was reserved, she should have graciously stepped off it, like an adult. I understand that there's a lot at stake for her in this pop-up party get-together working out. I certainly understand how galling it is to realize you've apparently lost the moral high ground to a try-hard in a giant toque and a cardigan longer than her acid-washed jorts. But rules exist to help control the fun for everyone, no matter how much of an east side L.A. cliché they may be. I am not a crackpot.