You're the Worst 1.9: "Constant Horror And Bone-Deep Dissatisfaction

Chris: The first season seems a little early to do a flashback episode but it works mainly to give the audience context of where the ring came from that Gretchen found as well as give overall context of where all the main characters were and what led them to get to the present day. And in both Gretchen and Jimmy, we see a desperate attempt to go back to who they were before their relationship. Jimmy becomes hopeful that this breakup will ignite his creative juices like it did after his relationship with Becca but is met with nothing. Gretchen tries to be the carefree little-effort person that can pick up and move to New York but quickly realizes that she’s grown out of it and feels out of place. It’s two people that are trying to fool themselves that their relationship wasn’t a big deal and didn’t affect them in any way. However, after seeing the flashbacks and who they are now, the relationship was a bigger deal than either are willing to admit.

Alexa: Chris is right - most shows wouldn’t include a flashback episode in the first season. But “You’re the Worst” isn’t most shows, and this isn’t just a flashback episode. With Jimmy and Gretchen’s relationship crumbling, it isn’t enough to tell the audience that these two have changed each other in a significant way. Instead, the show’s creative team decided to show us, and it’s so much more impactful that way. To truly understand the importance of this relationship, we have to understand Jimmy and Gretchen as people outside the relationship. We were introduced to them at the time they met, so this episode provides much more context about where they were personally leading up to Becca and Vernon’s wedding. It gives us deeper insights about Jimmy and Gretchen, and by extension deeper insights into why their relationship works. Only nine episodes into the series, this installment does a great job of conveying these characters’ emotional growth since they met.

Joel: This might be one of the most realistic “post breakup” episodes of a show that I’ve seen. So often when characters in a show break up, the next episode focuses on them crying, eating ice cream, unable to get out of bed, and being reminded of their now ex by every tree, sock, and/or laundromat they see. When a person loses their significant other in a show, they stop being a person. Instead the lack of their significant other seems to become their defining character trait, at least for the next episode or two. I don’t mean to complain about that, after all, that is basic storytelling, especially when the story you're telling is focused largely on relationships.

But this episode takes a different approach to the day after. Both Jimmy and Gretchen make an almost continuous effort to revert back to the person that they were before the relationship started, almost as if they could delete the existence of the relationship from their timeline entirely. Jimmy returns to focusing on a life of intentional self imposed misery as that’s the state of mind he thinks makes him the most creative, while Gretchen regresses possibly even further back as seen in the recording studio in a sequence that is almost identical to the levels of deja vu to where her life was a few years earlier. Thanks to the flashbacks in the first part of this episode, we see the life of both characters prior to their meeting, and see what appears to be a deliberate step backwards in both of their lives, and in both cases it doesn’t work. You can’t just decide to delete your emotional journey of two months from your life no matter what it is. Jimmy not only finds that he can’t create like he had planned on, but he’s not the same person that he was at the beginning of this season. The first moment we ever saw Jimmy in this show was at Becca’s wedding where Jimmy was obsessed with getting “revenge” on Becca or finding some way to cause her unhappiness. Now, it’s not even that Jimmy has decided to move past this part of his life, but it’s something that simply isn’t on his radar anymore. We get a clear picture of someone who is simply a different person than the Jimmy we were introduced to in episode one.

In the same way, Gretchen discovers that she doesn’t want to be the same person she was before. Sam gets his crowning moment of awesome to date when he points out that his nonsense as a twenty-one year old is not the same as Gretchen’s nonsense at thirty. As someone fast approaching thirty themselves, this was probably my biggest moment of identifying with Gretchen as she takes stock of where her life is in that moment and decides to do something about it.