You're the Worst 4.6: "There's Always a Back Door"

Chris: And just like that, Paul puts in a late bid to become the actual worst person in the show. Becca is still in the lead just based on so much we’ve seen her say and do since the beginning but, boy, did Paul make up a lot of ground in one episode. I want to hate Boone, I really do, because this show has always been about Jimmy and Gretchen’s relationship and it’s easy to see Boone as the person in the way of that. However, Boone is winning me over and that’s made easier by Jimmy’s perpetual delusional state he’s in this season. I’m leaving more in favor of Edgar and Lindsay ending up together as they become more adorable after they got together to complain about their failed friend attempts. YTW is also really good at cringe moments like Gretchen unknowingly talking about Boone’s daughter. It doesn’t take the cringe cake as that still belongs to neighbor episode in season 2 but it’s up there.

Alexa: I would say Jimmy is back to being the worst for being such a jerk to Edgar when Edgar has been nothing but a wonderful friend to him, but Paul is a pretty horrible person now. I know Lindsay never treated him right, but that’s no excuse to turn into a men’s rights creeper. He should have stuck with his girlfriend from season 2. That said, it’s nice to see Edgar starting to stand up to Jimmy and I hope he doesn’t let him off the hook easily. And I’m with Chris that I’m actually kind of shipping Edgar and Lindsay now. Their relationship is oddly sweet and it suits them. I also think it’s totally presumptuous of Jimmy to assume that Gretchen breaking up with Boone means she’ll immediately come running back to him after everything he put her through. I do want to see Jimmy and Gretchen get back together in the end, but he has to earn it first. In the meantime, seeing Gretchen in a relationship with someone who has a kid is bound to be an abundant source of awkward hilarity.

Joel: I really expected this season to be the “Gretchen vs. Jimmy” season where our two leads are pitted against one another through escalating shenanigans before reuniting at the end of the season or possibly early in the fifth season. However, it seems that the “Gretchen vs. Jimmy” aspect of the storyline seems to have been all used in the previous episode. I’m torn between wanting to see more “conflict” driven storylines between the two characters and being impressed that the idea wasn’t milked to death over the entire season. Yes, we could have easily had ten more episode of Gretchen and Jimmy trying to one up each other or threaten this or that thing they had over each other, but by the time we’re in the middle of this episode, it feels like we’re past that and are looking toward the characters reuniting.

Here it feels like we’re stuck with life moving forward without a defined group to attach ourselves to. Over three years now, we’ve had a very good idea of who the core group of friends was, and exactly how close each one of them was to the others. Now, it feels like we’re floating adrift a little bit with characters unsure of exactly where there place is. In this episode, we have Lindsay trying to make new friends by being herself, only to have the people she works with dislike her even more. Edgar tries to establish a deeper relationship with Jimmy only to be told directly that it wasn’t going to happen. Gretchen is forced to confront the idea that her “no future” relationship with Boone could actually go somewhere and what does she want to do about that. For the entire run of the show, we’ve always had the core four as a base group to come back to and now we don’t have that. Edgar and Lindsay end the episode hanging out together, but Gretchen ends the episode with someone else, and Jimmy is alone at the end. It feels like we’re adrift and I don’t know where the show is headed with these characters.

Of course we should mention Paul, who has been absent for the whole season up until this point, only to show up as a full blown Men’s Rights activist. I don’t know where the show is going with this new character development, but right now I don’t really like what I’ve seen so far. Paul has been one of the few, really sympathetic people on the show, and has really grown as a character over three seasons, from an off screen joke into something much deeper. It feels like all of that has been thrown away for a couple of cheap jokes on how much MRAs suck. Still, there has been more than one occasion on this show, where cheap jokes have grown into deep explorations about heavy topics, so I’m willing to wait and see where they take this thing.