You're the Worst 5.13: "Pancakes"

Chris: First of all, playing “No Children” by The Mountain Goats was the perfect ending I didn’t know the show needed. You’re the Worst ended with in a more happy, optimistic way than I think anyone predicted but I think it was done so in a way that was appropriate to how the show had felt previous to Pancakes. Edgar is the best of the worst, I’ve decided. Yes, trying to convince the groom to not go through with the wedding so close to the ceremony is a very bad thing to do but it forced Edgar and Gretchen to not only really think about what they actually wanted but to do so by directly addressing it with each other for once. In the end, Jimmy and Gretchen stay together but don’t get married and, honestly, it makes way more sense this way. The one thought I’ve had creeping in the back of my head since the moment Jimmy proposed was how out of character it felt for either of them to want to get married with all of their commitment issues. Neither of them deal well with pressure and I believe marriage was unnecessary pressure when all they wanted to do was live happily together which they would’ve done married anyway. For the last five years, I’ve been that annoying person that adored this show and nagged all of my other friends to watch it and love it as much as I do. Hell, the main reason this review series is even happening is because it was essentially a con to get Joel and Alexa to watch. All of that is to say that I’m sure I sound like an incredibly biased fan when I praise the finale but so many times a beloved show ends in an unsatisfactory way (looking at you How I Met Your Mother) and people are so vocal about all the things wrong with how that show ended but I really did love the end of You’re the Worst and I appreciate the effort that went into presenting something that made their fanbase feel like it was all worth it to stick with the show until the very end. In conclusion, Becca is, has been, and will always be the worst.

Alexa: I’ve been up front that I think season five overall has been pretty weak. Characters developed and regressed without reason or explanation. Some episodes were great, while others seemed like nothing more than filler. Characters like Edgar and Lindsay didn’t have much opportunity to shine until the last few episodes. The last season really should have been eight episodes at most. A tighter, more deliberately constructed narrative would have benefited the overall story arc. But those complaints aside, I have to say I think “Pancakes” was a pretty perfect finale. (Bonus points for bringing back Ben Folds. Have I mentioned how much I love Ben Folds on this show?) I’m still not sure how I feel about the bait-and-switch with those flash forwards, but I’m willing to move past it because I think the outcome made so much sense for our protagonists. Nothing about the buildup to this wedding has felt right, and it was a little jarring to see Jimmy and Gretchen at the center of this formal affair at this posh venue. It felt forced, and not at all like something either of them would have actually planned themselves. As unconventional as Jimmy and Gretchen are, they’ve always had a tendency to be weirdly traditional in some ways, and getting married feels like one of those moments, something they’re doing just because they feel like it’s the natural next step when it doesn’t have to be.

Staying together but not getting married feels like the most true-to-character outcome for these two. Joel brings up a good point that this isn’t the first time Jimmy and Gretchen have considered the idea that taking major steps forward in their relationship doesn’t mean it has to be forever. But something about their exchange in the diner feels more significant than that. It’s less about reassuring each other that they can always cut and run if they want to and more about realizing that the only way to make their relationship work is to take it one day at a time. Jimmy and Gretchen have always been afraid of the future. It not only impacts their relationships but impedes their careers and friendships, like when Gretchen sabotaged things with their new couple friends earlier this season because she couldn’t handle the idea of friendship being “for life.” The only way Jimmy and Gretchen can succeed at anything, including their relationship, is to not look too far ahead, and it takes something as momentous and their almost-wedding to make them commit to taking that approach to life.

And thanks to the additional glimpses at their future we get at the end of the episode, we know that this new outlook works for them, at least so far. I found that whole montage unexpectedly emotional. In true “You’re the Worst” fashion, it showed not only the joyous moments in Jimmy and Gretchen’s future but their struggles too, like when Gretchen weeps while Jimmy and the baby sleep. But through it all they’re by each other’s side, because they’ve finally allowed themselves to grow together. It was also satisfying to see Lindsay settle down after realizing how much she wanted true love, and to see Edgar find his independence even if it cost him a few years of friendship. “You’re the Worst” certainly had its creative ups and downs, particularly in season five, but the finale is a satisfying conclusion to a unique gem of a show that’s well worth watching.

Joel: So, Jimmy and Gretchen ended up not getting married. They decided that instead they would, every day, choose all over again to be with each other, and that doing this would be far more meaningful that a wedding. This way, their relationship would be about how they felt in the present, rather than how they felt once upon a time years ago, when they did something. It’s supposed to feel like this great moment, when Jimmy and Gretchen discover how to truly work as a couple, only we’ve seen them land on this discovery before. These two characters have always been afraid of commitment. Gretchen loves to remind Jimmy that no matter what, she always has one foot out the door. Their entire relationship has always been on that exists “for now” with no promise of what tomorrow might bring. The scene of Jimmy and Gretchen deciding to stay together but not get married has happened at least twice before. It’s the attitude that Gretchen has to take to be able to move in with Jimmy, and it’s the attitude that Jimmy has to take to be able to say “I love you.” to Gretchen. Everything we do and say only counts right now. We can always change our mind tomorrow. Jimmy’s plan to decide all over again to love each other every day isn’t new territory. It’s the couple returning to their default position.

It’s funny that Chris brings up the How I Met Your Mother series finale, because that’s the finale that I kept coming back to as I watched this one. I thought that may have been because both final seasons were so wedding focused in the respective shows, but it’s more than that. Each series finale feels like it caps off what is ultimately a wasted season. The sins of the final season and episode of HIMYM have been detected in great detail, so I won’t go to deep into them here, but like the final episode of that show, You’re the Worst concludes by casting aside character change and growth and returning the characters to when they worked best, in this case about halfway through season three. Obviously most of season three is when the couple we’re at their emotionally strongest. They had gotten through the biggest storm of their relationship, and come out stronger on the other side. This was after Gretchen’s depression arc and Nina, but before their pros and cons lists of each other. Even as they were planning their wedding, Jimmy and Gretchen weren’t as strong as a couple as they were back then. So it makes sense to return to that, but the episode doesn’t treat their decision as a return to form. It’s supposed to be a different way of thinking, a new path that will lead to the happy ending future that we’ve been seeing in the flash forwards.

Which brings us to the result of the ominous flash forwards that we’ve been seeing throughout the whole season. These flash forwards have shown us a future where Jimmy and Gretchen seem to no longer be together, until we learn that, in a twist on the whole thing, these were all carefully selected scenes from a future where they are together. This might also be my new favorite example of the worst possible way to provide a twist ending for your audience. One way you can measure the quality of a “twist ending” is how well the material holds up on a second viewing. Ideally, with the new information, you should be able to watch everything again in a new light. Maybe there will be something there that you can’t believe that you missed. A good twist will provide you will all the information needed to come to the right conclusion, but do it in such a way that it can guide you to a different conclusion. It might use you own expectations or assumptions to its advantage, but what it shouldn’t do is outright lie to you, or deliberately withhold information to make it impossible to come to anything but the wrong conclusion. Yet this is what the flashforward scenes have been doing this whole time. They are meticulously selected moments designed to carefully cut out anything that could possibly hint at what is really supposed to be going on. Watching these scenes again, knowing how the show ends, adds nothing to them. There is no incorrect way to interpret the information given in these flash forwards. They aren’t allowing you to go down the wrong path due to your own assumptions, but instead are forcing you down that path.

What’s frustrating, is that I can give you a good example of subverting expectations within this same show. In the buildup to the depression storyline from season two, we get several episodes of Gretchen sneaking out of the house with a cell phone. Jimmy leaps to the conclusion that Gretchen must be cheating on him, and traces the phone to Sam. It’s a great moment because we got to see Sam give her the phone in an earlier episode, so we as the audience had the information to know where that phone came from even if that connection was revealed to Jimmy later. In season two we got a “sneaking out” storyline that, once we had all the information, still plays out in a way that makes sense to the characters. We don’t having anyone bending over backwards to not refer to Edgar by name because that would ruin the setup. We don’t have Gretchen deciding to give up alcohol for one moment without any context and only showing that moment to you. The flash forward scenes don’t show you anything that didn’t happen but it’s lying by omission. This is the “I’m not touching you.” of storytelling. It’s technically true, but is still just as annoying as the real thing.

It hurts the finale that it comes at the end of the weakest season of the show. While, this is supposed to be the series finale of five seasons of television so much of it is dedicated to Jimmy and Gretchen’s wedding, and so much of the fifth season was dedicated to the wedding as well. The entire season feels littered with missed opportunities and abandoned plotlines that had to be cut to make room for the wedding storyline. Edgar’s conflict with Paul F. Tompkins was really interesting, but it got pushed to the background, and then written off in the Sunday Funday episode without ever getting a chance to really come into focus. Becca, Vernon and Paul almost cease to exist this year except for one bizarrely out of place episode, and even then, the forward momentum that happened in that episode, is pretty much wiped away without explanation a few episodes later. So much of what made this show great was sacrificed in this final season, and final episode, only for none of it to matter anyway. The ominous hints in the flash forwards didn’t mean anything Any character growth that we might have had between season three and now didn’t mean anything.

A long time ago, sitcoms used to thrive off of stagnation. There was no way to watch an episode if you missed it, so things couldn’t really change or evolve much No matter what happened in the episode, everything always had to return to status quo by the end. The Bradys always stopped fighting and Gilligan never got off of the island. But the reason everyone keeps saying that we’re living is a golden age of television today We get to watch these characters grow, change and evolve. It’s the reason we can do massive binge watches like this one because we have access to every episode. We got to watch Jimmy and Gretchen grow as people and grow as a couple throughout the show, until these ending moments where everyone has to reset to where they were supposed to be. Again, I don’t mean to continue to draw parallels between this ending and that of How I Met Your Mother but for those that don’t remember (or didn’t care at the time) one of the biggest issues was how much the final episode ended up regressing the characters who had already moved past where the show needed them to be for the preplanned ending.

I don’t want to say that the ending of a show ruined the show for me. When something is on the air for multiple years, providing dozens of hours of storytelling and entertainment, I don’t want to think that a failure to stick the landing retroactively makes everything great that came before it terrible now. This was a show that had some incredible strong moments. I won’t even say that everything in season five was bad. The previous episode’s scene between Edgar and Jimmy was probably a top five moment for me in the entire run and I know that it needed something monumental, like an impending wedding for it to work as well as it did. Going back through the episodes, I’m struck by more good memories than bad. I get to remember several storylines, jokes sight gags and characters that I had forgotten about.  This was not a bad show, and don’t let my extended complaints about the ending cause you to think that I hated the whole thing. Ending things the right way can be hard, and in this case the mark was missed by a very wide margin. Still, what we have in its entity makes it worth checking out the next thing that Stephen Falk has to offer.