What I’m Watching: In Treatment

In Treatment: Season 4, Episode 22 “Colin – Week 6” (B+)

Now this was a perfectly appropriate goodbye, one that signaled inklings of tremendous growth before revealing absolutely no progress at all. Colin finding out that Brooke had signed off only made him want to work with her more, as did his eagerness to get back to the blunt, real her that he saw when he ambushed her late at night by showing up at her house. Colin is such a fascinating character because he’s so aware of the things he does but actually has no clue how they come off. He’s big on the idea of taking responsibility for your actions but then not being held to account for them, and his description of the justice system as being too binary felt a bit like appropriating someone else’s struggle. Brooke didn’t let him off easy, pointing out that privilege and oppression are the two things you can’t say to white guys, and he took it a step further by absolving himself of a rape he might have committed in the 1980s because he claimed that everyone was doing it and no one called it by that name then. Trying to lift her out of squalor by getting her a job that paid better than whatever she was making which might keep her in Baldwin Hills was the ultimate condescending white savior move, and when he asked to kiss her and pouted when she said no, he revealed how completely he wasn’t listening to anything that she said. Telling him that she was going to talk for a little while and he was going to listen gave Brooke the opportunity to try to drill some sense into him, but his response that she believed she was virtuous because she’s black and a woman once again reiterated that he didn’t think she had anything of value to say. I would absolutely love to continue watching these two go at it, but this was an emphatic and intense installment that served as a fitting goodbye.