What I’m Watching: Transparent

Transparent: Season 4, Episode 8 “Desert Eagle” (B+)

After some tumultuous interactions, now we just have all the members of this extended family hanging out in the desert and getting a bit stir-crazy spending so much time together. Sarah’s intense fever dream about Lila giving birth to multiple babies was a real head trip, and Len telling her that he was doing all of this for her paved the way for a more important conversation about how she’s living on a high and that’s not all a relationship and life are for him. Maura trying to talk to Moshe didn’t yield the results that she wanted, with Moshe boiling down her transgender status to him not being a proper male role model, and his subsequent conversation with Shelly was just as insightful. She seemed truly surprised that Maura was now considering herself a heterosexual woman, and she got truly hysterical when traumatic experiences from her past boiled over with a gun pointed at her by her son. While Josh’s usual weapon of choice is self-loathing, he didn’t want to hold a gun and probably shouldn’t have considering the spiral that he’s been going through lately, and it all ended with a pretty upsetting scene in the middle of the desert. After a liberating time spent away from her family, Ali seemed very distressed and eager to get back to them, a journey that didn’t prove to be so simple. She’s already found a lot of the oppression that she perceives in this country to be triggering, and the guy who gave her a ride getting stopped as she just walked through only made things worse. With only two episodes left this season, I can’t imagine much more can implode on this trip.