This was a poignant one, more so than any of the other Big C episodes I’ve seen.
Coming face-to-face with her mortality, Cathy continued checking things off items on her life’s “To Do” list, saying she’s more afraid of not doing everything she wants to do than she is of dying. The big item on this week’s agenda: Visiting her father, telling him she loves him and calling him out on his faults.
Cathy underwent a metamorphosis during her road trip with Sean, morphing from being the good daughter who has always sought her father’s approval and made excuses for him, to someone who’d stand directly in front of the TV to block her inconsiderate dad’s view of the ballgame, tell him off and then steal her mother’s ashes.
It has been fascinating to watch Cathy as the episodes progress, remove, layer by layer, the social niceties from her persona to stop being life’s doormat. You could see her confidence grow just during the car ride with her brother as she stole the Dingleberry sign, drank beer in the car, admitted that she’s cheating on Paul and have her brother tell her she’s just like her self-centered father. Then, to have her father tell her to lower her expectations because she’s an older woman without many options in life, well, that’s all Cathy needed to unleash her angry inner daughter, to prove to her brother that she’s not just like dear old dad.
I loved the fact that Sean, who wears a mask of righteous indifference intermingled with sweat and filth, was humanized and lost some of his defensive, protective layers as well, allowing himself to absorb the potential loss of Cathy when she was, at last, honest with him. It was something I, as a viewer, had been waiting for, and it paid off in strange and weird ways.
“So that’s it, I have cancer,” Cathy told him after she’d released her mother’s ashes into the Mississippi River so she could finally make that trip to New Orleans, ironically giving her mother her last dying wish while checking off items on her own bucket list. “Melanoma to be exact. And I’m dying.”
This reveal, Cathy finally telling a member of her family the truth, was played perfectly. At first, Sean tried to be cool about it, saying, “People die, that’s the way it works.” But then, as it sunk in, Sean crumpled to the ground in tears. “I was just starting to understand that you’re the only thing I have in this world,” he said. That’s the kind of thing I’ve been wanting to see, glimpses of real emotions that had been so long camouflaged and obscured by watching Cathy buy a car, get a bikini wax, crash her doctor’s house shopping trip, drink expensive champagne and sleep with a muralist at her school. Most of the first part of the season has been about pure wish fulfillment, which is fine and entertaining to an extent, but eventually, Cathy would have to tell those she loves and deal with the messy truth.
Unfortunately, while watching her brother become a raw, exposed, vulnerable nerve was just too much intensity for Cathy who, upon seeing his pain, decided to play off the whole cancer thing as a practical joke.
All in all, I think this was one of my favorite episodes, drunken man-child “Paulie” lying on the carpet while his son is puking on the front lawn notwithstanding.
Clacked by Meredith O'Brien 
on Oct 05, 2010 @ 14:00 EST5EDT
