Photo: Hopper Stone/Netflix
We’ve all been there: the Shame Spiral. One minor thing happens, or one person says something just a little bit cutting, and you go in hard on yourself and spiral into a place full of anxiety and self-loathing and full sleeves of cookies until you arrive at one conclusion: I’m the absolute worst. Being human is fun, isn’t it? In “Either Aura,” both members of our main couple have their individual shame spirals following a historically great TV kiss. But only one includes a shitty booty call with Ryan Hansen! Find out which, below!
It’s not Noah. No, Noah spends the rest of the evening post-kiss in a hospital waiting room full to the brim with awful vending-machine snacks and devastating levels of Jewish guilt. That call from Rebecca at the end of the previous episode was actually Rebecca’s mother trying to get hold of him to tell him Rebecca was in a car accident. Well, actually, she says Rebecca is “almost in a coma,” which not even Sasha can begin to decipher the meaning of, but once Noah gets to the hospital, he learns Rebecca drove into the back of a parked bus and needs surgery on her wrist. She’s fine. Or “it’s in God’s hands now,” depending on whom you ask.
The majority of the waiting room, including Bina, Esther, and Rebecca’s parents, blames Noah. Rebecca has been heartbroken, and it led to her being distracted and caused her accident. “It’s a shame she had to have an accident to get you to pay attention to her!” Rebecca’s mom yells at Noah upon his arrival. And once Rebecca’s parents find out about the little blonde he’s been hanging out with, chaos erupts. Even after he leaves the room, he doesn’t fully escape the wrath of Team Rebecca: Esther follows him to make sure that he knows he’s being an idiot, that her best friend Rebecca is too good for him, and that she’s still in love with him. He’s breaking up the entire family, she heaps on top of all this. Listen, I’m into Esther’s brand of mean (she’s played by Jackie Tohn, so good in GLOW), but this is such a low blow.
The guilt trip works, though: Later, Ilan finds his son sitting alone wondering if he’s a terrible person, wondering if trying something different with Joanne is selfish. Ilan’s kind of the best. He tells his son it’s not selfish and he’s not a terrible person; he is the only person who will have to live with either the regret or the joy of his decision, so he doesn’t need to listen to anyone else. But don’t tell Bina that — she would honestly flip. Remember when Esther said she’d run Sasha over with her car? Yeah, Bina would do that.
Elsewhere, Joanne is having her own meltdown. Still floating after that kiss, she texts Noah, “That was a great kiss. I think I might be pregnant,” and begins to spiral when he doesn’t respond. It certainly doesn’t help that at that moment she’s walking into a recording session with Morgan (and their mom), and their guest, a “doctor” who believes auras can reveal your personality, cannot find Joanne’s. Even that guy has judgments about Joanne dating a rabbi. Morgan is very intrigued by the good rabbi telling Joanne to put down her ice cream before smashing faces, but mostly she has doubts that this budding relationship has legs. It’s not that Joanne is a bad person per se, yet she is a bad person “relative to a man of God.” But hey, she could totally see Joanne with a cult leader. That pairing makes sense. She says it like a compliment, but it’s definitely an insult.
When Joanne shows Morgan and Lynn the “I think I’m pregnant” text, the ghosting from Noah begins to make sense to them. “He’s a rabbi, he has a different brain than you,” Morgan tells her sister. It sends Joanne deeper down her spiral. Why is she an idiot? Why does she always have to make jokes out of everything? Morgan tries to fluff her up by reminding her that, hey, at least she isn’t boring, even though men actually do seem to like boring. Okay, so she doesn’t fluff her up; she just makes things worse.
Joanne heads home in a real mood, which is probably why when her usual booty call, Kyle, texts her, she calls him back. Don’t worry, it’s not to hook up with him; it’s actually so that he, a trash bag of a human, can make her feel better about herself because surely he — a grown man playing video games in a beanbag chair and getting hard over someone considering him the worst person they know — must think she’s a good person. Like, relatively speaking. But even Kyle catches on to what Joanne’s trying to do. He’s not going to make her feel better. But he does make us feel better because, hey, we get a little Veronica Mars pseudo-reunion, and that’s fun!
Also not going to make her feel better — at least not in the long run — Joanne almost hits a stray dog and decides to rescue him off the street and keep him for the night until she can take him to her friend’s shelter the next morning. Puppy snuggles are nice, but is she not at all concerned about fleas?
This is the state Joanne’s in when she finally makes it home, covered in dirt and leaves from her rescue, snuggling that puppy, and so unbelievably sad about Noah. Except she has no reason to be sad about Noah because she finds him sitting on her stoop. He tells her he had a rough night and suddenly found himself driving to her house because he wanted to see her. He congratulates her on her pregnancy — he had no idea he was such a good kisser — and Joanne feels immediate relief. She knew he’d get it. And the reason he didn’t text her back right away is because he left his phone in his car; he only just got the message. Joanne needs to trust herself more, she needs to trust that she’s worthy of being loved as she is right now, and she needs to trust that if a dude doesn’t get a pretty standard joke, that means he sucks and it has nothing to do with her. Joanne has a lot of work to do when it comes to remembering she is an equal in this relationship, but that work is for another day. For now, Joanne and Noah say how glad they are to see each other after some very emotionally taxing, introspective evenings, and if being the one person someone wants to see after they’ve been at their lowest isn’t a sign of something real happening between them, I don’t know what is.