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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]I thought the Patrizio thing was kind of a weird sidebar, and that generally that couple had too many zigs and zags in this season.  (I love them both, they're probably my favorite couple, but it was a lot of back and forth across several dimensions.)[/quote]

Omg I love the Patrizia thing.  In part because everyone kept talking about her like she was a crazy housekeeper or something and then we find out she’s a dog.  And it was so emblematic of the one character always doing these impetuous things and letting his Italian husband contort himself to live with the results.  That’s why it was an important part of their character arc (also relevant to their whole convo about whether they can/should have a baby….we all know who would be getting up for night feedings with that baby.).  I loved the passive aggressive convo where they both knew the dog has been given away but neither will say it.  I also liked the gentle ribbing of the upstate middle aged lesbian stereotype.  I want to be an upstate middle aged lesbian with a yard full of dogs!

The one liners were also really good — “there’s a fine line between quaint and meth”.  [/quote]

There was some subtext to the relationship between Claude and Danny though, revealed in the Covid flashback. In the present storyline, we see Claude express an interest in having a kid, and then actually accuse Danny of preventing them from having one. But in the flashback, we see Danny suggesting becoming parents to Claude during the Thanksgiving weekend, and Claude reacts with actual disgust to the suggestion. Of course, this is in the context of Danny adopting Patricia and refusing to see how badly it was going, so you can understand why Claude is a hard no on a baby in that context -- he can see exactly how it will go.

I think the subtext is that Claude actually would have liked to have a kid but he recognizes that Danny probably isn't the right partner for raising kids with. They love each other and have a great life, but having a kid is going to create a very specific dynamic that is going to be hard on both of them because it will trigger both of their worst qualities and some of the cracks in their relationship. Later Claude expresses regret about not having a kid and blames Danny for getting in the way, and you assume it's because Danny said no to a kid. But he didn't -- he actually suggested a baby. It's that Danny's personality and tendencies aren't right for parenthood, even though Claude's are. But Claude also has a toxic trait -- he's a people pleasing nurturer who allows resentment over that role to build up, even when no one has explicitly asked him to fix it (takes one to know one, Claude).

And that's why they flip flop on who wants a kid -- on some level, they both know it's not a good idea, so even when one of them starts to warm to it, the other slams on the breaks. I thought it was actually a very realistic portrayal of how the best couples often understand their own limitations even when they don't say them out loud. That's why they also kind of agree silently never to actually acknowledge what happened with Patricia -- it would expose some things about each of them they don't really want to acknowledge, so it's easier to just live in the fiction that Patricia ran away.[/quote]

Yeah I enjoyed the nuance in that storyline and how the flashback to that earlier conversation is shown later in the season.

But I stumbled over both of them making assumptions off these short conversations rather than bringing it up again and talking it through. Having a baby, if someone really wants one, is a big deal! But maybe the point is they were both ambivalent in different ways for different reasons and that's why neither pushed that convo in the intervening years.[/quote]

I agree it was frustrating to watch them make this big assumptions about what the other person wants based on short conversations. But it's also not that unrealistic. My spouse and I generally communicate well about big stuff but we have some miscommunication like this in our past, too. In fact, this entire plot line reminded me of how it was that we wound up not having a second child. Our first (now only) was about a year and a half old and I started talking about wanting to have another and how great it would be to have a whole other person we loved as much as our first. His knee jerk reaction was anti, because of money and time and just a general sense of overwhelm. I should have explored it further because I know he has a pattern of doing this -- he can be very resistant to change sometimes and gets very negative about certain ideas and it's not reflective of his true feelings. It's just fear takes over for him. Anyway, I dropped it and then life happened and then when it came up again, I felt I was too old and didn't want to put my body through it again at that point, so that was that. But now sometimes he will express sadness we never had another kid and I feel a little exasperated because I was the one who wanted one and he put the brakes on. But he just wasn't ready when I was ready, and then by the time he was ready I felt the window had closed. It's exaggerated in their situation because they didn't already have a kid and because as gay men, their path to parenthood requires total intentionality. But I very much relate to the way these conversations that are really just a snapshot of how someone feels one day can become a final decision without anyone really meaning that to happen. Time stops for no one, even when you really wish it would.[/quote]

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