Fun
Frisky
Nostalgic
Intense
Adventurous
Choked Up
Curious
Romantic
Weird
If The Path led to Kathleen Turner every time, it’d be a much better show. Returning as cult leader Cal Roberts’s alcoholic (and now terminally ill) mother Brenda, she just leaves it all out there on the road, croaking and cursing and sobbing her way through a deathbed acceptance of her failures and cynicism about those who’d offer her solace. “Are you here to poke me with something, or pray for me?” she asks Sarah Lane, serving as the absent Cal’s proxy. “Is that what’s been happening?” Sarah asks. “That’s pretty much all that happens at the end,” Brenda replies. That’s cutting writing, delivered with conviction and pain by a talented performer. Sure, the meat of her scenes is simultaneously undercooked (she tells Sarah that Cal’s in love with her and this is treated like a bombshell despite being consistently depicted since the start of the series) and overcooked (she drops the genuine bombshell that Meyerist founder Dr. Steven Meyer molested Cal as a child, as if we needed further evidence that Doc was a false prophet, and as if this won’t make Cal’s already convoluted motivations even more incomprehensible). Still, there’s something here. It just isn’t anywhere else.
The episode is basically split into two stories: Cal’s unorthodox fundraising trip to California and Eddie’s time in captivity. It goes without saying, but in the spirit of The Path I’m going to say it anyway, that the crack interrogation team of Richard and Kodiak really suck at this. Other than buying a creepy cabin and somehow knowing exactly where to fake a breakdown on the side of the road so that Eddie would stop to help (???), they do basically nothing right. Instead of asking him questions, or even roughing him up in any real way, they leap straight for “let’s dose him with ayahuasca and hope he hallucinates a confession.” They nearly kill him by providing too strong a dose. Rather than continue to question him when he comes to, they immediately accept his non sequitur assertion that Doc Meyer was dead, philosophically at any rate, the moment he was diagnosed with cancer. Kodiak smashes a chair and leaves; Richard is so blown away by Eddie’s newfound acquaintance with the Light and the Garden and whatnot that he visits his apartment the next day to give him Doc’s medallion and pronounce him the new leader of Meyerism. Does this mean we get to see the key conversation in which Eddie explains to Richard how he tried to save Doc, who’d just pronounced him the messiah, but lost his grip and got struck by lightning? Hell no! That all happens off-screen, for reasons no amount of ayahuasca could uncover.
There’s also the matter of the ayahuasca trip itself. It’s characterized by cheap and cheesy visual effects: The room goes wavy and the edges of the hallucinatory afterlife into which Eddie journeys are blurred, as if mind-expanding journeys paradise are a lackluster Photobooth filter away. The so-called Garden is just the same upstate New York compound we’ve spent half the series in, no matter how much Eddie and the dead people talk it up like it’s Lothlórien. One of those dead people is a beatific Doc Meyer himself; You may remember him from the episode’s other major storyline, in which Cal’s dying mother reveals that he was a child molester. All told, the Light has some pretty weird ideas about the promised land.
Indeed, all the strongest things about the kidnapping storyline are badly bobbled. In addition to the weird way in which Eddie’s status as a possible savior figure and rival to Cal and Sarah’s throne is advanced, there’s the matter of Chloe’s kid, stranded in the car after Richard and Kodiak kidnap his sitter. (More ace planning from Meyerism’s masters of espionage!) The shots of the kid emerging from the car in the middle of nowhere, calling for the adult he’s counting on for protection, and getting no reply are the stuff of nightmares (literally — I used to have bad dreams about getting abandoned in the car all the time as a boy).
But instead of sticking with the kid Arya Stark–style to see the incident’s effects through the eyes of the most affected party, the whole thing is done just to give the abduction extra juice. The fact that the kid had seen Kodiak earlier that day apparently never comes up when he talks to the cops. His father is reunited with his missing child for about two seconds before he starts yelling at his mother in front of him; Unless the idea is that he’s a completely unfit parent, which it isn’t, this is ludicrous behavior. The cops never come to Eddie to question him about his disappearance. Chloe acts as though Eddie abandoned her son, then does a 180 when he says he was kidnapped and adopts a we’re-in-this-together attitude, albeit a downbeat one, toward his plight. This guy just put her son in grave, potentially lethal danger — I’m sorry, but the time for the “I think we should see other people” conversation has come, Chloe.
Then we come to the continuing misadventures of Sarah and Cal. The former has no fewer than three major emotional storylines to handle this episode: deal with Cal’s dying mother and her allegations of abuse, get confronted by her son Hawk about the movement’s near-bankruptcy, and continue her quest to blackmail wealthy Meyerists with their taped “unburdenings.” Each of these is ample fodder for an entire episode; Instead, they’re all chopped up and mixed together in the writing and editing like a tossed salad, jerking the character back and forth and preventing any individual plot point from having the impact it should.
Meanwhile, her counterpart Cal goes through a facsimile of one of Don Draper’s California sojourns (sans his charm and talent) in an attempt to wheedle rich music mogul (and mother of inconsistently written young recruit Noa) Jackie Richards, played by Melanie Griffith as a Stevie Nicks stand-in. Within seconds of meeting him, Jackie — who for some reason is hanging out at a pool alone — confides the potentially career-ending secret that a superstar client named Luna is planning to bail on her tour commitments. Cal offers to help get the pop star cleaned up and back to work; Instead, he winds up doing some blow with them, giving his least convincing hard sell of Meyerism yet (which is saying something), and ultimately telling Luna, who we should note is suicidally depressed and high as a kite, to just get in her car and drive as far away from Jackie as possible.
When he divulges the fruits of his labors to Jackie the next morning, he tops off his role in costing her millions of dollars by insulting her parenting and her entire persona. Why this inspires her to make out with him is beyond me, especially since she so effectively took his number earlier in the episode (“First rule of sales: You gotta believe your own pitch. You’re not convincing anybody, Cal. You’re not even convincing yourself”), but there you have it!
The truly frustrating thing — okay, one of the truly frustrating things — about the episode, the season’s eighth, is that nothing happens in it that couldn’t have happened in episode two. Sarah’s exposure to the dark side, Cal’s piss-poor leadership, Eddie’s messianic secret, Kodiak and Richard’s suspicions of Cal and Eddie alike, the movement’s financial woes, even Hawk’s emergence as a natural leader in his own right: It was all right there already. The Path does not need to be such a long and winding road if it’s just going to wind up a few steps from where it started.
Sean T. Collins (@theseantcollins) writes about TV for Rolling Stone, Vulture, the Observer, and anyplace that will have him, really. He and his family live on Long Island.
