‘Maniac’ Episode 6 Recap: Mother, May I Sleep With Trauma?

And now, an interlude. Maniac Episode 6, the aptly titled “Larger Structural Issues,” is a breather after back-to-back-to-back installments that took us deep into the minds of its leading players. No traumatic car-crash memory, no “furlord shooting Uzis or magical chapters of books” as Owen describes his and Annie’s shared fantasies — just Dr. James Mantleray and Dr. Azumi Fujita and Dr. Greta Mantleray, three weirdos trying to figure out how to rescue James’s life’s work from the brink of disaster.

Now that Phase B of the trial is complete, the problems with the GRTA supercomputer are becoming impossible to ignore. It goes beyond combining Owen and Annie during their hallucinatory states, the result of a simple mechanical malfunction. (No one thinks to share this information with the subjects, so Owen spends the episode terrified he’s having a major break with reality, and Annie is half-convinced they’ve discovered a layer of the collective unconscious akin to “multi-reality brain-magic shit.”) According to printouts GRTA has begun sending to Dr. Fujita’s workstation, she’s depressed over the death of her lover (!) Dr. Muramoto, and she needs therapy. Specifically, she wants to be treated by the woman upon whom her A.I. is based: James’s self-help snake-oil saleswoman mom, Greta.

It takes a lot of corny, unfunny jaw-jaw to get us there. James becomes as petulant and terrified as a child over the prospect of asking his mom to help. Greta has a live-in escort named Julio (she pronounces it with a hard J sound) who helps administer her chemo in bikini briefs. There’s a ton of single-entendre incest stuff and masturbation jokes and whatnot.

In the end, Greta agrees to help GRTA, but not before totally getting James’s number. Now that she’s been filled in on all the details of the project her estranged son has worked to distance her from until now, she sums it up thusly: Seven years ago, after falling out with his therapist mother, James embarked on a quest to invent a series of pills that would eliminate the need for therapists forever, using a supercomputer based on the therapist mother from whom he was estranged; now that his computer-mom isn’t working, he’s come running back to his real mom for help. Why leave anything to the audience to interpret when you can spell it out, right?

This scene, at least, has the virtue of being kinda funny because it’s so blunt and brutal. But it points to a larger, worrying tendency: the artlessness with which mental illness is discussed on the show.

“For some reason it’s more exciting to tell people I cut than to actually cut,” says one patient, describing an apparent history of self-injury. “You know that movie It’s a Wonderful Life? If that happened to me there would be no difference in the world,” Owen says when asked to describe in his own words what’s “wrong” with him; later he disputes GRTA’s contention that she can cure him by stating flat-out “There’s no cure for schizophrenia.” “She laid in my bed for two months and talked to me about how she wanted to hang herself; I was eight,” James tells Azumi about how his world-famous mother handled his father’s abandonment of the family.

This isn’t writing, as I understand it, in the context of narrative fiction in general or genre fiction in particular. This is just having a character walk up to the camera and describe, in so many words, a thing about a rough part of being alive. For some people this kind of writing seems to hit like a bolt out of the blue, or at least the proliferation of Bojack Horseman screenshots on my Twitter timeline tells me so. The ecstatic reaction to Alex Garland’s Annihilation, which features an exchange in which one character suggests another’s self-injury scars indicate attempts to kill herself and a third says “No, I think the opposite: trying to feel alive” — a truism from the depths of the purplest YA fiction, or an unremarkable real-world therapy session — is another indicator.

I’m bored by it, frankly. When I think of lines from films and television shows about mental illness and suffering that have really moved me, it’s not stuff I’ve heard before cutting a check to my psychiatrist for my co-pay, it’s stuff I’d never thought of before at all, but rang true the moment I heard it. I can still remember exactly how flattened I was when I first heard Boardwalk Empire‘s traumatized, murderous World War I veteran Richard Harrow explain why he stopped reading novels after the war: “It occurred to me the basis of fiction is that people have some sort of connection with each other, but they don’t.” It washed over me like a nightmare, and functioned like a nightmare in that it dredged up fears I hadn’t been courageous enough to face and forced me to stare at them. He didn’t just say “I’m having a hard time enjoying things that once brought me joy” like he’s in a commercial for a new antidepressant. He fucking walloped me. The thrill of recognition is tiny. The thrill of revelation is colossal.

So that’s my problem with Maniac now, even if Justin Theroux is far better playing an unorthodox but effective psychiatrist, as he does in the post-pill interview scenes, than a funny-looking goofball with sex hangups, like he’s forced to everywhere else. There’s no art to it, no faith in the power of genre to use spectacle and the unexpected to articulate truths in a truer way than rote recitation. This despite layer upon layer of fantastical worldbuilding and enough vectors for getting far out — semi-dystopian near future, talking supercomputer, weird clinical environment, psychoactive pills, elaborate fantasy sequences, schizophrenic hallucinations — to sustain several shows, much less just one. Let the pills take hold, man. Let the pills take hold.

Sean T. Collins (@theseantcollins) writes about TV for Rolling Stone, Vulture, The New York Times, and anyplace that will have him, really. He and his family live on Long Island.

Watch Maniac Episode 6 ("Larger Structural Issues") on Netflix