Review: Being Erica, Season 4, Episode 5: Sins of the Father
What is this "party" I am apparently attending?
Well, I got what I asked for. Last week I talked about how this season of Being Erica was overly light-hearted and filled with happy endings. This week was another Dr. Tom backstory episode, as well as giving a bit more info on Dr. Naadiah, both of which were welcome. More after the break.Tom is one of the darkest characters on the show. He’s divorced, has no friends, a bad relationship with his daughter. All he has is patients. And what did he learn this week? That his engagement with Amanda fell apart because of his mistakes, not Amanda’s. That his father isn’t happy with the choices he’s made in life. That it’s possible to be a Doctor and have a life, as Dr. Naadiah showed him.
At some point, though, this moved away from backstory to the beat up on Dr. Tom hour, where he’s completely wrong about everything in his life. It was more than what was necessary to get the message across. We’ve seen in previous episodes, and especially previous Dr. Tom flashbacks, that he doesn’t really have a life, and maybe doesn’t even want one. It would have been nice to build on that, focus a bit more on his daughter, rather than introducing us to his father and his ex-fiancee all in one episode, which was a bit too much story to handle.
This episode also continues the trend this season of focusing on one character each episode, which means we get to spend a lot less time with Erica. Always unfortunate. Dr. Tom flashbacks are just not as entertaining as Erica flashbacks are–she’s got a much lighter, funny approach to getting the moral/answer out of each time travel. The other thing Erica-centric episodes have going for them is their furthering of her becoming a doctor storyline, which I had thought would be this season’s dominant storyline, just like last year’s group therapy plot. Unfortunately, that aspect of the season is progressing slowly, and not going into the interesting process of how someone becomes a magic time traveling doctor.
The episode’s B-story, Kai returning to the present, is something I’m going to reserve judgment on. He was mainly interesting in season 2 because he was the first person Erica met who was also in therapy. Now that she has Adam, and a bit more of an open relationship with Dr. Tom, I’m not sure why Kai needs to come back. He was never very interesting in his own right, and this thing where he comes back on a regret and just stays for a long time seems to go against how everyone else deals with going back on regrets. And why would his Doctor let him go back, after he refused to finish his regret when he was sent to the present back in season 2?
I just hope Kai’s storyline involves more than just him coming back to cause problems for Erica and Adam, who pulled a “don’t see him anymore!” jealous TV-boyfriend thing. Ugh. Give me more Erica-therapy-training, less letting Erica slide into the background for storylines that just don’t measure up.
Moment of the episode: Erica making weird screechy noises after giving Adam tickets to see The Thing.
Weird noises! Horns!
Summing Up 