Episode Report Card Deborah: A | 3 USERS: A+ YOU GRADE IT "But What's Puzzling You / Is The Nature Of My Game"
By Deborah | Season 2 | Episode 22 | Aired on 04.21.2005
He wanders up one side of a bookcase with Joan on the other, as she asks, "So, when did it all start for you?" He says he was fourteen, describes himself as a "lonely, emotional kid" and when his parents got divorced, he needed someone to talk to: "So I made him up. And suddenly, he was real." Joan: "[Do] you know why you were chosen, and all that?" Ryan: "I don't really care." Joan: "Where do you think it's leading? I mean, there must be some kind of big plan, right? That's why we're meeting. It's all...coming together." She seems a little excited about the prospect of making more sense of this whole thing. One of the books on the top of the shelf in front of Ryan is Judaism for Dummies. Ryan: "Like I said, Joan: I just don't care." Joan: "What do you mean?" Ryan: "Well, he's master of the universe, he created everything…I'm supposed to be impressed? With this universe? You do watch the news occasionally?" Joan does. Ryan: "If he were really that divine, not to mention smart and merciful, he would have scrapped the free will idea. We would have been like computers: intelligent, capable, infallible even. But not free." Joan shakes her head, perplexed: "I don't get it." Ryan: "We don't have to be bossed around by some love-starved, egocentric deity. I didn't ask to be born. Now that I'm here, it's all up to me. I like it that way. My life is a gift? Okay, thanks. He can't ask for it back." Yeah, but if God is God, it can be taken away from you anyway, even if you choose not devote yourself to God. Ryan walks around Joan, and she turns around very slowly to face him again: "Does he know you feel this way?" Ryan: "We've talked about it. He enjoys the debate. He's a great conversationalist. Very well-informed." Well, I'd imagine. Joan wonders how Ryan can just say no, if he knows it's God? She says, "He's in charge." Ryan: "But he's not." Joan thinks about that for two seconds and comes back with, "But he will be." Ryan: "When it's over, it's over." He walks closely past her, adding, "That's a little something he left out of the story." Joan: "That's not true." He asks her how she knows. Joan says quietly, "I just know." Ryan humours her: "Hm." He pulls a book from the shelf: "Hegel. Haven't read him in a while. Do you know what his philosophy was? 'Life must be some kind of terrible mistake.' But the beautiful thing, Joan? It's not my mistake." Noticing Joan's troubled expression, he says, "Don't look at me like that. I'm a good guy. I saved Adam's life." He walks out the front door, whereupon the wind machine people down the street crank it up again and a small windstorm begins. Watching him go, Amber Tamblyn makes this great gesture that's exactly halfway between a shrug and a shudder.
Down the street (more or less), Kevin and Lily are having coffee at a sidewalk table of a café. Kevin's reading the newspaper: "Okay, so here's what we're looking at: Three Stooges film festival. If you say yes, it's true love." Lily's not really listening. She's just holding her mug up near her face and staring ahead of her. Kevin continues: "A Yugoslavian film I can't pronounce about, uh, people wearing bad clothes and being hungry. It's a quiet masterpiece." See, that would get my vote. "Or a tractor pull. Tractor pull's always good. Laser tag…" Lily suddenly says, "It makes me want to go back. What happened at the church." Kevin looks nervous: "You mean all the way? The full metal nun…back?" Frink and I: "So not ever getting any from her." Lily said she's been thinking about why she left, which was because she wasn't sure: "I had questions, I was angry, I didn't completely understand what God was up to…" Join the club, lady. I would argue that people who think they completely understand what God's up to have seriously misapprehended the nature of the entire matter. That's why they call it faith. She continues, "I was just a little confused, that's all. And so I threw away my whole vocation because I was a little confused." And your Mother Superior allowed that? I mean, from what I've read about convents and nuns, if you want to leave, you're usually given quite a lot of spiritual counselling and support in order to make sure it really is the right decision. I'd be pretty surprised if Lily just walked into the Mother Superior's office one day and said, "See ya, don't wanna be ya. Later, yo." Kevin asks, "That's the whole reason you left?" Lily admits that what she calls "the guy thing" had something to do with it: "I kept thinking about falling in love and how I would never get to do that. You're not really supposed to feel that way if you have a calling. So I thought maybe that I was hiding from life in here, and now that I'm out, I feel like I'm hiding from God." Hmm. Nicely expressed. Interesting that she speaks as if she's still in the convent: "In here." Kevin replies, "You're just…stuck. Psychological quicksand. I was like that after the accident. I didn't want to live. I didn't want to die…eventually one choice just comes into focus." Lily thinks about that and then smiles at Kevin. He waggles his head around, joking, "And you thought I was just handsome."