When Paul toasted Cathy at a surprise party he threw for her, he said, without realizing how ironic he was being, “Since her birthday’s in July, she is a cancer, a crab … Happy Birthday my little cancer.”
Then he served up chocolate cake with raspberry filling, his favorite cake not hers because he didn’t know, after 15 years of marriage, what her favorite was. If she wanted her favorite cake, she had to buy it for herself. That pretty much sums up their marriage, but then again, it felt like we already knew that.
As I watched Cathy crush her husband, I got the feeling that, even if Cathy had never gotten cancer, her marriage would’ve fallen apart anyway. Cancer was just the excuse that caused her to reevaluate her choices and she didn’t like what she saw. (Or, it’s possible that maybe she wouldn’t have mustered the courage to be clear-eyed about her marriage had a death sentence not been staring her in the face.)
It wasn’t new news that previously super-cautious Cathy and man-child Paul had been drifting apart. This fact had been well established in previous episodes of The Big C. This episode merely put an exclamation point at the end of that sentence, with Cathy craving her college days.
Regret was palpable throughout as Cathy observed that she hadn’t been truly happy in 20 years, the amount of time she’d known Paul. Seeing her former college buddy, Rebecca (guest star Cynthia Nixon), prompted her to recall times when she was happy, when she was carefree and had no responsibilities. Seeing Paul run around the house, which he’d decorated for Cathy’s birthday, stabbing balloons with a fork and taking his frustrations out on helpless streamers, it seemed like Paul was acting the way Cathy felt inside, angry and betrayed, like everything was slipping away.
All of this seemed appropriate and right for the story, but it left me feeling flat because their old way of life had already been slipping away since the pilot episode and Cathy’s life. Despite Cathy’s regret-filled realizations and the goofy karaoke scene, this episode represented a bit of a backslide following on the heels of last week’s where Cathy tested the waters by telling Sean she has cancer, but then played it off as joke. When Cathy called Lenny to tell him she was going to accompany him to the Bahamas because she is “always talking about vacations I never take,” it seemed like a repeat of Cathy checking off things on her “To Do” list. Been there, done that. Cathy was making no forward progress and neither was the overall story, other than Marlene continuing to suffer from a worsening case of dementia or Alzheimer’s or something of that sort.
Not that I expected Cathy to get all sentimental and confessional at her party, that would’ve been out of character, but I was waiting for something more, other than the same regret which has permeated the other seven episodes, regret that’s swiftly met with impulsive action.
The closest we got to true emotion was when Cathy told her aunt, who still buys her clothes in the juniors’ department, “It’s a privilege to grow old.”
Clacked by Meredith O'Brien 
on Oct 12, 2010 @ 12:40 EST5EDT
