Last week I mentioned that I was glad to see Cynthia Nixon back on The Big C. After this week’s episode, however, I’m beginning to wonder if her character, Rebecca, is just a little too much. She had already been established as a selfish, egotistical person throughout the first season, but she was really getting on my nerves in this episode. I think it was just a little too much for me. First there was the complete lack of remorse for telling Sean that Cathy had cancer, then it was bullying Cathy into throwing her a last minute baby shower, and then there was her announcement that she was going to name the baby Cathy as an “homage.” I don’t quite hate the character yet, but I think the writers need to be very careful with her.
Gabourey Sidibe returned this week too, as Andrea. I really liked her reintroduction, as the blast of fresh air and honesty juxtaposed against all the sympathetic smiles and cupcake drives that Cathy met upon her return to school. I think those cupcakes may have been my favorite part of the episode, especially when the girls realized that putting a big “C” on the top of every cake wasn’t the best idea.
I would be remiss if I didn’t bring up the beautifully sad title of the episode, “Musical Chairs,” and the image from the episode. Cathy was admitted to a clinical trial only after another patient who was already enrolled died suddenly. She confronted her doctor about this sad truth (as she was suffering from survivor’s guilt) while he was in the pediatric ward, with the children playing musical chairs in the background. As he described how half of the kids would never leave the hospital they played in the background, fighting over a dwindling number of seats. I found it to be a powerful piece of imagery.
One thing that I was left wondering about during this episode was the interleukin treatment that Cathy underwent. The writers clearly made the creative decision to move the show past them between seasons, but I’m wondering if we, as an audience, got cheated out of anything by not seeing the treatments. It seems like there definitely would have been some drama and comedy that could have been mined from that. I also would have liked to have seen how it affected the family and brought them back together. Perhaps we will be seeing similar things as Cathy enters the clinical trials with her new doctor.
It was great to see Alan Alda on the show, and I hope that he gets a little more quality screen time than he did in this episode. It’s hard when a show has such a great cast to balance all the characters. I think Alda is going to make a fine addition to the show, though, and it should be interesting seeing if there is going to be more sparring between he and Cathy, or if she is going to have a better relationship with her new doctor moving forward.
Clacked by Bob Degon
on Jul 05, 2011 @ 18:33 EST5EDT
