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When you think of the classic challenges of early adulthood, a few obvious ones come to mind, mostly related to careers and relationships and making or maintaining friendships. But I appreciate that, in between wacky subplots about jury duty, Adults is also spotlighting some of the more subtle conflicts that crop up as you age, like how to make your sister want your sperm.
Okay, but for real — there’s an interesting core to the main story in this episode, even if it takes a while to get there. It starts with that basic incest joke that fuels much of the dialogue: Anton knows his sister and her wife are thinking of having a baby, and he desperately wants to offer his “seed.” (That joke doesn’t really evolve throughout the episode so much as it repeats itself a dozen times.) When Talia (Raven-Symoné) first shows up, they seem to have a good vibe between them — playfully antagonistic at worst. But then Anton brings up the idea of Talia and Brooke using him as their sperm donor and Talia fully cracks up. (Raven-Symoné has always had one of the best laughs.) She mentions that he “ruined every family vacation,” which clearly hurts Anton.
The basic sitcom-y premise of this new family dynamic, verbalized later by Samir, is this: Anton is completely charming and lovable to everybody in the world except his parents and sister, to whom he is a complete monster. Sure, that works, though Owen Thiele screaming gets a tad old by the end of the episode. (This is already a scream-y show.) The more interesting idea is that Anton desperately cares about his family seeing him as well adjusted, or “spermworthy,” in Paul Baker’s words — that he doesn’t want to conform to his mom and sister’s ideas of him as immature or anger-prone, yet their skepticism keeps pushing him into that mode.
Paul Baker is perfectly happy to help out, as usual, and he immediately impresses Talia and Brooke during the private dinner they serve at the diner where he works. I immediately saw where this was going: Of course they’d ask Paul Baker to father their child, not Anton. But it’s an effective trigger to set off Anton’s anger again, which in turn sets off Talia’s anger again. Both are quick to point out that neither of them acts like this with other people or in their everyday lives, which makes total sense: Spending time with family often has a way of turning us into our most feral, sensitive selves.
This all ends with a sweet scene in the storage closet, where Anton and Talia discuss how little they actually know about each other. She didn’t know he was married, and he didn’t know she works in the same field as him (digital ad sales). Anton says something interesting here: Because he knows Talia so well and in such a specific context, he can’t typically show her every part of himself. The two are only able to unlock a new understanding of each other by pretending to be strangers meeting for the first time. It’s like when you hear a close friend explaining their job to a stranger at a party, and you’re like, Wait, that’s what you do? In a weird way, sometimes knowing somebody so implicitly makes you miss basic facts about their life.
Anton’s and Talia’s mutual desire to know more about each other reminds me of the season premiere when Issa wanted to glimpse the sides of Paul Baker that he was hiding from her, particularly his inner bro. That love and curiosity on her part seems at odds with her current obliviousness about him, something I’m still struggling with a bit. It’s deliberate that we see Issa admit she has no idea how many kids Paul Baker wants, then see Paul Baker and Anton have that very conversation. (He wants four, three girls and a boy, which isn’t actually far off from Issa’s five-kid plan if they did want a big family together.) The show is widening the distance between the established couple and drawing this other pairing closer together, and it’s working well, even if I’m unsure where exactly I want the story line to go next.
Issa is on her own fertility journey in “Talia,” freezing her eggs and giving herself daily hormone shots with the help of Samir, who adapts to her violent injection avoidance surprisingly quickly and comes up with some creative ways to stab her before she can resist. It’s a good bit, especially with how happy both of them are to role-play stabber and stabbee. After all, their eventual conversation about kids with Samir’s girlfriend takes place while Issa is peacefully tied up in a chair. That’s when Issa realizes how little she has planned out in her life and her relationship compared to Samir and Carly. Maybe it’s not a coincidence that she resists the next injection even harder than before, administering it herself only once Anton borrows his sister’s “opposite trick” (a.k.a. reverse psychology).
It’s an interesting place to end the story and connect it back to Anton, though I can’t help thinking all three of the major arcs of this episode feel a bit rushed. I appreciate Adults keeping the run times short, but sometimes it’s nice to have some room to breathe. We get Anton making one last insane plea for Talia to take his sperm, for example, but no resolution to her actual pregnancy plans, and I’m not sure any follow-up will happen until the next time Raven-Symoné is available. She’s welcome any time, though. She and Thiele do bounce off each other really well.
Similarly, the goofy C-stories could use a little more time to cook. Billie’s week in jury duty has its moments, especially the reveal of a whole board of her quotable lines. (My favorite is “Wednesday is yellow, Thursday is blue.”) But it feels more like a sketch than a true subplot — and one that could be inserted into practically any episode. That’s not to say every installment requires perfect thematic unity among the various goings-on, but this is just ultimately another take on Billie’s over-the-top camaraderie with the employees at the print shop in “Marathon Day,” itself kind of a rip-off of a Broad City bit.
Yes, it’s in character for Billie to crave the structure and routine that come with jury duty and that she’d suck up to the judge. It’s also fitting that her own inappropriate behavior, in this case sending baked goods to the litigants and their legal teams, leads to a mistrial. Besides that, though, there’s not much here, especially compared to her age-related meltdown last week. As cartoony as the incest jokes and violent resistance of Anton’s and Issa’s respective fertility journeys get in this episode, they’re grounded in the characters’ very real insecurities. Adults is almost always at its best when there’s a method to the madness, a kernel of earnestness at the heart of it all.
• “If I’m ever in a coma, put braces on my teeth.” “Okay.” Starting off the episode strong with this exchange, I must admit.
• Again, I know the surreal elements of this show are well established, but sometimes the meta jokes skew a little obvious for my tastes, like when an imaginary studio audience applauds for Raven-Symoné and Anton acknowledges it by asking, “What the fuck is that?” But I totally understand if that’s the biggest laugh of the episode for some viewers. I mean, seeing Raven makes me want to clap too.
• “Keep the Brita, okay? We don’t have space to plug it in anyways.”
• “Some of us are never gonna have kids with our sisters. Is that really the worst thing?”
