I actually wrote down “gross” in my notes at Jonathan’s aggressive “nice guy” antics during that scene, and I’m sure Franklin would agree.Īnother thing with which I’m sure Franklin would agree: Jonathan being home isn’t good for anyone. Franklin has a lot more to say to this man he never wanted as his son in law, and we see his shock and disgust again when Grace is hospitalized after fainting in the park, and Jonathan whips out his “pleasant and pushy doctor” act to look after her. I believe him when he says he would kill Jonathan, and I also appreciated how much of a toll his “I’m done here” seemed to take. And when he sees Jonathan in jail, it’s with the gaze of a predator sizing up his prey. He is honest to Grace about the unhappiness of his marriage to her mother (another detail from You Should Have Known that has little impact here because it was fumblingly adapted) as a way to beseech her not to stay with Jonathan.
He leans extremely hard on Reardon’s Principal Connaver to keep Henry in school that “old-fashioned cocksucker” speech was pure President Snow. He secures the services of Haley Fitzgerald, who clearly doesn’t seem to like either Grace or Jonathan (… I get it) but agrees to take the case as a favor for Franklin.
THE OFFICE SEASON 3 EPISODE 15 PLUS
Monetarily, Franklin is already out $2.5 million - $2 million to get Jonathan out of jail and brought back home, plus that missing $500,000 that I WILL NEVER STOP TALKING ABOUT BECAUSE I DON’T UNDERSTAND WHY NO ONE IS ASKING ABOUT THIS - and we also see him putting up cachet, not just cash (I’m sorry, I’m sorry). Is all this confusion why Franklin goes on the offensive so hard? Is this Franklin’s way of gaining some measure of control in protecting his daughter: using his wealth and his influence to maintain as much normalcy for Grace and Henry as he can? I suppose so.
THE OFFICE SEASON 3 EPISODE 15 HOW TO
How did she go for a walk around Harlem on the night of Elena’s murder without remembering it at all? Why did she never once mention getting called all those times by a mysterious number that ended up being Elena’s number? (Also notice that she tells Detective Mendoza that she never picks up the phone if she doesn’t recognize the number, but she did pick up when looking for Jonathan, and it ended up being a telemarketer - so I’m not totally sure we can buy her staunch denial here, either.) And I don’t even know how to discuss that oil painting! Did she sit for Elena? Or was Elena really so obsessed with the Frasers that she, what, followed Grace and did the portrait from memory? I have no idea! I am not sure I really like how much Elena is being made into an outsized stalker, one who potentially was trailing Grace for months, when we never saw any inclination or mention of anything suspicious before now! Instead, we have an increasingly unreliable Grace, one whom I worry we can’t trust about anything.
I wish The Undoing had adapted any of that subplot, because I think as Grace’s career becomes increasingly irrelevant to the show’s narrative, we also lose the inner struggle that the book so well captured for this character. It’s ironic, then, when the know-it-all therapist ends up entangled in a murder investigation because of her husband’s lies. In You Should Have Known, Grace is a respected therapist whose brusque style turns off some people but has landed her a deal for a book that addresses all these topics, in particular the way that women act in relationships. Instead, we should be considering why we accept the situations we do, and why we make certain assumptions, and why we create these false, outsize narratives in our imaginations about who we are. The book on which The Undoing is based, Jean Hanff Korelitz’s You Should Have Known, does a wonderful, layered job at probing at this idea: that as much as we want people to change, they rarely ever do, and we can’t blame them for that. And when people show us, again, who they really are, we only have ourselves to blame for not believing them the first time. Unless there is some kind of irrefutable, undeniable, absolutely certain evidence of wrongdoing, we want to believe people are innocent. Most of the time, we want to believe in some kind of intrinsic goodness in people.
I personally find Jonathan detestable because of what so many other people in his life seem to be ignoring - for the millionth time, let me mention the mysteriously disappeared $500,000, the use of a conference in Cleveland as a cover story, the whole lying-all-the-time thing - but more and more, I can understand how he conned so many people so for long. I think Hugh Grant is a good, but limited, actor, and the more I see of him as Jonathan Fraser, I realize how fitting it is that he’s playing a character who is also a good, but limited, actor.