The sixth episode of Fleishman is in Trouble may pick up right where we left Toby, but it also flips the script, transitioning the plot away from the protagonist we’ve been following up until now. Titled “This Is My Enjoyment," the episode is a segue for Libby, our narrator, who becomes more introspective before delving into a different Fleishman who is also in trouble. Here’s a detailed recap of episode six.
(Linda Kallerus/FX)
While the Vantablack exhibit may have scared Solly Fleishman (Maxim Swinton) away from the Museum of Natural History, Toby (Jesse Eisenberg) continued to take his kids there. Toby’s favorite exhibit, The Hall of Human Origins, brought him comfort. “To survive is to evolve,” Libby’s narration explains the display’s theme of perseverance. “To evolve is to move forward and to move forward is to recover.”
Seth Morris (Adam Brody) comes to Toby’s apartment to help remove the terrible blinds it came with, a feat that seems impossible. Seth shares that he is planning to propose to his girlfriend Vanessa. The idea came to him while the two of them were watching Bubbles while Toby picked his kids up from camp. He received a call from a head hunter and came clean to Vanessa about being fired. She was so understanding and supportive and he wants that. “Marriage is no guarantee of anything,” Toby warns him. “Well, you still have a family,” Seth responds, sharing that he was jealous of Toby and his kids as they shared dinner that night. “You can be happy for me, I was happy for you,” Seth says.
That night, Toby reads A Wrinkle in Time to Solly, reaching a part where Madeleine L'Engle’s Meg says “Like and equal are not the same thing at all.” Solly asks if that’s true, pointing out that Toby never liked Rachel’s friends. The conversation shifts to the red stain on Toby’s ceiling, which seems to be getting bigger. Toby tells Solly that it’s fine.
As Toby’s life began to feel like a new normal, he began to think about what he wants out of it. Visiting Nahid (Mozhan Marnò), he stands at her doorway insisting that she leave her apartment with him. “Let’s throw caution to the wind and just be two consenting adults eating dinner,” he asks. Nahid asks if they can stay in and talk. “I want something real,” Toby says. “No, I deserve something real.” Nahid leans in to kiss Toby goodbye, a gesture he backs away from. On his walk home, he gets a text from the hospital saying that Dr. Bartuck wants to meet with him. The next morning, as Toby puts on his tie, Hannah (Meara Mahoney Gross) says “I’m proud of you” as she and Solly share in their father’s excitement about his impending promotion.
Dr. Bartuck (Michael Gaston) seems anxious and overly formal as Toby takes a seat in his office. Toby’s ears begin ringing as he shares that they are filling the subdivision role with an outside hire. “Nobody doubts your skill, but they felt like you were unable to give the time,” Bartuck says, bringing up Toby’s inconsistent attendance over the past three weeks. Toby asks about the previous 15 years during which he never once called in sick. Bartuck says he just needs to put in the face time and maybe he will get the position next time. As Toby gets up to leave, he asks for the name of the outside hire – Aaron Schwartz. “I went to medical school with him,” Toby tells his boss’ boss.
Toby tries to pull himself together in the restroom, but is called into action by a text that reads “Karen Cooper 9-1-1.” His VIP patient had a rare post-surgery brain hemorrhage that rendered her brain dead. “What do we do now, what’s the next step?”, Karen’s wealthy husband David Cooper (John Patrick Hayden) asks Toby in the hallway. “It’s an injury that’s hard to recover from,” Toby says, clarifying that it’s an injury people don’t recover from. Despite his recent disappointment, Toby is empathetic with David, but he is unable to give that level of understanding back. “Who else can I talk to about this?”, David asks, describing this situation as unfair and not what was promised. “I need to speak to somebody about this. Somebody who is actually in charge.”
Toby goes to the break room to pour himself a cup of coffee. The pot is empty. He pushes a chair in anger just as his boss, Janice (Pearl Sun), walks by. “Fleishman, is everything okay?”, she asks, concern on her face. Toby can’t stop thinking about David Cooper’s claim of fairness as he thinks about how unfair his own life feels. “There are questions a person shouldn’t ask because they’re unanswerable,” Libby’s narration explains.
One of Toby’s interns, Phillip (Ralph Adriel Johnson), finds him in the bathroom while washing his hands, telling his mentor that he’s applying for a fellowship in nephrology and needs a letter of recommendation. Phillip shares his goal of running a gastro unit someday and that he met with Dr. Bartuck, who told him specializing in both hepatology and nephrology would be the fastest way to that position. When Toby asks Phillip if that’s what he got into medicine for, Phillip says “A man’s worth is no greater than his ambitions.” Toby’s expression becomes cold as he tells Phillip to write the letter himself and that he will sign it. “Thanks, Toby,” Phillip says. “It’s Dr. Fleishman, okay Phillip?” Phillip looks stunned by the sudden change in the formality of his mentor.
Toby goes to his office to find another one of his interns, Joanie (Ava Yaghmaie), waiting for him on his couch. She’s in disbelief that Bartuck hired someone from the outside rather than promoting Toby. He first pretends like he’s not upset about it, repeating what he’s always said about getting into medicine to help people and preferring one-on-one patient interaction. “You always have to be on guard for the people who want to advance you out of the thing you got into medicine for,” he says. Joanie praises Toby as teaching her more than any other teacher and he becomes overwhelmed by emotion as he thanks her. He moves to sit closer to Joanie as he breaks down his facade and shares that he is upset by the decision. He becomes a broken record, talking about Rachel and how he wasn’t ambitious enough for her. Joanie tells her mentor how much she admires his consistent values, saying “I really want to be like that.” Toby invites Joanie to dinner to continue talking… he just invited her on a date… she gets up and says the has to go check on a patient’s sonogram… Toby is spiraling…
Hannah and Solly ask a lot of questions when Toby picks them up from day camp. “I told them I didn’t want it,” he lies about the promotion. “Being a boss is terrible, and then everybody hates you.” He takes the kids out to dinner at an Italian restaurant. Hannah realizes that something is wrong as Toby orders a giant bowl of spaghetti and stuffs his face full of it. The plate of red sauce morphs into the red stain on Toby’s bedroom ceiling, where he lays paralyzed by his body’s response to carbs after thirty years of abstinence. “The thing is, he hadn’t even asked for a promotion,” Libby friends us. “He hadn’t asked for this particular rejection.” Toby wonders if he will now be fired for harassment for asking one of his interns out on a date.
Toby is brought out of his funk by a ring at the doorbell. It’s his friend Cherry (Sierra Rein), who he had asked to come watch the kids and then forgot about it. “You said you have a party to go to,” she reminds Toby, who admits that he’s had a bad week and is going to skip it. “He didn’t get his promotion,” Hannah tells Cherry. “He didn’t want his promotion,” Solly corrects her, to which Hannah responds “Sure, dufus.” Hannah and Solly take Cherry’s daughter Jessica (Emma Giorgio) to see their rooms as Cherry and Toby talk. He tells her he doesn’t want to go to the party because it’s a reunion for friends he made in Israel and he will feel awkward now that he’s divorced. She reminds him that most people are divorced, tidying up the living room and forcing Toby to take a shower and go.
It’s been 15 years since Toby has seen the whole Israel crew, having stopped going to this annual reunion after he married Rachel. As he arrives, we see flashbacks of a housewarming party Rachel (Claire Danes) and Toby threw at The Golden after moving in. The usual guests were in attendance – Sam (Josh Stamberg) and Miriam Rothberg (Jenny Powers), Roxanne (Ashley Austin Morris), Cyndi (Joy Suprano), Todd (Eric William Morris), and Rich (Zack Robidas). The other husbands had nothing in common with Toby, who was annoyed by their small talk. None of Toby’s jokes were received well, with Rachel calling one of them “Stupid.” Toby eventually excused himself to the bedroom where he drank alone.
In comparison, Toby is the center of attention at the reunion. His old friends ask all about the dating app world. He sits on an indoor swing in the loft apartment talking to the host (Steve Rosen) about a woman he dated who wouldn’t leave her house. His friend suggests that life is sometimes just unfair. “I just don’t like to think in those terms,” Toby responds. “That’s what those terms are there for” Toby is told, his eyes becoming misty as he becomes surrounded by people who knew him back when he was all potential.
Libby (Lizzy Caplan) and Adam Epstein (Josh Radnor) arrive to the delight of the crowd. “We never go to parties, ever,” Libby tells her friends after a few drinks. “We go to parties all the time,” Adam corrects. “We never go to fun parties,” Libby responds, adding “This is my favorite night of the whole year.” Adam is noticeably upset by this statement and Seth changes the topic by asking him how he enjoyed their vacation to [CENSORED]. “I loved it!”, he exclaims, as Libby tells everyone she found it “soul-crushing.” She tells them that their club-level hotel room came with passes that allowed them to skip the line, which she felt bad about. “The thing about my wife is that she can be both unhappy on a line and cutting a line,” Adam jokes. Seth shares that he can’t wait to have kids and take them there. Libby goes on about how all of the women there wore yoga pants and were yelling at her kids, only to realize that she was also wearing yoga pants and yelling at her kids. Adam interrupts, saying they have to be home by 1:00 am to relieve the babysitter. “No, no, no, no, no, it’s my favorite night of the year!”, Libby objects. “I wish you would stop saying that,” Adam pleads. Libby refuses to leave, telling her husband she will take a car home later as he leaves alone. Seth gets a text from his girlfriend Vanessa and announces that she’s on her way, which offends Libby because she says his girlfriend is too young for this crowd and that if she just dismissed her husband, he can’t have his girlfriend over. “Have you considered that I like my girlfriend more than you like your husband?”, Seth asks, which offends Libby.
Libby goes outside to smoke, with Seth joining as Toby watches. They reminisce about the brand of cigarettes they got in Israel, which were called T.I.M.E., an acronym for “This Is My Enjoyment.” Toby tells Libby not to flick her ash on the ground at their host’s house. “Toby, this is my enjoyment,” Libby laughs, asking why Toby seems more annoyed than usual. “You should be nicer to Adam,” he tells her, with Seth agreeing. “Oh, you’re interested in me now?”, she asks, pointing out that Toby never asks anything about her or her life. Seth agrees, pointing out that Toby never asked how he was doing when he told him he lost his job. “If I was Adam, I would be done with you,” Toby snaps at Libby. “You’re going to give me marriage advice?”, she scoffs. Toby tries to divert the ire towards Seth, who he says hasn’t told his “toddler girlfriend” that he lost his job. “I’m tired of you treating me like I’m not a real person because I’m not married, I don’t have kids.” Toby tries to make it a joke, giving him a blessing in a Yiddish accent, but the joke doesn’t land. “I just remembered why I stopped hanging out with you two,” Seth says, calling Toby “needy” and Libby “dismissive.” Vanessa (Francis Li) pokes her head out, having just arrived, and Seth lights up, acting like they weren’t all just fighting. “I’m gonna go home,” Toby announces. Libby asks if she can join him in his car to get to the train station.
As the car pulls up to Toby’s apartment, he tells the driver to continue on to Grand Central Station, but Libby announces she’s getting out there. She begs Toby to let her use his bathroom and he asks her to be quiet. When Toby wakes up Cherry, she recognizes Libby and uses her maiden name, Slater. She is confused, asking if Libby is divorced, too. After Cherry leaves and Libby has used the bathroom, Libby enters Toby’s bedroom and asks if she can smoke by his window, talking about an ex-boyfriend she had who played the harmonica. She avoided looking him up, preferring to think of him the way he was in their youth, but at the party, she was told that he’s now an accountant in Scarsdale married to an English teacher and it made her sad. “How did we all get this way?”, Libby asks, feeling like she’s caught in a societal trap that puts everyone into the same boring life. “I miss longing, I miss desire.” She talks about how great Adam is, blaming her feelings of entrapment on a system. “I’m worried that the only way I can feel anything is when things are very bad,” Libby continues, worrying that something is wrong with her. Toby is silent and as Libby extinguishes her cigarette, she realizes why. He fell asleep. Rather than leaving, she climbs into bed next to Toby. She stares at the red stain on the ceiling, then looks at her friend, and then turns off the light.
Toby awakes to Solly crying about wetting his bed. Libby tries to console him, saying that her son Miles does it too, but Toby snaps and begs her to leave. “There was no use in going home like this,” Libby explains, “I had made a mess, and the cleanup already felt impossible.” She instead wanders around the city, visiting her old haunts, calling it “the museum of my youth.” She visits her old brownstone, watching her younger self enter with Glenn (Joe Tuttle), an editor from the men’s magazine she worked at. “You have to understand, I was never wild,” Libby confesses. “I didn’t have affairs. I didn’t have good judgment because I didn’t have any experience. But I wanted what he had. I wanted to really participate in life. I wanted to eat the world the way he and every other guy at the magazine did. I went about it the wrong way.” Libby confesses to being Glenn’s mistress, blowing smoke on him in hopes that his wife would know where he’d been. “I didn’t realize that the real power I had was that I had no obligations.”
Libby follows the ghost of her younger self to Central Park. “I can’t believe how briefly I held it and how quickly I gave it away,” she says of her marriage. She’s been thinking a lot lately about what Seth said to her previously, about how people have affairs in a quest to return to a younger version of themselves. “How poorly I wear this life,” Libby thinks, sharing flashbacks of her frustrations with suburban life – Adam coming home and asking how her day was when the answer is always the same, a freezer door that eternally seems ajar. “This is what I was saying about questions that can’t be answered. Is life fair? How did I get here? Trust me, you shouldn’t ask them.”
(Linda Kallerus/FX)
Libby sits down on a park bench and pulls out a pair of headphones, listening to “Wise Up” by Aimee Mann. She looks around at the other people in the park. And then she has a moment of recognition. A blonde woman with short hair in a tan jacket sitting on a bench directly across from her. She looks dazed. She holds a bagel in her hand but hasn’t taken a bite out of it. She looks lost, just like Libby. It’s Rachel Fleishman.
FX’s series adaptation of Taffy Brodesser-Akner’s novel continues on Thursday, December 22nd, with the penultimate episode, titled “Me-Time." I leave you with a brief description of the next episode coming to Hulu.
Libby learns of previously unknown dimensions to the Fleishman divorce.