Web Therapy on Showtime Season 2 Episode 8

 My name for this episode is “Fiona Has a Ball.”
 

It’s a pun because in this episode Fiona’s skills at emotional castration emasculation of men is especially evident.

 
It begins with David Schwimmer on the web cam; he is playing Neville Miller, someone from Fiona’s past. Only Fiona doesn’t recognize him (Ouch!) and keeps calling him Newell instead of Neville. (Ouch!  Ouch!)  Neville is devastated by this, so devastated that he goes practically catatonic. At one point he shouts a vulgarity at Fiona several times in a row, replacing the word “mother” with “father” in the well-known MF insult. I’m getting the feeling that Neville will be back, and we will learn how the young Fiona dropped the young Neville as her boyfriend and took up with his father instead. 

Conan O’Brien, playing himself, is her next patient. Just as Fiona diminished Neville by getting his name wrong and failing to recognize him, she now belittles Conon with the same tactics. She pronounces Conan’s name wrong and says she has never heard of him. (Ouch!) She tells him he is having a “mid-life crisis” because he is a failure in the entertainment business (Ouch! Ouch!). She suggests that he is not good-looking enough to be the host of a TV show, and when Conan is shaken by her comments about his looks, she tells him he has self-esteem issues. (Triple Ouch!). She googles him while he is talking.  (Quadruple Ouch!) Then she insinuates that O’Brien’s sidekick, Andy, on “The Conan O’Brien Show” is funnier and more appealing than Conan. She says that Conan is the vegetables and Andy is the dessert. (Ouch! Ouch! Ouch! Ouch! Ouch!) How many times can Fiona “rip his balls off"?

I use that phrase, “rip his balls off,” because Conan himself uses it. He is not referring to himself; he is referring to Fiona’s assistant, Jerome. Jerome breaks into the room while Fiona is in session with Conan to tell her some urgent news. Fiona calls him a “colossal idiot,” and she orders him to get out of the room. Her behavior causes Conan to say that Fiona was “cruel.”  He says, “You ripped his balls off, tied a bow around them, and handed them back on a silver tray.” Interesting—he can see the castrating knife when Fiona directs it at someone else, but not when she directs it towards him.

Even Fiona’s former co-worker, Gina, carries the balls theme forward. She is in Nome, Alaska at the job Fiona got for her in order to get her out of town. Gina sends Fiona a video saying she is “freezing her balls off.”  Wait, isn’t that an anatomical impossibility for a woman?  

In the last scene, Fiona and Conan get into a disagreement because Fiona refuses to play a part in O’Brien’s scheme to convince Andy that he should stop stealing Conan’s limelight. They argue, Conan delivers a veiled threat, but backs down saying, “This is a whole new ball of wax.”

We always knew Fiona was brazen and ballsy.  In this episode, we get to peer into her trophy room.   

My “This-sums-up-Fiona-in-a-nutshell” line of the week is spoken during the intro to the show. “Many of the most important names in Hollywood have one thing in common; they picked the wrong therapist.”

 

 

This picture is from www.sho.com