Stick S1E4 Review: A Unicorn Floaty, a Quarry, and a Coach Out of His Depth
Pryce chases his prodigy into the Gen Z deep end, Mitts spills the secret that explains everything, and a bar Bellini girl gets handed a 1999 Ryder Cup ring as collateral.
The fourth episode of Stick has a tricky structural job, and it solves it with a $40 inflatable unicorn. After three hours of watching Owen Wilson’s Pryce Cahill try to coach a teenage prodigy who does not want to be coached, the show finally has to answer the question every Apple TV+ sports comedy eventually faces: why is this middle-aged man hauling a duffel of regrets around the country and shouting at someone else’s son. The episode answers that with one quiet line from Mitts at a snack-bar counter, then drops Pryce off a literal cliff to underline it. The result is the best half-hour the show has shipped so far, partly because it stops pretending the title character is the smartest person in the room and partly because it gives every other character the floor.
A quarry, a floaty, and a man too old for both
The cold open is the show in miniature. A Clark Ross insurance ad plays on the lobby TV. Mitts groans. Elena asks who he is. Mitts and Pryce explain in two clipped lines that Clark was Pryce’s playing partner at Sawgrass in 2009, that Clark won that day, that he said something cruel in the locker room, and that Pryce fed him his teeth in front of a lot of people and lost his tour card for it. The Clark Ross detail is a Chekhov’s gun the episode never fires, and the restraint is the point. Pryce has a buried thing. The show is not in a hurry to dig it up.
Santi rolls into the hotel lobby with Zero, the bartender from a previous episode, in tow. He has won his round. He has skipped dinner. He has answered his mother’s three-hour silence with a thumbs-up emoji. Pryce wants to celebrate. Santi wants to go swimming. Elena, played as the only adult on screen in most scenes, mediates by sitting down and ordering a drink. Pryce floats the line that gets the rest of the hour moving. He needs to mend some fences with Santi before next week’s Applebrook qualifier. He is happy to eat a little crow. He just does not know where the kid is.
By morning Santi is gone again, to a rock quarry with Zero and a wolf pack of Gen Zers, and Pryce has decided that fence-mending requires retrieval. The drive to the quarry is the episode at its loosest. Wilson plays Pryce as a man who has worked out exactly one parenting move and is willing to deploy it forty times. Marc Maron’s Mitts plays exhausted. Elena plays patient. The bit at the ticket window is the kind of small set-piece the show has been quietly getting better at. No floaty, no entry. Noodles are out. All that is left are forty-dollar unicorns, and Pryce, who has just spent the morning lecturing his sixteen-year-old client about honoring his commitments, hands over a hundred dollars and walks into the swim area with a giant inflatable horn strapped around his middle.
What Mitts tells Elena while Pryce is doing CPR on his ego
The episode’s center of gravity is not the quarry. It is the snack-bar bench where Mitts sits down next to Elena and decides she should know the thing Pryce will not say.
Elena has been needling Pryce. The line lands the night before. If you’d ever had a kid, you’d know that. Pryce eats it without answering. Mitts, who has been watching from the next stool with the wariness of a man who has worked one job for two decades and survived it, files the moment away. The next afternoon, while Pryce is fifty feet up a rock wall trying to figure out whether to jump or climb back down, Mitts puts a hand on Elena’s wrist and tells her.
Pryce had a son. His name was Jett. He died of cancer at four. Sawgrass happened a few months after, and golf was the only thing keeping Pryce together, and he thought he had a handle on it, and he did not. Whatever Clark Ross said to him in that locker room was about Jett, and that is why Pryce broke a man’s face in front of the tour and never came back. Mariana Treviño’s Elena does the work of the scene with two small gasps and a Spanish phrase that does not get a subtitle. She does not perform the realization. She just lets her face register it and goes quiet. The show could have scored the moment. It does not. The only audio is a teenager screaming as he hits the water in the background, which is exactly the tonal mix Stick has been chasing since the pilot.
The scene also pays off the Clark Ross ad from the cold open without underlining it. The episode trusts the audience to draw the line.
The cliff jump, the lightsaber speech, and a coach who finally listens
Pryce gets to the top of the quarry, runs out of stalling routes, and jumps. It is the kind of physical bit Owen Wilson has been doing on screen for thirty years and it still works, partly because the show shoots it from a teenager’s-eye view, with one Gen Zer yelling “check out the old dude.” He hits the water harder than he expected, comes up coughing, and floats over to Santi on the unicorn.
The pool talk is the episode’s other quiet pillar. Santi, played by Peter Dager with a permanent half-smirk that finally cracks here, lays out his case. He won yesterday. He won because Pryce shut up on the back nine. The moment Pryce stopped barking on his backswing was the moment Santi stopped being a kid and became Luke Skywalker. He is not interested in another coach who rides him during the round and shows up with a breakfast sandwich and an apology the next morning. He has had that coach. He knows the playbook.
Pryce hears it. Wilson plays the listening as a physical thing. Floating on a unicorn, sunburned, soaking wet, he just lets the kid finish. Then he counters with one number. Twenty-two. That is how many wins Pryce had at Santi’s age, and now here he is jumping off cliffs with a unicorn floaty around his waist because he did not know what he did not know. Santi asks what he does not know. Pryce gives him an actual coaching note. He overthinks around the greens. He sometimes swings from his toes, which chops his rotation. The biggest thing is he is in his head, peaks and valleys, and the show needs long flat expanses of professionalism for a forty-two-week season against athletes who are mentally strong.
It is the first time in four episodes that Pryce has said anything specific and useful about Santi’s game on screen. The kid does not accept the coaching. He tells Pryce to sit back, bring breakfast sandwiches, and cash the checks. But the seed is in. The episode trusts the audience to notice the swing note even if Santi pretends he did not.
The Ryder Cup ring, the brokie, and a caddy named Zero
The third act pivots on a hustle Pryce will spend the rest of the hour pretending was not a hustle. He pulls Zero aside at the post-quarry barbecue, where Zero has just talked Santi out of eating a hundred dollars’ worth of steaks on the grounds of methane emissions. Pryce has watched the conversion happen in real time. Twenty-four hours ago Santi was digesting fourteen Whoppers. Now he is the president of PETA. Pryce sees a lever.
Lilli Kay plays Zero with a constant low-grade contempt for Pryce that keeps cutting through his pitch. He is acting super creepy, like he is about to show her his penis. She has pepper spray on her person. He is a middle-aged unmarried man with a bad haircut talking about helping each other out. The script handles Zero’s pronouns and beliefs without making them the joke, and Kay plays the negotiation as a series of small flinches at Pryce’s vocabulary while the substance of the deal lands clean. Pryce wants Zero on the road as amateur golf’s first gender-fluid caddy. He has no money. He offers ten thousand dollars he does not have. Zero, sharp, tells him he is a brokie. Pryce concedes the brokie status, then produces a 1999 Ryder Cup team ring from Brookline, the kind Tiger Woods has one of, and offers it as collateral.
The closing sequence is the funniest sustained piece of choreography the show has done. Mitts, who has overheard the deal, pretends his feet hurt from the cliff jump. Plantar fasciitis, he tells Santi, with the exact pitch of an old caddy improvising. He cannot carry the bag at Applebrook. Pryce, with the broadest Owen Wilson grin available, suggests they need a temp caddy. Santi, on cue, suggests Zero. Pryce performs reluctance. Santi escalates. Within ninety seconds Zero has signed on for the road trip, Santi is laughing in the pool, and Pryce is sitting next to Mitts with the look of a man who has just successfully run a long con on the only person in his life who matters.
Mitts, of course, knows. He asks if it was a hustle. Pryce says it was not. Mitts asks if there is a little plan. Pryce says there is no little plan. Mitts asks if there are flaws in the little plan that does not exist. Pryce says nothing. Mitts says yeah. Many.
What this episode argues
Stick has spent three hours selling the audience on the idea that Pryce is a charming wreck who can coach a kid out of his slump if he can just stop self-sabotaging long enough to do it. This episode argues something colder. Pryce is a charming wreck because his kid died at four and golf was the only thing holding him together and it stopped holding. The Sawgrass meltdown was not a temper problem. It was a man with a buried wound being poked by Clark Ross in the locker room. Mitts has known this for fifteen years and kept the secret because that is what caddies do. Elena now knows it because Mitts decided she should. The audience now knows it because the show has finally decided we have earned it.
The corollary argument is gentler. Santi does not need a coach who fixes him. He needs a coach who notices his actual swing flaw, says it once, and then gets out of the way. Pryce floating on a unicorn in a flooded quarry and giving Santi one real piece of coaching advice is, structurally, the most adult thing Pryce has done in the season. The show frames it not as a victory but as a baseline. This is what the job actually is, and Pryce, after one round and one cliff jump, is finally doing it.
The unicorn floaty is the episode’s running visual joke and also its argument. A grown man humbling himself in a rented pool toy, paying a teenager’s price of admission, listening more than he talks, taking the coaching note about himself as well as giving one. The show is saying that is the work. Not the breakfast sandwich. Not the locker-room apology. The unicorn.
Verdict
This is the episode where Stick stops being a hangout show about Owen Wilson being charming and becomes a show about why Owen Wilson’s character is the way he is. The Jett reveal could have been a cheap unlock. The script holds it back, hands it to Mitts to deliver while Pryce is offscreen, and lets Mariana Treviño carry the receiving end with a face and a Spanish word that doubles as a verdict. The pool conversation between Pryce and Santi is the first scene in the series where coach and player are actually speaking the same language, even when the kid pretends they are not. Lilli Kay’s Zero is a real find, the kind of character who can puncture a Wilson monologue without taking the wind out of the show, and the Ryder Cup ring is a perfect single-prop reveal of how far Pryce will go to keep this thing alive. The B-stuff with Elena’s dogs and the steak debate is thinner. The Clark Ross ad runs once and then disappears, which is the right call for setup and the wrong call for a kicker. Mitts gets the funniest line of the season so far. Happy fucking idiots, twice, the second time whispered. That is the show in three words.
Rating: 8.3/10