Stick S1E6 Review: A First Time, a Bear, and a Ryder Cup Ring
Santi has the talk with Pryce, Mitts and Elena fight about a hundred grand of helium, and a single piece of jewelry blows the whole RV apart.
The first five episodes of Stick used the road trip to keep everyone close enough to hurt each other without anyone admitting the proximity was the point. Episode six finally lets the proximity do its damage. Santi sleeps with Zero, Mitts puts a hundred thousand dollars on a helium bet, Elena says out loud what she has been swallowing for thirty years, Pryce buries his grief in a putt-putt joke about his ears falling off, and a Ryder Cup ring sitting in the wrong bag detonates the family on the morning of the tournament. It is the busiest hour the show has run, and the busiest the show has been allowed to be, because by this point the audience knows these five well enough that the door does not need to be propped open with exposition.
The body-count conversation, the dance, and a real first time
The cold open is Owen Wilson’s Pryce Cahill giving advice he is wildly unqualified to give. Santi, played by Peter Dager, wants to know whether to tell Zero his body count, and Pryce, after a long sucking of teeth, suggests that a lie can sometimes be a kindness, or at least a self-protection. Then he looks at the kid and reverses course. “You’re like a decent human being, and decent human beings tend to tell the truth, from what I hear.” Wilson plays the line as a man amending his own life mid-sentence. The follow-up, “I sometimes wonder if I would have done better in my life with less game,” is the most exposed Pryce has been in six episodes, and he gives it to a teenager who is too distracted by his own nerves to notice.
The Marco-Polo sequence at the lake is the prettiest thing the show has shot. Lizzy Caplan’s Elena is offscreen. Mitts is offscreen. The frame is two kids in water and a long quiet, and Lilli Kay’s Zero finally being still long enough to let Santi find them. When Santi says he is a virgin, Zero answers, “Me too.” The catch in that scene is the silence that follows. Neither of them performs. Neither of them turns it into a joke. Zero says, “I don’t trust a lot of people,” and the rest of the sentence is in the cut. The morning-after at the breakfast table, with Elena clocking that Santi looks different and Mitts blaming RV-living, is one of the rare beats where Stick lets sweetness sit unchallenged.
The crash happens in the second act and it happens at a minigolf course, because of course it does. The countdown clock at the kart track, Zero kissing Santi mid-quote, the line about playing the intercourse, the two of them sliding into something easy and earned, all of it is the lure for the trap the episode is setting. Stick has been training the audience to laugh at Pryce’s avoidance for five hours. This week it asks whether Santi’s giddiness might be the avoidance too.
Mitts, Elena, and a hundred grand of helium
The B-plot is on paper a sitcom premise. Bill Mitts, played by Marc Maron, wants to put his hundred-thousand-dollar gift from Pryce into a mutual fund or some bonds because that is what a grown man does with a windfall. Elena wants to dump the entire stack into helium. The first scene at the campground burger pit is Mitts trying to be supportive and producing a “huh” that Elena hears clearly and files away. The second scene, with the hot dogs not ready, the little brother who does not eat red meat, and the kid asking about nachos, is some of the show’s tightest staging. The frustration is not about the order; it is about the word “huh.”
Then Elena lets it land. “I’ve spent my whole life being questioned by pinche assholes like you.” She tells him about DePaul, about being top of her class, about Gary the first husband telling her to drop out when she got pregnant with Santi, about her father telling her not to go back because she had to be a good mother. “I’ve spent my whole life listening to fucking men, and I’m sick of it.” The grill is still going. The Happy Birthday Elliot song is somewhere behind them. Maron plays Mitts as a man absorbing a hit he genuinely did not feel coming, and the show resists the urge to give him a comeback. He just stands there with the spatula.
The reconciliation arrives in two pieces. The first is Mitts running her down to apologize, then absorbing her actual pitch on helium, which is a genuinely good pitch about MRI coolants and surgical lasers and a Tanzanian regime change and a supply chain narrowing to two mines. The second is a bear walking out of the trees, both of them screaming and getting bigger, and Mitts pulling Elena out of the way. The scene shifts from a real fight to a real adrenaline burst in the span of forty seconds, and it works because the show has earned the right to be sloppy about its tonal joins. The next morning Mitts tells her the helium idea is amazing. Whether he means it or whether he is just folding is left for next week.
Pryce, Dr. Molly, and the music turned down
Pryce spends the episode being two things at once. In the daylight he is Santi’s coach, telling him to play the left side on seven and the narrow chute on fourteen, telling him to take Wednesday off, telling him to stay loose. At dusk he is on the floor with a child named Molly who decides, unprompted, that his ears have fallen off. He puts them back on. They work. Wilson plays the whole bit with the same easy register he has used since the pilot, but the camera holds on him a beat longer than it needs to, and the held beat is what makes it. Earlier in the day Amber-Linn, his ex, picked up a FaceTime to tell him she is throwing out a brown club chair and asked, “One of those days, huh?” The chair, the date that is presumably the anniversary of their son’s death, the kids on the playground, the little hand pulling at Molly’s mom, all of it lives under Pryce’s ear gag.
The conversation at the picnic table with Elena that night is the episode’s emotional climax. Pryce admits Mitts told her. He talks about watching the mother put the daughter to bed, the bargaining for five more minutes, the “I’m not tired,” and says that is the stuff he feels like he missed. The grief-group monologue, where everyone was talking about lost graduations and weddings while what Pryce actually misses is yelling up the stairs to turn the music down, signing mediocre report cards, telling a kid no to a ferret, is the most lived-in writing Owen Wilson has been given in years. The line that closes it, “If you do, you really just don’t wanna come back,” is delivered into a beer can and not toward the camera, and the cut to the next morning lets it sit.
The ring, the lie, the locker room
The third act is a slow-motion structural collapse. Zero has Pryce’s Ryder Cup ring in their bag because Pryce gave it as collateral on a ten-thousand-dollar bonus owed for getting Santi to the Amateur. Santi spots the ring during the haircut bit. Zero lies, says they found it outside the RV. The next morning Santi hands it back to Pryce. The trap snaps shut in the parking lot when Pryce says he lost the ring at Crooked Stick the previous week, four hundred miles away, and Zero says they found it yesterday in the lot, and Santi watches both stories cross.
Santi is sharp enough to ask the right question fast. “Are you hanging out with me for money?” Zero says no. Pryce tries to triage. The actual deal comes out, that Zero gets paid to say things on the course because Santi will hear it from a peer and blow it off coming from his coach. The way Santi processes that is the cruelest cut in the script. He asks if Pryce paid Zero to sleep with him. He hears Pryce say no, but the question is the wound. By the time he is calling Zero an e-girl, a skater boy, a phony, a clown, the camera has lost interest in defending him. Peter Dager plays the speech as somebody who has been waiting weeks to be allowed to be cruel and has finally found the receipt. The episode does not let Zero rebut. It does not let Pryce rescue. Santi walks. “Where Is My Mind” hits.
What this episode argues
Stick has been a road comedy about a man avoiding his grief by managing a kid’s career. Episode six argues that the deal he made to do that, paying a stranger to be a translator between him and Santi, was always going to be the bill that came due. The structural irony is sharp. The same week Santi has a first night with someone he trusts, he finds out his trust was on a payroll. The same week Mitts learns Elena spent thirty years swallowing the word “huh,” Pryce delivers a monologue about the ordinary parental sentences he never got to say. The episode lines those grievances up next to each other and lets the parallels do the work.
The argument the hour quietly stakes is that the people in this RV have all been performing a version of patience they are running out of. Elena’s outburst, Pryce’s grief, Santi’s blow-up, even Mitts’s careful financial caution, are all the same impulse from different angles. The show is no longer pretending these five can keep absorbing each other’s avoidance without one of them detonating. This week Santi detonates first. Next week the bill goes to somebody else.
Verdict
The episode juggles a sexual-debut scene, a couples fight, a grief monologue, a bear attack, and a tournament-morning betrayal, and only one of those beats overreaches. The bear gag is funny on first watch and a little load-bearing on the rewatch, asked to do tonal work the rest of the scene cannot. Everything else lands. Wilson has not been this exposed in years, Marc Maron plays a husband being told the truth without making a meal of it, Lizzy Caplan’s “I’ve spent my whole life listening to fucking men” is the line of the season so far, and Peter Dager has been waiting six episodes to be allowed to bare his teeth. The Pixies needle-drop is the kind of cue that would have felt cheap in episode one, and works here because the show has earned the swing.
Rating: 8.6/10