Stick S1E7 Review: Mutant Boy, a Bus Station, and a Hail-Mary Sponsor Exemption
Pryce chases a kid through an airport while a season of grief, joyrides, and homemade tattoos catches up with him in one long, ragged afternoon.
A back-half episode of a sports comedy is usually where the show has to admit what it actually is, and Stick spends this hour admitting it twice. The first admission is in the cold open, which hands Pryce Cahill his own life in a flashback montage. The second is at a Tulsa-bound departure gate, where a 17-year-old golfer who has been telling everyone he is fine breaks into a run. By the time the credits arrive, the season’s premise has been reverse-engineered out of grief and re-pointed at a PGA event one week away, and Owen Wilson has done the heaviest acting of the season inside three short scenes.
A cold open that hands Pryce his entire life in eight minutes
The episode opens on Jett at seven, in a homemade superhero cape, freezing his dad with mutant powers while his mother watches from the doorway with a glass of wine. A brontosaurus is stuck in a toilet upstairs, because a brontosaurus is, per Jett, the largest of the quadrupeds. Pryce calls it a fool’s mission. His son corrects him on the asteroid theory of extinction. The joke lands, then the camera lingers a beat longer than a joke needs, and the warmth tilts.
The flashback compresses the entire shape of a fatherhood. Jett at 13, joyriding the family car to a McDonald’s drive-through so a friend named Dylan can buy a salad. Pryce trying to do “measured and cool” while his son walks away from him mid-lecture. Jett at the pool party getting a backyard tattoo from a kid named Conor, an eagle that comes out as a phallus, and Pryce’s instinct, after a stunned beat, is to grab the needle himself and try to repurpose it as a Civil War cannon. Amber-Linn screams that he is tattooing their child. The camera cuts before the verdict on whether the cannon looks like a cannon.
Then Jett at 18, packing a college bedroom. Pryce, in the doorway, asking him not to go out with his friends, asking him to stay one more night, asking what if he is not gonna be all right. Jett quoting his father’s own Grossweiner’s law back at him: you gotta let the past go, focus on the moment, it is the only thing you can control. The kid leaves. The flashback ends on a different child, asking Pryce in the present day if the pickleball kid was his son and why he was crying. The cut from one boy to another is the cleanest piece of editing the show has done, and it tells the audience what the rest of the hour is going to be about without putting a single word on the case.
The bus station, the airport, and the apology in the middle
The middle stretch fans out across three locations, and the show trusts the audience to track them. Elena is at the airport with Santi, two dogs, and an airline counter agent enforcing a one-pet-per-passenger rule with cheerful inflexibility. Mitts is at the bus station with Zero, handing them three hundred dollars and a warning not to eat in the food court. Pryce is somewhere in between, getting punched by his own season.
The Zero scene is the episode’s quiet centerpiece, and it is also where the show finally lets Mitts off the bench. Marc Maron plays the bus-station goodbye as a man who is exhausted by every word that comes out of Zero’s mouth and is going to say the hard thing anyway. Zero, still rehearsing the grievance, calls Pryce a clown, calls Santi cruel, demands to be heard, demands held space. Mitts tells them to shut the fuck up for a second, and then delivers the sentence the episode has been building toward: sometimes people who love each other hurt each other at the same time, and that is part of life. He references Francine. He does not elaborate. He hands Zero three hundred dollars even after Zero refuses it, because he doesn’t want them eating bus-station food.
What the scene gets right is the asymmetry. Zero is not converted. The closing line, “Bye, boomer,” is a small refusal, and Mitts takes it with the same shrug a man uses when his back goes out for the third time in a year. The hour has earned the right to let an apology fail and still count as a goodbye.
Meanwhile, in the car, Elena is failing in a different direction. Santi is telling her, finally, the thing he has been carrying since his father left: that he quit golf two weeks before his dad disappeared, that he tested his father with the Westview Qualifier, that he failed the test. The line that lands is “I was just a fucking golfer to him.” Lilli Kay plays it as the first time Santi has said it out loud, not the hundredth time he has thought it, and Elena’s response, “He didn’t know how to show it,” is the kind of consolation that a parent already knows will not stick. She apologizes for getting mixed up in this. She does not pretend the trip was harmless.
Pryce arrives at the gate as a man who has just spent a flashback understanding what he had with his own son and lost. The apology he delivers to Santi is mostly not an apology. It is a list. Pickleball. Mitts cooking. Throwing marshmallows. Slapjack. Santi trying to drive the RV badly. The funniest thing about the speech is that Wilson lets Pryce arrive at the verb “love” without ever saying it, and the second funniest thing is that Santi receives it without thawing. He nods. He turns and boards.
The Hail-Mary, the hustle, and the show finally telling us what it is
The pivot is Santi’s, not Pryce’s, and the show is careful about that. Halfway down the jet bridge the kid stops, says he can’t, and runs back. The argument with Elena that follows is the season’s first real fight between them, and it is the one the season has been earning. He is 17. He is sure. He cannot go back to Indiana. There is nothing there for him. He says it in Spanish first. Elena breaks slowly, not all at once, and the show is patient enough to give her a beat where she just stares at the gate before she gives.
What she gives is the Ready Safe Invitational, one week from now, in Tulsa. The PGA-rules detail Santi rattles off is real: a zero-handicap amateur is technically eligible to play in a PGA event if a sponsor hands out an exemption. The example list is Tiger, Phil, Michelle Wie, Nick Dunlap last year at the AMEX. The host of the Ready Safe Invitational is Clark Ross, who Pryce has been narrating insurance commercials at for two episodes and punched in the face one episode ago. The reach of the plan is absurd. The math, as Mitts puts it, is a moon shot but technically possible.
The closing beat is where the show admits what it actually is. Mitts and Pryce share the look. The word “roper” gets used. The episode has been a family drama for 25 minutes, and in the final 90 seconds it becomes a heist movie about scamming a PGA Tour sponsor exemption out of a man who hates Pryce Cahill. The transition would be jarring in a worse show. Here it lands because the heist is being run for the kid, not against him, and the kid is the one who proposed it. Pryce gets to be the schemer he has been since the pilot. Santi gets to be the reason. Mitts gets to be the old hand who has done this before and is delighted to do it again. Elena gets the line that closes the negotiation: you hurt my son again and I will fucking end you. Wilson plays “comprende, yes ma’am” with the relief of a man who has just been allowed back into the room.
The button is Santi finding Zero in a hallway, saying “Hey, nomad,” and the camera cutting before they answer. It is the only beat in the hour the show does not finish, and it works because the audience has already watched two reconciliations either land or fail and earned the right to imagine this one.
What this episode argues
The hour’s quiet thesis is that nobody in this RV is being a good parent to anyone, and that this is fine, because parenting is mostly the part where you guess wrong out loud and apologize after. Pryce did not know his son was seven. Elena did not know Santi had been testing his father with a golf tournament. Mitts cannot get Zero to take the three hundred dollars gracefully. The flashback structure makes this argument without speeches: every Pryce-and-Jett scene is a man getting the wrong answer in real time, and the closing flashback is Jett telling him to focus on the moment because it is the only thing he can control. The show then has Pryce do exactly that, badly, at an airport gate, and rewards him for it by handing him a heist.
The episode also argues, more dryly, that an apology is not a transaction. Mitts apologizes to Zero, and Zero leaves angry. Pryce apologizes to Santi, and Santi boards the plane anyway. Elena does not apologize to Santi so much as concede to him, which is a different and harder thing. Three reconciliations, three different shapes, none of them clean. The hour respects all three.
Verdict
A penultimate-arc episode of a freshman sports comedy usually has to choose between paying off character or setting up plot. This one chooses both and gets away with it, because the cold open does five hours of family-drama work in eight minutes and frees the back half to be a heist setup without feeling unearned. Wilson does his best work of the season at the gate, with no jokes to hide behind. Kay finally gets a scene that lets Santi name the wound rather than circle it. Maron gets the bus-station monologue the show has been holding back, and he plays it without sentiment, which is the only register that would have worked. The Clark Ross hustle is a swing the show announces a beat too loudly in the closing minutes, with the wink-wink nudge-nudge runner going on a few lines past its expiration date, and the brontosaurus runner in the cold open is one of the few moments where Stick lets a joke run a touch longer than its own dignity. Those are small prices. The hour ends with a season that has remembered what it is for.
Rating: 8.5/10