The Four Seasons Season 2 Episode 6 Review: "Little Thanksgiving" — Patrizia runs off, the lockdown gets meaner, and everybody says the ugly part out loud
What happens — the short version (spoilers)
- Patrizia arrives like a baby substitute and immediately becomes everybody's problem.
- The poem ritual and talent show give the lockdown a weird little church-service energy.
- Kate's positive test turns the house into a quarantine bunker.
- Danny's kiss with Maureen turns the flirtation thread explicit.
- Finding Patrizia ends the search, but not the larger confession about fear and competence.
What starts as a smaller Thanksgiving turns into a dog nobody can manage, a house nobody can leave, and a lot of adults who are suddenly too tired to pretend they are not scared. Kate's fever turns the lockdown into a full panic, Patrizia makes everybody behave like incompetent parents, and the flirtation and marriage stress underneath the holiday finally lose their cover. By the end, the disaster is already in the room.
Patrizia arrives like a baby substitute and immediately becomes everybody’s problem
Patrizia is the perfect joke because she is not a joke to the characters. She is a dog named like a person, carried into the house with the same mix of pride and delusion that usually attends new babies, and the episode makes that comparison without ever having to underline it.
From the first minute, she behaves like the family’s stress test. She hates being fussed over, she disappears, she makes the adults talk about what they are capable of, and she forces Danny and the others into the oldest question in the house: are we actually prepared for responsibility, or do we just like the idea of it?
The poem ritual and talent show turn the quarantine into a weird little church service
The nightly poem reading is exactly the kind of absurdly earnest ritual this group would invent when they are trying not to fall apart. It is romantic, embarrassing, and deeply on brand for a holiday where nobody can say what they mean directly. The talent show does the same job on a bigger stage, giving everybody something performative to hide inside.
That is why the hour works so well whenever it lets the silly thing stay silly. The poem is a family joke until it becomes the one thing that makes them sit still. The talent show is a joke until the kid with the spoons, the video call, and the “first annual Covey award” make everybody realize they are building a memory in real time.
Kate’s positive test turns the house into a quarantine bunker with opinions
The COVID scare is handled with exactly the right amount of 2020 exhaustion: everyone is pretending they are calm until the red test line makes the whole house rearrange itself. Kate’s fever means the usual family chaos is now also a health crisis, which gives Jack a fresh reason to panic and everybody else a fresh reason to be irritated.
The lockdown detail matters because it makes all the emotional mess feel inescapable. Nobody can leave, so the half-hidden resentments have to become conversation. It is one thing to dodge your own feelings when the room is moving. It is another thing to do it while the entire household is stuck in one house with a dog and a test strip.
Danny’s near-miss with Maureen turns the marriage thread from vague to explicit
The show has been circling Danny’s flirtation all season, and here it finally stops circling. The pie drop-off, the text thread, the “near miss” with the actuary, and the confession that he kissed her before lockdown all land like a reset button nobody asked for.
What makes the scene sting is that it is not played like a huge adulterous drama. It is played like the thing adults do when they get a little too much attention at the wrong moment and then spend months pretending it was nothing. Kate can feel it in her bones even before Danny says it, which is why the episode keeps the emotional weight on her side of the room.
The search for Patrizia becomes a fight about fear, competence, and whether anybody is the stable one
Once Patrizia runs into the woods, the holiday stops being theoretical. Everyone is suddenly walking, calling, and improvising like a bad rescue team. The dog search is funny until it reveals who is actually holding the family together and who just likes to think they are.
That becomes the episode’s cleaner emotional turn. Danny keeps insisting things are handled; Kate keeps doing the work of noticing what is wrong; Jack keeps trying to turn panic into a philosophy. By the end, the dog is found, but the bigger point is that everybody has already confessed how afraid they are of being the one who drops the ball.
The homecoming ends with the kind of honesty that only happens after too much noise
The final stretch is not trying to be pretty. It lets the house be messy, the air be tense, and the adults be more honest than polished. That is the right choice. Once the dog is back and the holiday resets enough for dinner, the show gets to land on something softer: these people do still know how to show up for one another, even when they have made a mess of the showing up.
It also keeps the season’s grief thread alive without turning it into a speech. Nick is everywhere in the ritual, the baby, the dog, and the food, which is enough. The episode understands that missing somebody can make everybody in the room slightly worse at everything.
Tiny details worth clocking
- Patrizia is a dog, but the house talks about her like a newborn from minute one.
- The “I have pretty eyes” line for the home tests is very dumb and very on-brand.
- “A dog is not a child” is the kind of sentence nobody wants to hear because it is both true and rude.
- The talent show makes room for the season’s strangest blend of sincerity and chaos.
- Danny saying the flirtation was a “near miss” is classic adult damage control.
Final verdict
This is the season’s best bottle episode so far because it knows how to trap everybody in the same emotional weather. The dog, the test, the poem, and the party are all different faces of the same problem: adults who are trying very hard to be responsible while also being scared of what responsibility says about them.
The logistics are ridiculous, and the mess exposes the marriage and friendship threads underneath. Nobody leaves better than they came in, but they do leave more legible to each other.
That is enough. In this show, clarity is a kind of repair.
Rating: 8.4/10 — a tight, funny quarantine Thanksgiving that turns one lost dog and one bad text thread into the same question about who can actually carry what.
More episodes from The Four Seasons — Season 2 — Friend-group grief comedy, trips, holidays, and second chances. Jump to any episode in the season:
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Reviewed by Mira Vance · QuizFandom Editor & Lead Reviewer. Every rating is an honest per-watch assessment from the desk that also writes the quizzes — not a press release rehash.