Spoiler alert: The following article discusses the entirety of “The Patient,” including the ending of “Cantor’s Husband.”
“The Patient” season has come to an end: in the finale, serial killer Sam (Domhnall Gleeson) and psychiatrist Dr. The climax between Alan Strauss (Steve Carell), neither escapes nor escapes—to varying degrees. After praising the former and demanding his release for resisting the latter’s urge to kill his abusive father, Sam walks out and stabs him in front of his mother, Candace (Linda Amond). Despite being told that true reformation comes in the form of penance and transforming himself, Sam ends the limited chain by putting himself in the same chains that held Strauss captive. For the stricken doctor’s family, his estranged and conservative Jewish son, Ezra (Andrew Leeds), appears to be consulting a grief psychologist.
FX’s co-creator, co-showrunner, writer and executive producer, “We hope the whole thing just creates a very intense feeling, which is, I think, what we felt writing it and what we felt watching it.” ” Hulu Show, Joe Weisberg told TheWrap in an interview. “It’s easy to say, as if there is some intrinsic good in feeling something, but it’s true… A small part is pulling through, either happily or kicking and screaming – it’s probably the latter.
Below, Weisberg and production/writing/show-running partner Joel Fields break down what it means — well, sort of.
Why did Dr. Alan Strauss have to die?
Fields and Weisberg knew from the start that Carell’s character would become one of Sam’s victims, though they toyed with the idea that he would survive, writing about 30 or so endings in their quest to find a fit. Huh.
“We had so many different ideas [of] How will it happen,” Weisberg said. “We wrote every single one of them and then we, to a certain extent, experimented with him not dying and went back to die and wrote 30 more endings, and we weren’t really going to stop when As long as it didn’t feel quite emotionally right for us. And there were a lot of nights when we thought it would never happen, so it’s a little scary, but then we got it.”
Fields said, “Unfortunately for Alan Strauss, we have several versions of the ending in which Alan Strauss is alive. None of them felt authentic to us.”
Has Sam really changed?
Well, if you take the actor’s own words for it, the answer is definite no. Gleason previously told TheWrap that true repentance and transformation would require Sam to turn himself in, on Strauss’s strong recommendation before the murder.
But the “Patient” EPs don’t want the answer to be so obvious. Eventually, Sam gives his mother the key to the lock, a sort of answer to the larger moral question, but who’s to say he won’t convince her to take it out?
Weisberg said of Riddle, “By the time you look at this entire show, it’s pretty clear that he was honest, right? He wasn’t doing any sort of hoax or scam to be more crooked than usual. He wanted to change, but he may or may not or anything else is something we want people to consider indefinitely.
Fields puts it more bluntly: “It’s something else for us that we hope people will discuss among themselves later, and we don’t have any specific input for that discussion because it’s going to happen before the end of our story.” Is.”
What about Sam’s mom? Candace’s hands are not clean
While doing research for the show, Fields and Weisberg found that Candace could potentially hold varying degrees of legal liability for aiding and abetting her son’s murderous tendencies, depending on which state they were in. live. Ultimately, Weisberg said the goal was to avoid creating a “stock character.” In Candace and instead portray a mother in a “terrible, impossible situation.”
He and Fields often argued about the moral implications of their decisions, they said in a previous interview with TheWrap, adding that the more “interesting” part of the equation was the emotional side of the debate.
“Sometimes if you get too involved in ethics as a writer, you can lose sight of something else that makes you feel,” he said. “It’s very easy to judge Candence, and why not? You need a part. But I think we hope that people will, by the end, feel what she’s experiencing and have some empathy with the decision.” – Can sit together.”
Ezra, Strauss’s son, goes to therapy and that full circle moment
Even though the bigger, more important aspect of the thriller show is the cat-and-mouse game Strauss has to play with his kidnapper, a significant part of his essence is unraveled through flashbacks and fictional interactions with his own therapist, including He digs into the incompatibility between himself and his son – which was exacerbated by the death of Strauss’s wife.
At one point, Strauss cautions himself to be more sympathetic to a serial killer than Ezra, leading to an epiphany in which he is able to spiritually break bread with his son along the way. He was robbed from it in real life. In a way, Ezra meets him midway through his therapy session, bridging the gap between father and son and healing the family in the midst of another loss.
“The fact that Ezra wind up in therapy was an important choice for us,” Fields said, “and the fact that Alan had a great time to apologize to his son and reach out to him to communicate what he had discovered. Wanted to find a way to make one final connection with Betty and her kids before she died, and that somehow the story of this bizarre relationship with Sam allowed that to happen — that was all that was important to us in the making of those final scenes. “
All episodes of “The Patient” are streaming on Hulu.
