The final two stories of the night come from our two contacts in the food industry. Janette is enjoying creating her menu and setting up for her eventual opening, but the other aspects of her job are grating on her. Having to be informed of all of the restaurant group’s policies and procedures not only bores her, but annoys her. She can’t fire someone who doesn’t work well summarily, and she has to be informed of sexual harassment policies that are ineffectual at best. Not only that, but she is now having to become a media personality, figuring out a way to foreground her own story when all she wants is for her food to speak for itself. It’s all just more compromises that dampen her pleasure in her work.
The storyline that began the least promising but delivered an emotional gut-punch of a finish was Sonny’s. Last week I worried that his backslide was little developed and barely telegraphed. This week he went even further, missing his boat launch and continuing his booze and drug-filled sets. A visit from his old bandmate, though, sets him straight. Sonny loves Linh, and he loves her family, but the stress of eventually failing is pushing him toward it even faster just to avoid doing it on accident in the future. This is his control, and he exercises it by going to a strip club and bringing home a girl. Mid-tryst, however, he slinks away and into a darkened room.
This is all pretty rote, but what sets it apart is how it ends. Sonny goes to Linh’s house and knocks on the door. However, he isn’t looking for Linh, but her father. Linh watches from the door as Sonny speaks to her father at the end of the driveway, leaning against the car before collapsing to his knees. It’s a moment of humility and earnest penance that we haven’t seen from Sonny before, and this moment of self realization could save him, just as his performance and the direction of this scene saved this storyline.
Every week the temperature on this melting pot of plots and characters goes up a little further, and it won’t be long until it all starts to boil over. Four episodes left for this season of Treme, and more than ever the wait between episodes is becoming an unendurable torture.
