I want to cry all the time.
Fleabag and her uptight sister are going to a silent retreat in an effort to bond and recenter themselves and find virtue in the disciplined routine of menial labor. Yeah, that goes about as well as you’d expect. The anti-misogyny workshop going on next door doesn’t help. Or maybe it does actually. This episode feels the most sit-commy of any of these so far; it’s got the kind of very overt premise you find on a lost of sitcoms, but it handles that premise with aplomb and this episode has some great surprises in store, including the return of a character from Episode 1.1 that I had not expected to ever see again. Sian Clifford continues to prove what a treasure she is and Waller-Bridge is brilliant as usual. The silent retreat enables her to really showcase her gift at pulling funny faces. There’s a scene near the end of this episode that seems to be a genuinely emotional scene and, as a viewer, I found myself being moved by it, but I was also very off-balance because I was genuinely unsure if the show really was empathetically getting at something very painful or if it was going to undercut the scene at the last second with a crude, hilarious joke. I’m not going to tell you which one it was, because that sense of being off-balance and unsure is part of what the show’s going for, I think. It’s a measure of just how precisely this show handles tone; it can take a hair-pin turn going about eighty and yet somehow not feel at all jerky or disconnected or sloppy. It’s another great episode. 4 stars.
tl;dr – the hook of a silent retreat is well handled with a surprise recurring character I’d almost forgotten about; the mastery of tone is absolutely precise, achieving both hilarity & pathos. 4 stars.