OnFleabag, nobody needs an explosive gadget.
In the Britcoms season 2 premiere, six adults smiling in a restaurant are six bombs with lit fuses.
Creator-star-savantPhoebe Waller-Bridgeplays the titular nuke, a never-named Londoner grieving between debaucheries.
Credit: Steve Schofield/Amazon Prime Video
In season 1, she was a self-declared #BadFeminist and sex-very-positive hedonist.
A year later, shes exercising, eating salad, avoiding casual hookups.
What follows is one of 2019s best TV episodes, a one-act spiral of unrepressed hostility.
Then comes the religious awakening.
Shes drawn to the holy man, for reasons saintly and blasphemous.
Its deeply humane even when its not entirely successful.
Scotts playing a tricky character, a chatty sad-sack dreamboat unattainably devoted to the Almighty.
And Waller-Bridge herself is a lacerating screenwriter and an invigorating performer.
Surely this is the first time anyone has called a Quaker meeting very, very erotic.
And when she talks onscreen about the screaming void inside my empty heart, you want to cryandlaugh.
These six episodes are the end forFleabag, Waller-Bridge has said.
And some wrap-up elements are conventional after season 1s primal scream.
Gelmans sleaze is fully inhuman, a walking personification of theJokertrailer.
But Clifford and Waller-Bridge are a transcendent sister act.
And the spiritual plotline is transgressive, even Bergman-esque.
Heck, pick your Bergman!
Waller-Bridges writing conjures Ingmars painful religious inquisition, while her performance suggests Ingrids dazzling beating-heart complexity.
Her rapid-fire quips deepen her sincere portrait of a 33-year-old seeking meaning in all the wrong-right places.
What had Jesus done by 33?
one character asks midway through the season.
Well, he never wroteFleabag.B+
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