'Sorry for Your Loss' Season 2 premiere sees Leigh, Amy and Jules' relationships come to a head over Christmas
In season 2 premiere with three back to back episodes, the focus is firmly on how family ties (both through marriage and otherwise) reconfigure and reshape themselves as something or someone forces us to confront how certain default dynamics are just not working. The subtext of the three episodes is also a realistic examination of the little ways in which we move on (or don't) from trauma, be it in a recent one or one buried in the distant past.
In the first episode itself, you have Danny Greer (Jovan Adepo) tell Leigh Shaw (Elizabeth Olsen) that the person that made them in-laws no longer exists. This is after he ignores her guilt-tripping calls and texts saying Matt would be angry about the way he was not speaking to her.
She is oblivious to how Danny is desperate to move on because thinking about Matt means thinking about whether he could have prevented his death as his disturbing dreams reveal. As he tells the random girl he hooks up with, he wants to "be free" and Leigh is a person-shaped reminder of everything he is trying to move past.
But he still agrees to exchange emojis, possibly the least demanding form of communication, to pacify her. Leigh is also trying to move on in her way. She locks up Matt's phone that has Danny's voicemail confessing his feeling for her.
She ditches the group therapy session for casual sex and then gets her mom Amy (Janet McTeer) to cut off her "grief hair" -- the three inches of hair she has grown after Matt died. But all of these cosmetic actions that also involve some beauty therapy are all forgotten when Jules (Kelly Marie Tran) tells her she had a dream about Matt and it felt like "he was really there".
When she speaks to Amy about trying "consciously dreaming" about Matt, Amy does her one better. She gets her hallucinogenics so that she can get on "Matt's plane". In a hilarious scene, Leigh asks her, "Mom, are you giving me drugs for Christmas?"
Skeptical, but willing to try anything that will get her closer to Matt, she tries DMT and in a surreal futuristic scene, meets Matt from whom she is separated by a barrier. In an almost silent exchange, Leigh finds the relief she has been looking for in all the months after Matt's abrupt death.
But while she finds peace, she also, unknowingly, causes havoc in her sister Jules' life as she celebrates her first "sober" Christmas. When Leigh constantly nitpicks her actions, Jules comes to a crisis point when she realizes her family expects her to fail, bringing all her insecurities to the surface.
She leaves and moves in with her father Richard (Don McManus) and his second wife Sabrina (Carmen Cusack) with whom she has formed a bond. The strongest element of these three episodes is the exploration of the family dynamic between the three Shaw females.
Old patterns re-emerge around the holidays as the three spend time together and anyone who has siblings will identify with both the love that Leigh and Jules have for each other and how layered resentments, built over years, can explode in an instant over a trivial fight about family rituals.
Things finally come to a head after a session at the therapist. While the sisters start to find ways to talk to each other, Amy starts unraveling as the therapist's words of her "using affection as a barrier" and "undermining her daughters" hit home.
Amy has been the rock that her daughters have lent on time and again and she is the unofficial referee of their fights. It is a role Amy loves and cherishes because she is trying to be the caring and giving mom that her own abusive mom never was.
She is shaken by the idea that she might be harming her children with her actions like her mother hurt her. With her daughters grown up, she realizes she is the "firefighter without a fire to put out".
It all comes to head at the family dinner where Sabrina and Richard are guests. As she lets loose about "being invisible" and how she has to act like a lunatic to finally be heard, she reveals Richard and her are sleeping together. After the disastrous evening, Amy tells her daughters the next morning she is going to Alaska.
Next week, we get to see how the two Shaw sisters get along under the same roof and in therapy while Danny and Leigh have to spend time together when Matt's school decides they want to memorialize him. 'Sorry For Your Loss' Season 2 will air new episodes on Facebook Watch every Tuesday at 12 p.m. PT and 3 p.m. ET.