In the Flesh: Dead Ringers Episode 4

Happy birthday, Mantle twins! Watching Elliot and Beverly regress, melt down, and white-knuckle their way through a visit from their charming and unpretentious parents Alan (Kevin McNally) and Linda (Suzanne Bertish) is like being waterboarded while trying to watch three different Tennessee Williams plays. I mean this as the highest praise possible. Elliot clings to their father like a shy six-year-old and lashes out at Genevieve at every opportunity. Beverly snaps and jabs at their mother, who we learn suffered from severe postpartum depression. Both parents, uncomfortable with their daughters’ wealth, try ill-advisedly to include the twins’ mysterious housekeeper Greta (Poppy Liu) in meals and leisure time. By the time Elliot learns that Beverly is pregnant and things start to come apart in earnest at their shared birthday party, it feels less like a calamity than an inevitability. Writer Miriam Battye and director Lauren Wolkstein make the experience a brutal one, closely shot and unrelentingly written, rubbing our faces in the Mantle family’s intense dysfunction until all these beautiful, talented people are about as appealing as exfoliating with steel wool.

What’s most impressive here is twofold: first, the show’s immediate and breathtakingly confident incorporation of Alan and Linda, who feel as sharply written and performed as the main cast. Second is the script’s and Weisz’s ability to excavate sympathetic moments from this pileup of gross emotional negligence and savage immaturity, even when it’s something as psychosexually complex as Elliot performing a vaginally-inserted heartbeat test on her own sister — whose fertilized embryos she’s kept alive outside the womb far past the legal limit. Playing with big emotions like this so close to a show’s start date is an easy way to alienate an audience from onscreen conflict, blowing things up past the viewer’s ability to empathize with, but Battye does great work balancing these practically stroke-inducing moments of inappropriate behavior with glimpses of the vulnerable motivations underpinning them. Elliot curling up on her side at Beverly’s bedroom door, a dog waiting desperately for its master to come home, is almost unbearably tender. “Why did you do it?” Tom (Michael Chernus) asks Elliot when she shows him the illegal embryos. Elliot looks half-dead, ravaged by loss. “Because I love her,” she answers. Like the twins gestating in Beverly’s womb

The flashbacks to young Alan (Brandon Bassir) and Linda (Kitty Hawthorne, who’s also Rachel Weisz’s body double!) are equally assured, and there’s something deeply touching about seeing how hard they fought for their family and how comfortable they are in their marriage as older people. Their chemistry is so believably lived-in, their good-natured ribbing of Beverly, whom they call “Dr. Mantle” and “The General”, so natural and gentle in spite of her evident loathing for it. The question of who needs and who is needed is everywhere, from Elliot’s grasping desperation for her sister’s attention to the omnipresence of babies and the unborn, entities whose entire existence is built around need. What do you do, Dead Ringers presses us to ask ourselves, when someone’s need for you is too voracious to sustain?