In the Flesh: The New Pope Episode 3

There’s a certain shock inherent in seeing John Paul III proceed with moderation and decorum through the Papal speeches and ceremonies which Pius XIII upended, tore apart, and used as a chance to force his underlings into submission. Francis II, just last week, did much the same as Pius in his own syrupy, iconoclastic way, and now the reassertion of genteel decorum feels like a bucket full of cold water in the face. There is a masturbatory air to it, as when a desperate Ester lets the deformed son of a rich family touch her breast for money. The church exists to magnify the personal issues of its broken leaders just as the boy’s family fortune exists to twist the world into a shape he can exploit, transforming his suffering in the same way the luxuriant ritual and conspicuous power of Catholicism transforms John Paul III’s.

Sir John’s speech about family to the crowd at St. Peter’s square, a staid echo of his furious rant at not just his decrepit parents but the entirety of their shared family life smeared across time and multiple actors, is as heartfelt as only something in praise of the things we believe ourselves to lack can be, as is his address about gentleness to the college of cardinals. So much of The New Pope’s third episode is given over to this kind of self-reflection, to the conscious presentation of coherent ways of being as a veil used to obscure our essential incoherence as human beings. It’s challenging material, presented without explication or hand-holding.

Ester’s new relationship with a strange, reticent repairer of watches—his hair a bizarre yellow slick, his smile like a row of chiclets—is similarly enigmatic and uncomfortable. Ester herself, delicate, somber, and impractical, is so definitively a creature of the High Church that her existence outside the Vatican’s timeless, echoing silence seems almost perplexing. He husband has abandoned her. She has no work except for dwindling checks brought in by TV appearances where she recounts the miracle Pius XIII performed by making her fertile, a depressing violation of the most precious event in her life. Her widowed new lover seems to provide a solution, until he refuses to bring her home for fear his grieving son would be irreparably traumatized. Instead, he suggests prostitution. 

The tremendous human scope of The New Pope, a trait it shares with its predecessor series, means that an hour spent observing contradiction plays out far more meaningfully than some half-assed “land of contrasts” thesis. Instead what we’re allowed is a chance to see the ways that our relationships and the systems within which we live shape us from birth in accordance and in opposition, leaving us unable to experience satisfaction except by telling stories which reconcile us with our fractured selves.