In the Flesh: The New Pope 'Episode 2'

“When I was a boy,” cardinal Gutierrez begins, his melancholy features shifting briefly into a faint smile of nostalgia, “a man took advantage of me.” The way actor Javier Cámara delivers the line is bottomlessly sad and gentle, a fitting end to an episode which takes place mostly inside a titanic monument to deathless, endless grief. But where in Gutierrez’s traumatic recollection we see also the seeds of his eventual inner strength, in the sprawling estate of Cardinal Sir John Brannox (John Malkovich) there is only emptiness and the inescapable shadow of a past not so much mourned as draped over the present like a shroud.

The New Pope’s second episode is simultaneously spare and lush, lingering and breakneck. From its opening in which a nun prays desperately to die along with her beloved fellow sister to its final moments in which the unscrupulous diplomat/operative Bauer watches his girlfriend dance late at night in an empty fast food joint it moves with grace, humor, awe, and sorrow through the continuum of human experience. The unyielding grief of Sir John’s parents for his dead twin, Adam, sits alongside Sofia’s ecstatic Skype sex with her husband. Esther’s abject poverty and the repeated selling of her miraculous story rests side by side with the curia’s hasty reclamation of their jewelry in the wake of Francis II’s death.

The languorous shadow of Sir John’s dining room, the firelit flicker of the bedrooms of cardinals Assente and Gutierrez as they regard one another through their connecting door. “All of a sudden,” Assente says, “I felt lonely.” The sorrow in the gay priest’s eyes, remarkably wide and expressive, is at odds with his often affected and sometimes insincere manner. Still, how could a man whose profession has been one long retreat into the closet not be something of a phony, and how could the exposure of the sensitive, aching soul concealed within his public persona fail to inspire tenderness? “If I let you in,” Gutierrez tells him quietly, “we will both be much lonelier later.”

The New Pope understands the incredible frailty and unbreakable strength of human connection. It understands that kneeling with a smile before a lover to let him jerk off on you and staring without cease at the tomb of your dead son are emotions which spring from the same source, that the human experience is one of contradictions, wild extremes, hypocrisies, and half-truths. It understands that the answers to many of the questions we consider so important are ultimately meaningless, that pursuit holds more value and beauty than attainment. It understands that we live in the shadow of death, and that life, in the words of the late Cardinal Spencer, is not some stupid centerpiece on the table of existence.