Review: The Comeback, “Valerie Chases the Truth” | Season 3, Episode 7
Why wind down the drama right at the climax?
When I think back to the most moving moments of The Comeback’s first two seasons, one scene in particular always comes to mind: Valerie and Mark’s climactic fight in what was once the penultimate episode of the show. Season two had already spent several episodes zeroing in on this marriage—particularly the toll that Val’s increasingly all-involving quest for fame and recognition was taking on her husband at home. And now all of those issues were bubbling to the surface in a conversation that would be difficult for any couple to come back from.
It’s a masterful, gutting scene, up there with some of the other most painful marital spats in film and TV history. (Tom and Shiv in the final season of Succession come to mind, to use a recent-ish example that I also reviewed.) Aside from the raw emotional power of that confrontation, though, what makes the scene interesting to me is its complexity. Mark’s complaints are valid, of course, and the show largely endorses them—it’s clear Valerie needs to change or she’s going to lose the person she cares about most. But from Val’s perspective, he’s being whiny, insecure, and needy at the exact time when she’s finally getting what she always wanted (or at least what she thinks she always wanted). Doesn’t she deserve her moment? Mark was never framed as the perfect husband, the endlessly patient and reassuring partner who’s happy to exist in her shadow. He never wanted fame, but that doesn’t mean he’s impervious to jealousy or a number of other ugly qualities.
Season three has retained that complexity and pushed it further, showing Mark at rock bottom even as his marriage with Valerie is stronger than it has been in the past. In “Valerie Chases the Truth,” by far the most Mark-centric episode of the season, that doesn’t just mean revealing an embarrassing back tattoo (“Anywhere Else”). It’s more than showing him at his most powerless and ineffectual on the set of Finance Dudes—though the details in that scene are perfect, from his rookie habits (forgetting to put his phone on speaker during a filmed call, speaking into his coffee mug) to his stiff body language and stilted, dull answers. (Val likens him to Mauricio from The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills, but he’s closer to Russell Armstrong in terms of charisma.) No, this episode leans even harder into Mark’s skeevy qualities with his confession that he used to sleep with temps and assistants who worked under him.
