Review: Master of None: Moments In Love Is a Beautiful Act of Misdirection

The series is, in its present and possibly final incarnation, about its makers answering to their audience.

Master of None: Moments In Love
Photo: Netflix

“I hate it. I hate having to answer to people. I hate having to…I hate having to be a sheep, man,” says Denise (Lena Waithe) to Alicia (Naomi Ackie) on a secret rendezvous several years after they sold their upstate New York home. Before them is a flock of sheep, inspiring Denise to launch into a bleating impersonation of her bosses. This moment, some 10 minutes into the final episode of Master of None’s third season is slyly emblematic of Waithe and Aziz Ansari’s skill at, um, pulling the wool over our eyes. As Denise rants about her cubicle job, for feeling like a hell because she once tasted heaven, the profound weight of her frustration is made relatable by Waithe’s gift for making dialogue sound improvised. So much so that you almost forget that Master of None is, in its present and possibly final incarnation, about its makers answering to their audience.

They probably won’t admit to this, but what they’re answering for is Ansari’s sexual misconduct allegation in 2018, which effectively put Master of None’s fate in doubt after its acclaimed second season, and accusations that Waithe is in the full-time business of peddling black trauma porn, which predate the backlash surrounding Amazon’s Them. And their answers are, in part, a matter of distance, as Ansari pointedly appears, and briefly, in only two of the season’s five episodes, which play out as a celebration of queer black love. Lensed by Thimios Bakatakis, a frequent collaborator of Yorgos Lanthimos, in ways that are as unsparing and subtle as the naturalistic depiction of Denise and Alicia’s unraveling relationship, these episodes are a divergence for Master of None, but only on the surface.

That’s because, as ever, Waithe and Ansari, who co-wrote all five episodes, are every bit as fixated on the professional ambitions as they are the ups and downs of their characters’ love lives. At the start of the season, Denise and Alicia are very much in love, though it’s easy to anticipate the cracks that will form in their relationship, and bring it to ruin, given how Denise struggles under the expectations set by her first book, a New York Times bestseller, and her less-than-enthusiastic rubber-stamping of Alicia wanting a child. And the metatextual curlicues are still there, beginning with the almost Bergmanesque unsparingness of the season’s 4:3 boxy Academy aspect ratio, which isn’t only a wink to their being fewer characters at the center of any given episode, but a reflection of how our choices narrow with age.

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That point is driven further in the season’s memorable fourth episode, which jumps forward a few years to find chemist-turned-interior designer Alicia living in Bed-Stuy by herself and working at an antiques store, still nursing dreams of having a child. This quasi-bottle episode soberingly traces the highs and lows of in vitro fertilization with an unprecedented level of granular precision, and Ackie plays Alicia’s anxieties with a palpable woundedness. Multiple scenes are given over to Alicia getting her ovaries scanned, emotionally frayed and uncertain about whether she even wants to become a mother, only for her to be brought back down to earth with profound empathy by the nurse (Cordelia Blair) who gently squeezes her socked feet before leaving the room so she can wipe herself off following the procedure.

This episode, though, can feel almost dissonant to a fault. It’s certainly of a stylistic piece with the rest of the season, but it’s difficult to shake that we’ve been boxed in with a character who we’ve been barely allowed to know. Which, of course, ends up being the entire point of Master of None’s third season: to unmoor our wants. If we didn’t know who Alicia was when she wanted the child that Denise wasn’t ready for, we certainly know her now. In between dropping really funny bits of business into some not-so-funny scenarios—like when Alicia’s doctor (Pandora Colin) casually mentions that most insurance companies don’t have a code for “gay and desires pregnancy” but have one for being attacked by an orca—Waithe and Ansari ruefully ponder everything from complacency to the inevitable fate of all things. Which is to say that the third season of Master of None is consistent with its predecessors for so easily entwining us in what feels like a free-floating polyphony of life.

Score: 
 Cast: Lena Waithe, Naomi Ackie, Anthony Welsh, Aziz Ansari  Network: Netflix

Ed Gonzalez

Ed Gonzalez is the co-founder of Slant Magazine. A member of the New York Film Critics Circle, his writing has appeared in The Village Voice, The Los Angeles Times, and other publications.

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