Shaggy dog sto­ries

I did­n’t al­ways fully ap­pre­ci­ate Master of None. It was a bumpy ride of a show, with what felt like some weirdly dis­con­nected vi­gnettes, and some stiff act­ing that did­n’t al­ways fit the qual­ity of the writ­ing, but it got bet­ter by the end. Much bet­ter, and so I’m sit­ting here writ­ing about it.

So here’s the show: Dev Shah (Aziz Ansari) does­n’t know what he wants out of life, so you see him strug­gling with re­la­tion­ships, and be­ing dis­ap­pointed with his act­ing ca­reer, but the or­di­nar­i­ness of this premise is pep­pered with sharp, in­sight­ful com­men­tary on race, gen­der and age, from the point of view of an Indian-American se­nior snake per­son and his di­verse group of friends. The show opens on him in bed with Rachel (Noël Wells), a ran­dom hookup that seems to go nowhere, but since the show’s mar­ket­ing shows that they’re clearly dat­ing at some point, you’re watch­ing the jour­ney as Dev stum­bles through sev­eral ter­ri­ble dates, in­clud­ing an af­fair with a mar­ried food critic (Claire Danes), only to find Rachel again, re­con­nect slowly over sev­eral months, and fi­nally spend an im­pul­sive first date week­end in Nashville, which ends pretty well. Then (SPOILERS) the show starts to fast for­ward through two years of their life, pulling no punches in show­ing all of the ups and downs of their time to­gether. (Wells, most well known for her im­pres­sions of as­sorted Manic Pixie Dream Girls dur­ing her short time at SNL, does­n’t de­con­struct the trope so much as throw it against a wall and shat­ter it into a mil­lion pieces.) Dev gets freaked out at a friend’s wed­ding, where the cou­ple rewrites their vows to de­clare their love for each other with ab­solute cer­tainty. Confronted with his own doubts, Dev tests his re­la­tion­ship with Rachel, but it just turns into an­other fight; they take some time apart to think about things, and in the en­su­ing cooldown, Rachel de­cides she needs to go on an ad­ven­ture and dis­cover her­self in Japan.

There is a world-build­ing ex­er­cise in all the vi­gnettes that the show takes de­tours on, and this is when Master of None starts to come to­gether. So when Rachel an­nounces that’s what she wants to do, it makes sense; her de­ci­sion does­n’t come out of nowhere. In what seemed like a throw­away con­ver­sa­tion (the sort that Master of None ex­cels at) very early into the re­la­tion­ship, Rachel men­tions want­ing to live in Tokyo, ex­press­ing the fear that she’d end up like her sis­ter, who’d al­ways wanted to live in Paris, but sud­denly had a baby and will never do it now. In an­other episode, there is a par­al­lel story with Rachel’s oc­to­ge­nar­ian grand­mother Carol, who the cou­ple vis­its in a se­nior liv­ing fa­cil­ity. Back in Carol’s day, peo­ple mar­ried at 20 and started a fam­ily im­me­di­ately, and that just be­came the rest of your life. But her fa­vorite sto­ries are all about the few im­pul­sive times of her life in which she acts on a long­ing to es­cape: that one time she took a joyride in a stranger’s con­vert­ible, that one time she hitched a ride to see a con­cert, and that one time, por­trayed in the third act of the show, when Grandma Carol sneaks out of the fa­cil­ity to have a fancy din­ner with Dev, and then sneaks off again to sing at a lo­cal jazz club. There’s a hint, to the viewer, not nec­es­sar­ily to Dev, that the urge to travel and have ad­ven­tures might run through Rachel’s fam­ily. So when she runs away, you un­der­stand.

Dev is more ag­i­tated, how­ever. His anx­i­ety comes from feel­ing un­cer­tain of any­thing in life, which builds very much on the fears of first-gen­er­a­tion im­mi­grant chil­dren, try­ing to meet their par­ents’ ex­pec­ta­tions to play it safe and not screw things up. Even his de­sire to keep his apart­ment squeaky clean, re­sult­ing in one of Rachel and Dev’s longest stand­ing bat­tles as co­hab­itors, is to Dev a com­pro­mise for what his par­ents might say, who find af­ford­able New York City apart­ments gen­er­ally all too dirty to live in. Sometimes, it means that the quest for the best is ap­plied to the most mean­ing­less of de­ci­sions; bol­stered by tech­nol­ogy, Dev ex­haus­tively re­searches re­views on the en­tire Internet to find the “best” taco stand to or­der from (which turns out to be closed any­way). When Dev seeks out the coun­sel of his dad (played by Ansari’s real-life dad), you get, at first, what seems like un­re­lat­able im­mi­grant-par­ent-speak (“How do you de­cide?” “You just de­cide”), but then, the el­der Shah drops a bit of Sylvia Plath, ref­er­enc­ing this pas­sage from The Bell Jar:

I saw my life branch­ing out be­fore me like the green fig tree in the story. From the tip of every branch, like a fat pur­ple fig, a won­der­ful fu­ture beck­oned and winked. One fig was a hus­band and a happy home and chil­dren, and an­other fig was a fa­mous poet and an­other fig was a bril­liant pro­fes­sor, and an­other fig was Ee Gee, the amaz­ing ed­i­tor, and an­other fig was Europe and Africa and South America, and an­other fig was Constantin and Socrates and Attila and a pack of other lovers with queer names and off­beat pro­fes­sions, and an­other fig was an Olympic lady crew cham­pion, and be­yond and above these figs were many more figs I could­n’t quite make out. I saw my­self sit­ting in the crotch of this fig tree, starv­ing to death, just be­cause I could­n’t make up my mind which of the figs I would choose. I wanted each and every one of them, but choos­ing one meant los­ing all the rest, and, as I sat there, un­able to de­cide, the figs be­gan to wrin­kle and go black, and, one by one, they plopped to the ground at my feet.

It’s the para­dox of choice. When life gives you a lot of un­clear choices, maybe you die be­fore choos­ing. (Grandma Carol did­n’t have a choice in life, and her story is played up to be the im­pul­sive one, who takes op­por­tu­ni­ties when she sees it in­stead of be­ing frozen by too many of them.) This is where the ti­tle of the show, too, starts to tie its themes to­gether; when one is pre­sented with an end­less amount of op­tions, then one might start to hoard as many as pos­si­ble, never pick­ing a fig, but try­ing to keep all of them open for fu­ture pick­ing. Jack of all trades, but mas­ter of none.

Following the breakup with Rachel, Dev re­con­nects with show-biz friend Benjamin (H. Jon Benjamin, and his un­mis­tak­able Archer voice), con­tin­u­ing a con­ver­sa­tion es­tab­lished early in the sea­son when Benjamin talked about his bor­ing mar­ried life. It’s in this con­text of Dev’s re­cent strug­gle where he re­veals that his mar­riage is­n’t all about cer­tainty and sta­bil­ity all of the time, ei­ther. You have to work at at it, even when you’re only 20% cer­tain you’ll want to be with this per­son for the rest of your life. It’s an echo of what tran­spires with Claire Danes’ char­ac­ter: af­ter she’s caught in her fling with Dev, her es­tranged hus­band comes to re­al­ize what was­n’t work­ing with their mar­riage and they de­cide to work on their mar­riage to­gether.

It’s all a setup to the fi­nal scene of the show, which shows Dev pack­ing his bags and book­ing an in­ter­na­tional flight. You think that the les­son he learned about mak­ing re­la­tion­ships work means that he might be on his way to Japan to try to make things work with Rachel. The plane he’s on has a num­ber of Asian pas­sen­gers, play­ing on your ex­pec­ta­tions that this might just be vi­sual short­hand, and—while I ad­mit I fell into that trap—Master of None has al­ready proven with its rants on cast­ing strictly to type that it’s much too smart for that. When the woman sit­ting be­side Dev turns to him and asks, “Have you ever been be­fore?” in per­fect, non-ac­cented English, the show’s me­an­der­ing sto­ry­telling is about to co­a­lesce into a beau­ti­ful mas­ter stroke: it’s not a rom-com af­ter all. “No,” says Dev, “I’m go­ing to Italy be­cause I’ve al­ways loved pasta mak­ing and de­cided to en­roll in a school there.”

“Just like that?”

“Just like that.”

The show cuts to black, and it’s over. And what you, the viewer, un­der­stands is: like Rachel’s de­ci­sion, this was­n’t ac­tu­ally very im­pul­sive at all. A thou­sand tiny rea­sons fac­tored into Dev’s “you just de­cide” de­ci­sion. Rachel, Dev’s girl­friend of two years, a char­ac­ter who could have eas­ily book­ended the se­ries to make it solely a story about their ro­mance, was in­stead part of the story be­cause her in­flu­ence cat­alyzed so many of those lit­tle rea­sons that would shape the path of Dev’s life. The nu­mer­ous cutesy scenes of them psych­ing each other out, while lend­ing a quirky air to the show, only di­min­ished the sig­nif­i­cance of the mo­ment in which Rachel gives Dev an old pasta maker as a “housewarming gift”, yes-and-ing the tease where he pre­tends to kick her out of the apart­ment just sec­onds af­ter she moves all her boxes into it. Then, Rachel’s brief hia­tus for a job in­ter­view in Chicago leads him to fi­nally bust out the pasta maker in bore­dom, and fi­nally, Rachel’s ap­pre­cia­tive re­marks about Dev’s pasta-mak­ing skills stand out in con­trast with his frus­tra­tions with his go­ing-nowhere act­ing ca­reer. And so, like that, Dev’s life takes a turn. All be­cause of a ran­dom hookup from over two years ago.