Jobu is outside the laundromat window with a cigarette, grinning, telling Evelyn to come back to the bagel — and then to ignore it. But Evelyn can’t stop watching Waymond whisper something into Deirdre’s ear. We’re too far away to hear it. We just watch Jamie Lee Curtis take it in with her whole body: straightening up, clutching the eviction papers, breathing out, and then telling the cop to let Evelyn go before slumping hard against the washers like the fight has left her. Waymond walks over with his hands going into his pockets — somehow both aw-shucks-it’s-just-me and John Wayne after saving the town — and crouches down in front of his handcuffed wife to tell her everything is going to be okay. Evelyn says that’s impossible. Jobu, nearly talking over her, says it’s just a statistical inevitability. Nothing special.
Daniel Kwan originally wanted ADHD to be a running theme in this film, and this is the minute where Evelyn’s distractibility saves her life. We spend most of the episode on Deirdre — this is the second time she’s let this family off the hook, which makes it a pattern rather than a Grinch moment, and we build out a theory of who she was before her divorce and why she became who we met at the start. We also get into the two different faces Jobu is wearing in the same minute, why “statistical inevitability” echoes a line from a deleted Thetaverse scene, and the trope that doesn’t have a name but should: making excuses to do the right thing.
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