The Light may or may not be real, Doc Meyers may or may not be a fraud, the Meyerist Movement may or may not be a gigantic scam, but one thing’s for sure: Eddie Lane’s life would be a lot easier if he could control THE VOLUME OF HIS VOICE! The third episode of The Path’s second season (“The Father and the Son”) is like an object lesson in the the evils of shouting. Eddie shouts at his son Hawk. Eddie shouts at his ex-wife Sarah. Eddie shouts at his rival Cal. Eddie shouts at his new girlfriend Chloe about the man who’s stalking him. Eddie shouts at the man who’s stalking him. Apparently, none of the Ladder’s 13 Rungs teach that you catch more flies with honey than you do with vinegar, because Eddie’s ladling that shit out by the spoonful, and no one’s swallowing it.
As such, his behavior in this episode — culminating in a fistfight, a forcible ejection from a casino pool, and an allergic reaction to booze — is a solid demonstration of what the show is doing wrong at this point. Like Sarah nonsensically barking at Cal to dig up the body of the man he murdered in the premiere even though she’d long suspected him of the crime, and like Cal picking a fight with all his rich potential donors before slugging one of them in the stomach during the second episode, Eddie spends this hour needlessly ratcheting up the conflict in his life, to diminishing returns with each subsequent confrontation. The Path is hardly the first prestige-TV project to mistake raw hostility for drama — Halt and Catch Fire Season One springs to mind, as do the later seasons of Masters of Sex — but the sheer repetitiveness of Eddie’s fights with other characters in this installment makes this mistake stand out all the more. Forget the Light and the Ladder and all that shit — my dude needs good old-fashioned anger management.
Tags: decider, reviews, the path, TV, TV reviews