Main cast: Jay Duplass (Daniel), Will Tranfo (Patrick), Frank Ashmore (Older Patrick), and Jennifer Lafleur (Diane)
Director: So Yong Kim
Daniel, a man in his forties, is huddled up in Room 104 feeling all blue and surly because his wife Diane has kicked him out of their home.
She caught him with his boss, and she’s right: Daniel had been sleeping with his boss, using the excuse of him and Diane going through a rough patch to get his jollies elsewhere.
In fact, he was magnanimously ready to break it off with Brenda to go back to his wife when Diane caught him and booted his sorry ass out of there. How inconsiderate of her to not take into account that he was all ready to make the supreme noble sacrifice of going back to her and the kids!
So, while he’s feeling supremely sorry for himself, he conjures up the… spirit… I guess, of his long-dead BFF Patrick to ask for marital advice.
I Knew You Weren’t Dead wants very hard to be this intelligent, moving dramatic episode, and in a way, it sort of succeeds. Jay Duplass, who co-creates and co-produces this series, does an adequate job as the protagonist, although sometimes I can’t tell whether he’s smirking or what during a supposedly emotional scene.
However, this episode is this close to making Daniel hold himself accountable for his many, many sorry-ass attitude and antics, only for some reason does a complete 180 and has Patrick bending over backward to absolve Daniel of any guilt the man may be harboring when it comes to Patrick’s death.
It also doesn’t help that Daniel chooses to envision his BFF at the same age as himself to have a beer belly and looking like crap compared to himself. Really? He can’t even picture his BFF in a nicer way? Something tells me that mean streak that Daniel has in him hasn’t been completely addressed by the end of this episode. No, instead it chooses to do a revisionist history and insists that Daniel isn’t at fault.
Also, whatever happened between Daniel and Patrick has nothing to do with him being a cheating ass and a useless husband and father. However, this episode seems to assume that Daniel will magically becomes a better person after he realizes that he has nothing to feel guilty about in his past—a realization that is entirely his own self-justification if one chooses to interpret Patrick’s manifestation as Daniel’s own conscience talking to him.
Anyway, this is a pretty decent episode about an asshole doing his best to convince himself that he has nothing to feel guilty about or hold himself accountable for. It’s a watchable kind of terrible, in other words.
