Main cast: Erin Gray (Leslie), Hippolyte Girardot (Paul), and Page Fletcher (The Hitchhiker)
Director: Aline Issermann
Seriously, if there is anything the fifth season of The Hitchhiker can teach the world, it’s to never ever marry a French person. How many episodes in this season have such a couple fail spectacularly to work things out? Well, here’s one more episode to preach how the French and the Americans are the new players in the great 20th-century cold war.
Leslie is convinced that her husband Paul is cheating on her. Despite her husband even showing her his busy schedule of the day in order to convince her that he’s not screwing around, she still persists in believing that he is, and this is driving her to erupt into loud and melodramatic displays of tears and tantrums 24/7.
Personally, I won’t be surprised if he actually were cheating on her, because it can be exhausting to be around an emotionally insecure and needy wife that talks only about how she thinks he is being unfaithful each time they are together.
As for this episode, I don’t know what Together Forever is trying to do. The husband is behaving suspiciously all the while, and the episode doesn’t try too hard to hide the fact that he is having an affair.
At the same time, it is very hard to sympathize with Leslie because that lady is nuts. She really is. She spends her whole days and nights agonizing over what her husband is doing each time she is not around, to the point that her paranoia consumes her whole life. She even gets violent. This woman doesn’t need love, she needs a nice long stay at a loony bin so that she can receive appropriate medications and therapies.
Perhaps this episode is trying to demonstrate the tragedy that can result when one fails to help someone that is clearly crazy get the necessary help they need.
However, I don’t think the people behind this show are that deep or had put much thought into the episode. They probably think it’s fun to watch a crazy woman shriek and reel all over the place. Sadly, I have to disagree about that being fun.
