3x06 "Josh Is Irrelevant"
Written by Rachel Bloom, Aline Brosh McKenna and Ilana Peña, directed by Max Winkler. Original airdate November 17 2017.
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Songs
"A Diagnosis" (sung by Rachel Bloom)
- Climactic Music: Rebecca imagines finally finding out her correct diagnosis as triumphant. Followed by an Anti-Climax, as she has difficulties with accepting it throughout the episode.
- Continuity Nod: The actor who catches the diagnosis envelope that Rebecca throws also caught Rebecca's coat in the pilot episode's "West Covina".
Word of God says the songs share tonal similarities
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"This Is My Movement" (sung by Gabrielle Ruiz)
- Bait-and-Switch: Supposed to be about the communal power of social media, but switched at the very end:Heather: It sounds like you're just talking about poop.Valencia: What? No. I rarely poop. It's been a month.
- Comically Missing the Point: A volunteer worker at a teen suicide hotline tries to bond with Valencia over suicide awareness, but Valencia snottily dismisses her because the hotline doesn't have a hashtag and therefore isn't, in her mind, a real movement.
- Freudian Slip: Played with and averted (before the switch at the end).Valencia: My movement's getting stronger, there's no containing it.I can't wait any longer. I've really, really got to SH---ine a light on this issue.
- Toilet Humour: One long extended poop joke.
Tropes in the episode:
- Attention Whore: Subverted. Valencia spends most of the episode vlogging about Rebecca's suicide and cultivating her own fan group, but it's just her way of coping with her friend's suicide attempt.
- Brutal Honesty: When Valencia breaks down crying, she asks Rebecca to promise to never try to kill herself again. Rebecca stops and thinks, then says that no, she can't promise that, because the truth is she is still mentally ill.
- Could Say It, But...: When Nathaniel's father refuses to discuss his mother's suicide attempt, he later asks her when they're alone and she tells him how she "made a mistake with her sleeping pills" and went to a place where she learned how to "sleep without pills" in a way that makes it clear that yes, she did attempt suicide and was committed for a month while she recovered.
- Diegetic Soundtrack Usage: It's revealed that the title sequence of Rebecca watching talent show versions of herself is taken from this episode.
- It's All About Me: Josh makes Rebecca's suicide about him, like he did with Greg's drinking problem. In the end, though, he overhears Rebecca talking about his irrelevance to the situation, and it seems to get through to him.
- Precious Puppies: Josh intends to apologize to Rebecca and make her feel better with a tiny terrier puppy, but he ends up not giving it to her.
- Not So Stoic: Both Nathaniel and Valencia try to appear as aloof and unaffected as always, but by the end of this episode, both completely break down. Valencia ends up weeping over how scared she is of losing Rebecca, and Nathaniel finally comes to terms with his mother's past suicide attempt.
- Stepford Smiler: Nathaniel's parents, unsurprisingly. It becomes painfully clear that they have a strict policy of insisting that everything is fine, and absolutely refusing to talk about anything "unpleasant", no matter how serious a problem is. To the point of spending 20 years denying that his mother had attempted suicide and required hospitalization.
- Title Drop: Rebecca to her friends towards the end unaware that Josh is right outside.
