Spoiler alert: The following article discusses the entirety of “The Patient,” including the finale “The Cantor’s Husband.”
“The Patient’s” session has ended: In the final, climactic showdown between serial killer Sam (Domhnall Gleeson) and psychotherapist Dr. Alan Strauss (Steve Carell), neither escapes — to extremely varying degrees. After the latter lauds the former for resisting the urge to kill his abusive father and demands his release, Sam lashes out and chokes him in front of his mother Candace (Linda Emond). Despite being told that true reform comes in the form of penance and turning himself in, Sam ends the limited series by putting himself in the very chains that kept Strauss prisoner. As for the embattled therapist’s family, his estranged and Orthodox Jewish son, Ezra (Andrew Leeds), is seen consulting a grief psychologist.
“We hope that the whole thing just creates a lot of intense feeling, which is, I think, what we felt writing it and what we felt watching it,” co-creator, co-showrunner, writer and executive producer of the FX on Hulu show, Joe Weisberg, told TheWrap in an interview. “It’s easy to say that, as if there’s some intrinsic good in just feeling anything, but it’s sort of true … We don’t need to make you believe anything or know some new truth; what we want to do is drag you through a little bit of the human experience, either happily or kicking and screaming — it’s probably the latter.
Below, Weisberg and producing/writing/showrunning partner Joel Fields break down what it all means — well, sort of.
Why Dr. Alan Strauss had to die
Fields and Weisberg knew from the beginning that Carell’s character would become another one of Sam’s victims, though they toyed with the idea that he would survive, writing some 30 or so endings in their quest to find one that fit.
“We had a lot of different ideas [of] how it would happen,” Weisberg said. “We wrote every one of them and then we, to some degree, experimented with him not dying and went back to him dying and wrote 30 more endings, and we really weren’t going to stop until it felt absolutely emotionally right to us. And there were plenty of nights when we thought that would be never, so it’s a little bit scary, but then we got it.”
Fields added, “Unfortunately for Alan Strauss, we have many versions of the end in which Alan Strauss survives. None of them felt authentic to us.”
Has Sam really changed?
Well, if you take the actor’s own words for it, the answer is a definitive no. Gleeson previously told TheWrap that true remorse and change would require Sam to turn himself in, upon Strauss’ strong recommendation prior to his murder.
But “The Patient” EPs don’t want the answer to be so clear-cut. Eventually, Sam gives the key to the lock to his mother, which is a kind of response to the larger moral question, but who’s to say he won’t convince her down the line to get him out?
Weisberg said of the conundrum, “By the time you see this whole show, it’s pretty clear that he was sincere, right? He wasn’t running some kind of con or scam to be more devious than usual. He wanted to change, but the question of whether or not he could have or did or anything else is also something that we’d like people to ponder indefinitely.”
Fields puts it more bluntly: “That’s more something to us that we’d hope that people will discuss amongst themselves afterwards, and we don’t have any special input to that discussion because that’s past the ending of our story.”
What about Sam’s mother? Candace’s hands aren’t clean
When researching for the show, Fields and Weisberg discovered that Candace could potentially hold various degrees of legal liability for aiding and abetting her son’s murderous tendencies depending on which state they reside in. Ultimately, Weisberg said the goal was to avoid creating a “stock character” in Candace and instead portray a mother in a “terrible, impossible situation.”
He and Fields often argued about the moral implications of her decisions, he said in a previous interview with TheWrap, adding that the more “interesting” part of the equation was the emotional side of the debate.
“Sometimes if you get too involved as a writer in the morality, you can lose sight of the other thing, which is what makes you feel,” he said. “It’s very easy to judge Candance, and why not? A part of you should. But what I think we hope is that people, by the end, will feel what she’s experiencing and have some empathy that can sit sort of side-by-side with the judgment.”
Ezra, Strauss’ son, goes to therapy and that full circle moment
Even though the larger, more visceral aspect of the thriller show is the cat-and-mouse game Strauss has to play with his kidnapper, a significant portion of his essence unravels via flashbacks and imagined conversations with his own therapist, in which he excavates the dissonance between himself and his son — that which was heightened by the death of Strauss’ wife.
At one point, Strauss admonishes himself for being more empathetic with a serial killer than Ezra, leading to an epiphany in which he is able to metaphysically break bread with his son in a way he was robbed of doing in real life. In a way, Ezra meets him in the middle through his therapy session, bridging the gulf between father and son and healing the family amid yet another loss.
“The fact that Ezra winds up in therapy was an important choice for us,” Fields said, “and the fact that Alan desperately wanted to find a way to communicate what he had discovered, to apologize to his son and to reach out to his daughter and make a final connection with his children before he died, and that somehow the story in this bizarre relationship with Sam allowed that to happen — that was all important to us in constructing those last scenes.”
All episodes of “The Patient” are streaming on Hulu.
