‘Transparent’ Recap, Season Two Premiere: The Hora Of Our Discontent

At the end of the first season of Amazon’s Emmy and Golden Globe-winning Transparent, a lot had been dumped upon the Pfefferman family. Shelly (Judith Light) has recently lost her ex-husband, Ed, and her extended family had gathered for Ed’s funeral and the shiva that followed. Ali (Gaby Hoffmann) had inserted her foot straight into her mouth, per usual, after telling Rabbi Raquel that she suspected Josh (Jay Duplass) to be a sex addict (not knowing that Josh and Raquel had just hooked up). Josh got big news of his own: that he fathered a child with Rita, his off-and-on girlfriend ever since he was a teenager (and she was the family’s babysitter). Sarah (Amy Landecker) was still in an up-and-down relationship with Tammy, for whom she had recently left her husband. And then there was Maura (Jeffrey Tambor), who had slowly asserted herself as the matriarch of this messy, yet lovable, family.

There were a lot of loose ends from Season One’s finale, which seemed to be haphazardly tied together in between last year and today’s season premiere, titled “Kina Hora.” The second season premiere begins with an extravagant white wedding for Sarah and Tammy, opening with the perfectly comic image of the greater Pfefferman clan (which now includes Tammy’s children plus her ex-wives, along with Rabbi Raquel and Josh’s son, Colton) trying to assemble for a family portrait. That long, opening shot perfectly sets up not just the second season but represents Transparent as a whole: this is a show that can be at times bitingly satirical and deeply frustrating, and creator Jill Soloway offers a gorgeously chaotic scene to represent this unwieldy journey on which she’s about to take her audience this season.

If you smacked your forehead at the realization that it’s way too soon for Sarah and Tammy to be getting hitched despite the obvious dysfunctions in their relationship, you wouldn’t be completely in the wrong. The entire ceremony is tense and emotionally complicated for everyone involved, particularly Sarah. There’s a sense that Sarah’s losing it amid the picture-perfect Palm Springs setting around her; there are screaming children, but also screaming adults — Shelly’s intense intrusions feel even more discomforting at a wedding. In a particularly stunning sequence, we see the entire ceremony itself from Sarah’s perspective: first, the glee of new matrimony, which slowly devolves into Sarah’s manic, near-somnambulant state, as if she’s just a viewer in a madcap lesbian wedding and not a participant. It comes as no surprise, then, that she flees her own reception to cower in a bathroom stall to bemoan the fact that she’s made an incredibly major life decision that she has immediately come to regret.

Josh and Ali try to console the panicked Sarah, who shouts at her sister, “Why did you let me marry her?” Raquel, who is already recognizing the complications of entering into the family (after Shelly announces to entire party that she’s pregnant with Josh’s child, despite the fact that she instructed to Josh not to reveal the news), calmly explains that while Sarah and Tammy are technically married according to Jewish tradition, they are not yet legally wed — after all, she hasn’t yet submitted their wedding license to the state. “What’s a wedding then?” Ali ponders with her typical wide-eyed wonder. “It’s a ritual, a pageant,” Raquel replies. “It’s a very expensive play.”

It’s no doubt an expensive setting for even more skeletons to come bursting out of the Pfefferman closets. Maura, who we saw at the end of the first season can’t pass up showing off a bit at a formal event (taking a bit of the spotlight at Ed’s funeral by showing up in a stunning black dress), takes her role as the head of the family very seriously — only now, she seems to relish her new outward identity rather unapologetically. That is, until she recognizes that her sister, Bri, has also gotten an invite to the wedding — an offer handed to her simply as a seat-filler, since Sarah, Ali explains, lost all of her friends in her divorce from Len.

Maura cautiously confronts Bri, who only holds her in contempt. We learn that Maura is not yet out to her family, particularly her elderly mother, but we can see that the tension between her and her sister has a deeper, more troubled root than Maura’s trans identity. “I didn’t think Mom could handle this,” Maura tells Bri, “which is why I haven’t been by.” “You haven’t gone by before this,” her sister snaps in response with a cutting, hateful look. At the end of the party, when Maura tries to wave a white flag by thanking Bri and her son for coming and offering to visit her mother once again, Bri cruelly shuts her down. “You let this woman get off this planet without knowing about this,” she says after calling Maura “Mort.” “Could you do something for somebody else?”

It sets up something interesting that we may see more of in Maura’s character this season: that she’s just as flawed, just as self-centered, as the rest of her family. But in Soloway’s world, that isn’t necessarily a character flaw; it is but a character trait, one that nearly everyone has and manages to varying degrees.

The episode ends with a panning shot of four couples just after the night has wound down, all seen voyeuristically from outside their hotel room balconies. In the first room, Josh apologizes to Raquel for spilling the news of their new child, and delivers one hell of a killer line to her: “I don’t want to feel like you are sitting around correcting wrongs or waiting for me to fuck up so you can prove to yourself that this relationship is wrong, or that you’re unlovable.” In the next, we see a silent Sarah and Tammy sitting by their bed, with Sarah presumably telling Tammy that she doesn’t want to be married. Then, Shelly and Maura embrace with a kiss in their room, with Shelly telling Maura how beautiful she looked that night.

Finally, we see Ali slowly walk out onto her balcony, and we are left with the biggest mystery of “Kina Hora.” During the wedding reception, when the guests dance the Horah in a circle, we see a sudden flashback to Berlin, 1933, when a mysterious woman (played by trans actress and model Hari Nef) dances at a party filled with artistic, queer types of the Weimar era.

She shows up again, silently, on a chair behind Ali in the last shot of the episode. What will we learn of this mystery woman, and how does her appearance in the flashback connect our players in the present with their long, distant past?

[Watch the “Kina Hora” episode of Transparent on Amazon Prime Video]

Tyler Coates is a writer living in New York City. You can follow him on Twitter at @tylercoates.

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Photos courtesy Amazon Prime Video