‘Transparent’ Season 3 Shows That Identity Is Only the Beginning

Transparent is a show that gets (rightfully) praised for being at the forefront of a cultural conversation about gender identity. From the very first episode, when Maura Pfefferman (Jeffrey Tambor) declared to her family that she was a woman and would be living her life as such thereafter, the idea of identity set itself up at the very center of the show. Maura’s declaration of her own gender identity rippled through her family, with identity crises presenting themselves in her children and ex-wife. Throughout the course of the first two seasons, the Pfeffermans have moved through versions of themselves: Sarah (Amy Landecker) as mother, as lesbian lover, as inadequate bride, as BDSM novice; Ali (Gaby Hoffmann) as artist, as rebel, as lesbian, as academic; Joshie (Jay Duplass) as mogul, as cool guy, as decent guy, as father. All of them as Jews. All of them as diaspora. All of them as descendants of persecution for who they were. It’s been the string that has connected this show as it’s progressed. With its third season, which drops on Amazon Prime on Friday, Transparent asserts that identity is merely the starting point, and there’s a lot of wandering and stumbling to be done from there.

Maura begins the season by running face-first into her own limitations. She’s volunteering her time at a crisis hotline, and when she can’t help a trans girl in trouble, she embarks upon one of those strange Los Angeles odysseys people in movies and TV sometimes embark on, but it’s a disaster, and Maura ends up realizing all sorts of things about her life, her health, and how her identity as a white trans woman with some money butts up against the identities of other trans women. It’s more than just a nod to intersectionality from a show that is painstaking in its desire to tell this story “right”; it’s a mission statement for the rest of the season. Season 3 is probably the least dynamic of the three seasons of Transparent so far, but executive producer Jill Soloway pushes her characters the furthest out onto the limbs of the people they’ve decided to be, and the changes that happen are often thrilling.

The big change in Maura’s life is that she has decided to move forward with her transition, hormonally and surgically. The show keeps coming back to a makeover motif with Maura this season; she gets a streamlined new hairstyle and the clothes are getting more chic. Now that she’s emerged as a woman, she’s refining what kind of woman. This causes some bumps in the road for her relationship with Vicki (a warm and welcome Anjelica Huston), not to mention the usual ration of side-eye from her kids. And as usual: they have a fuck lot of nerve giving anyone side-eye. Sarah has decided to dive into the twin pillars of Judaism and bondage play, both of which she attacks with the kind of hurricane of self-actualization that the absent Tammy brought to their engagement last season. She and Len have decided to be divorced but also co-parents who are living together, and they spend a lot more time convincing themselves that the arrangement is working than actually working at the arrangement. Sarah’s involvement in the temple puts her into Raquel’s (Kathryn Hahn) orbit, an oil and water pairing that leads to some of the season’s best scenes. Hahn steps into her own as a main player this season, giving Raquel a kind of parallel actualization as the Pfeffermans do their thing.

Meanwhile, Ali and her college professor Leslie (Cherry Jones) have blown past all ethical conundrums and are full-on dating. Ali’s as together as she’s ever been through three seasons, but hers ends up being the weakest arc of the season; not because she needs to be a disaster to be interesting, but because we can see where the Leslie relationship is headed from miles down the road, and it’s kind of a bummer to waste Cherry Jones on a dead-end arc.

Hoffmann does get a great spotlight in the season’s phenomenal eighth episode, “If I Were a Bell,” which continues the flashback arc that was started in last season’s Weimar Germany episodes. The Pfeffermans are now in America in the 1950s, and we get to see young Morty’s furtive moments dressing up in pretty dresses in the family’s bomb shelter. Hoffmann plays Morty’s mom in these flashbacks, and she’s phenomenal (we also get Michaela Watkins reprising her role as Mort’s grandma and Michael Stuhlbarg as her husband). It’s a stunner of an episode that also turns to Shelly’s childhood, which had its own harrowing trauma to overcome.

Of the three Pfefferman kids, Josh’s arc becomes the most compelling. After spending the first few episodes adrift, he’s rattled into action by a tragedy and embarks on a journey to reconnect with his son, Colton (Alex MacNicoll). There’s an episode he spends on the road with Shea (Trace Lysette), Maura’s trans friend from when she lived with Davina (“YAASS queen!”), which AGAIN highlights the disconnect between these characters’ identities (She as a trans woman; Josh as a Guy Who’s Cool With Trans Women) and what they do with them. That Transparent continues to push this conversation forward is admirable; that it does so with scenes as compelling as bracing as this one is what makes it a great show.