‘Transparent’ Season 4 Travels To Israel For Some Big Revelations

The opening credits for the fourth season of Amazon’s Transparent have been updated slightly. Now, in addition to the beauty-pageant snippet and that bar mitzvah boy vogueing, we’ve got video footage of people in Israel and Palestine. Which should give you a sense of how important this season’s trip to the Holy Land is for the Pfefferman family.

Through three seasons, Transparent has been a blessedly progressive series for LGBTQ representation, but it’s also been one of the most boldly celebratory shows for Judaism. Jokes about the prevalence of Jews in Hollywood are a dime a dozen, but it still feels rare for a TV show like Transparent to dive into the greater spiritual, cultural, and historical corners of the Jewish community as a way to comment on its story about self-realization and change. So it should really come as no surprise that season 4 takes a little field trip to Israel, where storylines converge, secrets are uncovered, and more than one Pfefferman realizes some truths about themselves.

As season 4 begins, our Pfeffermans are in various stages of having their shit together. Sarah (Amy Landecker) is back in a regular sexual relationship with her ex-husband, Len (Rob Huebel); Shelly (Judith Light) has moved out of her condo and into a fraught living situation Josh (Jay Duplass), while also taking improv classes, which are exactly as harrowing to watch as you’d expect them to be; Ali (Gaby Hoffmann) is dealing with the aftermath of her relationship with college-professor Leslie, which includes having to testify in front of an investigative panel at the university. Maura (Jeffrey Tambor), meanwhile, is thriving as well as we’ve ever seen her on the show. She’s dating (a man, which is new and fun for her) and teaching college classes, to students who seem to really like her, and she’s preparing to travel to Israel for a lecture on gender and Judaism that her students can livestream if they want. And, yes, “a gender and Judaism class you can livestream” does sound like a pretty good description of Transparent. Before you know it, Ali has invited herself along on the trip, and then once she and Maura arrive in Israel, the discovery of a long-forgotten family secret draws the rest of the family to the Holy Land for the bulk of the season.

Creator and showrunner Jill Soloway has spoken a bunch about how “boundaries and borders” become a major theme this season. And when Sarah comments that “secrets are a perfect stand-in for boundaries” in a family that doesn’t respect boundaries all that much, you start to get what Soloway is talking about. Secrets have always been what have kept the Pfeffermans apart, even as they’ve been so close to each other. Sarah meets a young woman named Lila (played by Alia Shawkat) at a sex addicts group — the result of Sarah, Josh, and Ali all taking a BuzzFeed quiz and determining that they’re all probably sex addicts — and ends up bringing Lila into her sexual relationship with Len. That becomes a secret. Josh starts seeing visions of the late Rita, the babysitter who deflowered him and ended up messing him up for so many years. That’s a secret. Shelly is already keeping secret something the audience was made privy to last season — that she was molested as a teen by a teacher. Ali’s secret ends up touching on her innermost feelings of discomfort with her own gender.

In Israel, as the Pfeffermans deal with an even bigger family secret, our characters find room to grow and change, and in typical Transparent fashion, it happens through some gorgeously filmed and sparkling scripted scenes. Maura and Ali going through airport security, where Maura is flagged for a “groin anomaly”; Shelly using her new improv skills to find her voice and calm an agitated man; the Pfeffermans floating in the dead sea like a tribe of fallen angels. On a scene-by-scene level, this might be Transparent‘s strongest, most cohesive season yet.

The borders between Israel and Palestine are a constant theme this season. Ali takes up with some young Palestinians who open her eyes about their day-to-day. Another theme is, as strange as this sounds, the music of Jesus Christ Superstar, which manages to thread through some family flashbacks and then back into the present day. It’s strange at first, but once you settle in with the juxtaposition, that strangeness feels right.

Back in Los Angeles, we don’t lose touch with Davina (Alexandra Billings), who gets one particular episode as a wonderful showcase for her talents. Her living situation with Sal is deteriorating, she’s having some health problems, and she finds herself in as vulnerable a position has she’s been in since the start of the series. This episode also gives us a chance to see a flashback to young Davina, which makes for one of the most touching scenes of the season.

Flashbacks have always been an important recurring element on Transparent, and while season 4 offers nothing quite so impressive as season 2’s Weimar Germany storyline, we do get the chance to visit young Morty and young Shelly in the early days of their family. Present-day Maura is confronted by these memories, particularly the ways in which young Morty was tempted to follow his strange and unfamiliar feelings before ultimately being stifled. As bracing as any of the intra-familial confrontations on this show have been, Maura being confronted with her younger self is in another league.

As always, Transparent deftly confronts the past as a way of helping to sort out the present. And for as consistently as the show allows its characters to be as unlikeable as we all can be in life, it always remembers to give those same characters the moments of grace that Soloway and her team are so good at creating. The Pfeffermans push at their boundaries and test their own limits and end up more than all right in the end.

Stream Transparent on Amazon Prime