Stew

S1 E12: Marta Complex

Arrested Development, The Walt Disney Company, 2003.

“Marta Complex” is an episode about people hearing exactly what they want to hear, then building a beef-flavored world around it.

Sometimes this involves romance. Sometimes it involves family. Sometimes it involves the Spanish word for “brother.” And sometimes it involves Carl Weathers looking at a mostly finished plate and seeing dinner tomorrow.

At Lucille’s Valentine’s Day-slash-anniversary party for Lindsay and Tobias, Michael gives a heartfelt speech about family, honesty, and no longer living a lie. This is a dangerous thing to do around the Bluths, because they tend to treat broad emotional advice as if it were a set of personalized legal instructions. Lindsay hears Michael’s speech and decides she should probably get a divorce. Buster hears it and decides he should finally move out of his mother’s apartment. Marta hears it and realizes that Michael, not G.O.B., may be the Bluth brother she actually wants. Michael, meanwhile, believes he has simply said some nice things at a party. This is his mistake.

The entire episode then becomes a demonstration of what happens when one reasonably well-intentioned man attempts to improve his family by speaking clearly to them. Nobody improves. G.O.B. soon becomes convinced that Marta is cheating on him with a mysterious man named “Hermano.” He has overheard her speaking Spanish on the phone and repeatedly using the word, which is all the evidence G.O.B. requires before launching an investigation. Michael agrees to help him find Hermano despite the fact that neither Michael nor G.O.B. speaks Spanish. Neither man appears to consider this an obstacle, just like assembling furniture without instructions.

Michael spends the day following Marta around town and asking strangers whether they are Hermano. On the set of her Spanish-language soap opera, one actor points him toward another. The other points him back. Michael becomes increasingly furious while the Spanish language remains entirely blameless.

While Michael is conducting a private investigation into a vocabulary word, Buster is attempting adulthood. He confronts Lucille, packs his possessions, and leaves home, which would be a major developmental milestone if his immediate plan were not to move in with another woman named Lucille. Unfortunately, Lucille Austero has company. Carl Weathers is there, and they are, in his words, “getting a stew on.”

This is not the first stew of the episode. Carl has already been giving Tobias acting lessons that contain remarkably little acting and a great deal of personal finance. At the anniversary party, he notices meat left on a bone and explains that you can take it home, put it in a pot, add some broth and a potato, and “baby, you’ve got a stew going.” He then recalls surviving on craft-services vegetables, bacon and Cup-A-Soup while preserving his per diem, which also somehow becomes stew. Carl Weathers does not see leftovers. Carl Weathers sees a thriving dining establishment.

Anyway, by the time Buster finds Carl at Lucille Austero’s apartment, Carl describes the visit as “just two adults getting a stew on,” which Buster understandably interprets as something sexual. It is difficult to blame him. The phrase has range.

Elsewhere, Tobias and Lindsay’s marriage is also unraveling, although “unraveling” implies that it was previously arranged in a recognizable shape. Lindsay wants a separation. Tobias, a never-nude who is now pursuing acting seriously enough to pay Carl Weathers $1,100 but not seriously enough to question where that money is going, lands a role as Frightened Inmate #2. He is thrilled until he learns the role includes a shower scene.

George Michael, meanwhile, is living through an entirely different crisis after learning that Lindsay and Tobias had trouble conceiving Maeby. This raises the possibility that Maeby might not be biologically related to him, which for George Michael would solve one extremely specific problem while creating several much larger ones. But, this is what passes for hope in the Bluth family.

All of these plots run on the same fuel: incomplete information plus enormous confidence. Michael sees Marta buying an expensive men’s suit and assumes it is for Hermano. Buster sees Marta and immediately concludes that Lucille Austero is an old woman and Marta is the future. George Michael hears that Maeby’s conception was complicated and begins mentally drafting a family-tree loophole. Lucille discovers that being alone means she can eat cake, drink wine and turn the television up as loud as she wants, and realizes solitude may have been unfairly maligned. Carl Weathers sees a bone and thinks stew.

Eventually Michael has dinner with Marta, where she is trying very hard to tell him that her feelings for G.O.B. have changed. Michael is trying very hard to expose her affair with Hermano. Neither of them is participating in the same conversation. When Marta leaves the room, her son appears, and Michael decides to extract information from him in exchange for cake, which is not how the FBI operates but is probably how G.O.B. would.

In the end it turns out Michael has made a huge mistake. Of course he has. That is the organizing principle of the show.

“Marta Complex” is especially good at Arrested Development’s favorite kind of joke: not a single misunderstanding, but an entire ecosystem of misunderstandings, all feeding one another until everyone is pursuing the wrong thing. Michael believes he is protecting G.O.B. They both believe Marta has a lover named Hermano. Buster believes moving from one Lucille to another constitutes independence. George Michael believes genetics may rescue his romantic prospects. Tobias believes Carl Weathers is teaching him acting.

Carl Weathers, meanwhile, believes almost anything can become stew.

Of all of them, he may be the most correct. Give him a bone, some broth and a potato, and he knows exactly what he has.

Everyone else has considerably less to work with.

Make it! French Onion Soup from Food52