‘Survivor’s Remorse’ recap: Wrestling with faith, money and family history

Season 4, Episode 8 | “Future Plans” | Oct. 8

With season four coming to a close soon, Future Plans mostly functioned as a setup for the final two episodes. But more significantly, it revealed the way the season’s puzzle pieces fit together to form a larger narrative.

After broaching the subject of ring shopping with Allison in last week’s episode, Cam has plowed ahead with the engagement. He bought a giant ring, he asked Allison’s parents for her hand in marriage and staged a thoughtful proposal. We have liftoff on this engagement.

Meanwhile, Cassie (Tischina Arnold) has been faithfully attending Father Tom’s Sunday school classes, and now she’s just got one corporal act of mercy to make before she’s confirmed in the Catholic church. What’s touching about Cassie is that she has so many questions about her faith. She talks to the statue of Mary in her yard and she’s the most eager participant in her confirmation classes. Cassie illustrates the nuances of what it means to be spiritually engaged. Even though she’s sure she wants to devote herself more deeply to her religion, she’s not always sure about what exactly that means.

All the while, Chen (Robert Wu) has been a supportive partner. He’s not especially religious, but he’s been sensitive and engaged in Cassie’s journey. Theirs ends up being an illustration of how two people of differing levels of intensity when it comes to spirituality can coexist in a romantic relationship. Cassie doesn’t spend her time constantly proselytizing Chen, and Chen hasn’t pressured Cassie about her newfound religiosity. It probably helps that Cassie’s found a religious community that doesn’t shame her for her sexual relationship with Chen, given that they’re not married.

Reggie (RonReaco Lee), always the practical strategist, urges Cam (Jessie T. Usher) to think about the future to which he’s committing himself by marrying Allison (Meagan Tandy). And the issue that Reggie raises is class. Both he and Cam spent most of their childhoods without their fathers. Cam’s father was in prison and Reggie’s was abusive. Allison, like Missy (Teyonah Parris), comes from a loving, stable, two-parent background. Cam, Reggie warns, is going to have to do more than just show up.

Survivor’s Remorse began this season by asking what a healthy relationship with your parents looks like, and now we know why: It has a huge effect on your romantic relationships. Hearing Reggie’s advice to Cam, I thought of Beyoncé, Jay-Z, Lemonade and 4:44. A significant portion of those albums are about confronting how Bey’s and Jay’s pasts informed — and nearly tore asunder — their relationship. Jay grew up poor and without a father in Brooklyn, New York’s Marcy projects, while Bey grew up in a two-parent home in Houston. Some of the most affecting themes in both albums touch on how Jay had to unlearn the hatred he’d picked up for himself and for black women to be a better partner. And Beyoncé, after being hurt by the manifestations of that hatred, had to learn to forgive Jay so they could move forward.

By introducing Reggie’s father, Cam’s father, and Missy and Allison’s parents, it feels like much of season four has been laying the groundwork for deeper interrogation of those themes — I certainly hope so, anyway. It’s an area rich with ideas that haven’t been explored deeply on television, and if there’s a writing staff and directing corps with the chops to pull it off, it’s Survivor’s Remorse.

In some ways, Missy and Reggie have functioned as a test case. The two are about to embark on a journey together as real estate developers, if they can unshake the $480,000 they need from Missy’s trust, two years ahead of when she was originally scheduled to get it. Missy’s parents have given a tentative yes, assuming they can persuade their trustee to move ahead. All this comes after uncovering their differing attitudes about money, and where and how those attitudes originated.

It seems we might be learning what a healthy romantic relationship looks like for M-Chuck (Erica Ash), too. Out of all of the characters, we’ve had the biggest window into M-Chuck’s introspection and growth as a person. We’ve watched her deal with discovering the identities of her three possible fathers and the way she’s still working through the boundaries of where her mother’s privacy ends and her own trauma begins.

Now that she’s confident enough to write about those experiences for her freshman comp class, it looks as though she may have found a possible friend, and maybe more, in her classmate Therese. The class was asked to write the first paragraph of their autobiography anonymously. When they turn their papers in, the professor distributes them so they can be read aloud.

Upon hearing her essay being read, M-Chuck snatches her paper away before her classmate can reveal that she was a product of her mother being raped. Seconds away from tears, she storms out. But later, she gets a call from Therese, who already knows more about M-Chuck than possibly any woman with whom M-Chuck’s ever hooked up.

Remember when M-Chuck and her therapist were trying to work on her tendency to drown out her problems with semi-anonymous sex? Perhaps Therese will mark a turning point.