Expect Delays

A couple of weeks into sobriety, David rides the euphoric high recovery communities call the Pink Cloud, until real life starts testing it. A cold soccer game brings a bottle of Scotch offered at the edge of a soccer field, a wall of distance from his own kids, and a chilling text from Courtney about a HELOC that reveals just how far out of his depth he is with money. Between clean blood tests, cocaine dreams he can never quite finish, and a counselor named Jeremy who becomes an unlikely confidant, David starts building a new life out of a dozen plastic storage bins. It's a rare, cautiously hopeful chapter, one that finds real liberation in losing absolutely everything.

David traces addiction all the way back to its roots: a first DUI at fourteen, a violent breakdown at sixteen that landed him in rehab for his birthday, and a family history of sobriety and relapse running through both grandparents. Returning to treatment at forty-three, he confronts his own judgment of other addicts, the delusion of being a "functional" one, and the people, Nick, John, Kim, Otto, who crack him open with honesty instead of pity. It's a philosophical, unflinching look at what actually defines a man, a recovering addict, a person, and it closes on the quietest gut-punch in the series yet: a phone call where someone finally tells him she's proud of him.

After a ruined last binge leaves him wired, broke, and alone at dawn, David finally faces the full weight of what's coming: the divorce, the wreckage of who he's become, and a one o'clock intake appointment he's determined not to miss. Between a pre-dawn sobriety ritual and a raw reckoning with everything he's lost, he makes the drive to rehab with Radiohead's In Rainbows as his only company, the arpeggios of "Weird Fishes" carrying him past memories of Scarlett and straight into an uncertain future. By the time he pulls into the parking lot at Excel, scared and stripped bare, he's ready to stop running, at least for now.

Fresh off a breakup with Scarlett over something as small as a bartender admiring his rings, David unpacks who he'd actually become underneath the black leather and silver skull rings: a man split into two people, one present and sweet, the other cold and self-isolating. The episode pulls back a year to the motorcycle accident that shattered his leg on Scotland Road, the shock, the threats to a nurse over pain meds, and an unlikely detour into declassified CIA research on altered states while recovering. By the end, with divorce papers finally in hand and a borrowed retainer for a lawyer, David makes the call to get sober, but not before one last order to his dealer. Honest, weary, and unflinching about what a "last run" really looks like before rehab.

Fresh off a week of stolen intimacy in North Carolina, David comes home to Millburn Standard dinners, Halloween pop-ups, and the fragile normalcy of trying to hold his kids together. But a family movie night at The Exorcist: Believer cracks something open he wasn't ready for. The film's possessed children, missing days, and dark force luring the young into ritual send him straight back to a basement in Ohio he hasn't spoken about in years: a strange melody he couldn't stop playing at fifteen, a growl in his ear, and a warning his uncle waited a year to deliver. Alone in his camper afterward, too scared to sleep, David realizes the darkness that found him at fifteen never really left. It just learned to wait.

The night after a rough, almost hateful collision of bodies, something shifts in the air between David and Scarlett, something old, dark, and unnamed. A fever dream pulls David through a black sea guarded by ancient creatures and delivers him to a Hermit standing at the mouth of a cave, right before Scarlett's voice drags him back to reality with a very different complaint: his snoring. But the strangeness doesn't end there. A blinking light in the night sky follows them for two straight days, mocking, playful, impossibly patient, until Scarlett finally says out loud what David's been too afraid to: aliens. What begins as dread ends in something unexpectedly tender, a night spent naked under that same light, communing with each other and the universe in the last few hours before David's flight home.

Days of sun, wine, and baseball with Scarlett curdle fast when a phone call lights up mid-drive: Brad from Bermuda. What starts as an offhand explanation spirals into a jealous, drunken confrontation at a nearly empty boardwalk bar, a shoved-off hand, a blade in his pocket, and David alone on a cold October swing screaming her name into the dark. This episode is where the fantasy meets its first real test, and where David starts to recognize the pattern underneath the passion: two broken people colliding hard enough that rage and desire stop being opposites.

David flies south chasing a word he doesn't have yet, only later learning it's called limerence, the obsessive, uncertain longing that isn't quite love but feels indistinguishable from it in the moment. Between a tearful flight watching Beautiful Boy, an old jiu jitsu friend insisting Courtney's been unfaithful all along, and a screeching Mustang blasting Metallica pulling up to collect him, this episode is a collision of self-reflection and reckless reunion. What follows with Scarlett is hungry, funny, and tender, but beneath the Blue Moon and expensive wine, David starts to sense the truth he isn't ready to name yet: she isn't his soul mate. She's his mirror.

David arrives in New Jersey with nowhere real to call home, moving into a camper parked behind a jiu jitsu school as December closes in. Between a broken sewage line, a wave of quiet humiliation from near strangers, and a bar of Crosby, Stills and Nash crackling out of a phone speaker, this episode traces one long, grinding day in the wreckage: a prep school interview for his son at an elite institution that feels like a different world entirely, a bittersweet goodbye with a boy still hoping for chili dogs with his dad, and a night spent listening to a ballgame in the dark with a woman on the phone who somehow made the day feel survivable. It is the quiet, unglamorous middle of the collapse, where the mysticism runs headlong into gas station coffee, borrowed blazers, and a gas light that never seems to go off.

Recovering at his mother's house, David becomes a fixture of quiet chaos: sleepless nights, sad music, and a body running on fumes. A trip to a local bar turns an ugly moment of racial provocation into an unlikely friendship, while a phone call with Courtney lays bare just how far past repair the marriage has traveled, and how much of his own denial he's still clinging to. But the heart of this episode is what happens on the long drive back to New Jersey: a supernatural encounter behind the wheel that David can only describe as the presence of his estranged mother in law, delivering one message he can't shake. By the time the episode ends, a phone call to an old jiu jitsu friend hands David something he didn't expect to find: a place to actually stay, a camper behind a dojo, and the first real floor under his feet since everything fell apart.