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The realistic lesbian drama of Syd and Ali in “Transparent” Season 2

Caution: Mild spoilers ahead.

There’s a conversation in Season 2 of Transparent that encapsulates how well the writers of the show grasp two women in a relationship. Well, there’s certainly more than one, but one in Episode 8 particularly stood out. Syd (Carrie Brownstein) and Ali (Gaby Hoffmann) are on a hike where they get into a heated discussion about their future together. Having made the transition from friends to lovers and the immediate U-haul of Ali into Syd’s loft, the two are at odds over their endgame. Ali, a notoriously unfaithful person who has a hard time making commitments to anyone or anything, is not necessarily interested in forever. Syd, on the other hand, is looking for a partner who she can depend on. What begins as a conversation about polyamory ends up being about their different perceptions of love and the negotiations you have to make, or don’t.

“It’s not about other people at all. It’s about me and you,” Ali says. “It’s about how incredible this is and how amazing you are and how much I love being with you, and how being with you, I become myself and I want to keep doing that and expanding and getting closer and closer to that. And I know that I will just start shutting down if we have to make some commitment to next year or next month-“

“A month?” Syd interrupts. “Is that hard for you to think about? A whole month with me? Or a week? Or tomorrow? Like a day? That’d be hard? What’s gonna happen in an hour? Are we going to be going out in an hour or is that too hard? It’s just like so locked in-you’re so locked in by me.”

Ali says of course tomorrow, but why burden themselves with expectation?

“Because this isn’t a burden. This is not a burden for me,” Syd says. “I cant do this way. I cant do this version. That’s not who I am and you know that.”

Part of Ali’s idea of queerness is that it comes with the inherent freedom to redefine everything, including what it means to be loved, or in love, or giving and receiving love. Syd, meanwhile, is wondering how she’s created such a monster.

Ali’s newfound queerness is a large part of Season 2, and Syd is her entrypoint into that world. It’s a different one from her sister Sarah, who is involved with Tammy at the beginning of the season but struggles with her own sexual identity (and identity in general) throughout the rest. Syd’s life is steeped in queer-she spends her nights bowling with lesbian friends and at womyn’s moon celebrations around campfires.

“Ali is submerged in the world of very sexy, very hip lesbians,” Gaby said.”She’s exploring her identity and she’s trying something out. I think this [look] would be called-like, I’m making this up-but hipster queer. Queer hipster. I’m definitely in the queer world. I think [Ali’s] like, ‘I’m doing it. I’m trying it. I’m going full-throttle.'”

This season Ali will also be exploring academia, following in her Moppa’s footsteps, as Maura used to be a professor before retiring.

“[Ali’s] starting to figure out who she is, really, and what she wants, and she’s very excited by what she’s discovering,” Gaby said. And in how that relates to monogamy? “She wants to be able to make a lot of discoveries.”

Part of Ali’s discovering include delving into her Jewish ancestors, looking to find historical connections to her modern family, even taking Syd to meet her grandmother that the Pfeffermans haven’t seen in years. I was on the Transparent set the day Carrie and Gaby were shooting a brief scene on the train on the way to see Ali’s grandma at a Palm Springs retirement facility.

“I think it’s a big deal for Ali to be taking this trip,” Gaby said. “I think it’s kind of scary. It’s emotional territory she’s been avoiding. It’s also going to lead her to interesting places, so it’s the beginning of an interesting phase of her development and evolution. I think coming out of last season when they had a falling out, this is like a real intimate thing to do together and there’s a lot of trust in Ali’s bringing Syd with her. I think it’s setting us on the course of more of that.”

“When [the season] starts, the friendship is slightly fractured,” Carrie said. “Because Ali, as she’s prone to do, kind of takes Syd for granted and there is a bit of a falling out. Which, from my perception, is something they drift in an out of. Closeness, on and off. So it starts out that they haven’t seen each other in a while, and Ali comes back in Syd’s life.”

The role of Syd was not in the original pilot, at least not in the way that it came to be written when Carrie became attached to the role as Ali’s best friend of many years. Only in a few episodes of the first season, Carrie wasn’t sure if she would be given more in Season 2, but said she told creator Jill Soloway that she’d work around her own show, Portlandia, if she was to be brought back. Both shows shot over the summer, so while it was “a little bit crazy” for Carrie, she said that both productions were accommodating.

“Gaby and I really love the scenes we have with Syd and Ali because it does feel very real,” Carrie said, “and it’s easy to infuse a lot of our own friendship into this role.”

“I love Carrie and we have good chemistry,” Gaby echoed. “So that makes it easy.”

There’s an effortlessness to their relationship this season, one that shows how easy it can be for women to become intimate with close friends. Their serious conversations are peppered with inside jokes or repetitions of the word “cunt.” They are beginning a romantic relationship already privy to things about the other that would be completely new had they just met.

Syd has been a friend of the Pfeffermans for years, and had a fling with Ali’s brother Josh, something that spawned the initial friend break-up for Syd and Ali in Season 1, although Syd’s having more than friendly feelings for Ali played into it as well.

“I think that [Syd] and Josh had a bit of an understanding,” Carrie said. “And they each, I think, were looking for more and it was very casual. So I think despite the fight Syd and Ali had over that and their friendship in general, Josh wasn’t really an impediment to the Syd and Ali dynamic. But these are the Pfeffermans: Their moral compass and their capacity for self-delusion is pretty intense.”

“Last season it was really upsetting because it was this betrayal,” Gaby agreed. “It was more about trust, I think, than it was about sex. I think [Ali is] over it.”

“I always joke that next season I’ll be with Sarah,” Carrie said. “And in the final season I’ll be with Shelly. And Maura, too. If Syd is with a family member and there are five seasons, it’s just her role in the family.”

Carrie said she loved being able to shoot a scene with the entire Pfefferman family for the first time this season (“I definitely feel more integrated into the fabric of the show.”) and she was also excited to work with guest stars Eileen Myles (“I”m a huge fan of her work”) and out actress Cherry Jones, who plays a radical feminist lesbian poet and gender studies professor.

“This season I think it’s a lot about-I don’t want to mischaracterize what they’re trying to do, but from my sense, it’s a lot about togetherness versus isolation and kind of the way we move between autonomy and togetherness, I guess,” Carrie said. “Or autonomy and connection. And the ways I think you can feel alienated in both scenarios; you can feel other and outside yourself, both in isolation and when in relation to someone else. I think it’s very intense, I guess. It’s a thrilling show and very heartbreaking. All those things.”

Carrie, who is the co-creator and one of the head writers on Portlandia, praises the Transparent writers room for their ability to “see into the near future.”

“I think that it’s such an organism, I guess. I feel like they’re not just in the present tense with it. They see ahead to the future and are very much sort of planning out where these characters are going. Specifically the Pfeferman family, but also those that orbit around them,” she said.

This season finds all four of the Pfefferman women-Maura, Sally, Sarah and Ali-in relationships with other women, which is so atypical of television. (It’s worth noting that there are at least three queer-identified women in the writers’ room.) And even though Sarah (Amy Landecker) and Tammy (Melora Hardin) were the only two women in a committed relationship with one another in Season 1, queer viewers were really pulling for Syd and Ali.

“I think the Syd and Ali [relationship] is very relatable, and the Sarah and Tammy one had all these facets of melodrama which I think is very exciting to watch, but also less relatable,” Carrie said. “Because I think you hope you’ll never be going through anything as grief-stricken and drama-stricken as that, where I think a lot of us have enacted various permutations of Syd and Ali; having a friendship that kind of shifts between-or that sort of manifests itself in different forms of intimacy, which is very common.”

Despite many of the relationships and characteristics in Transparent being commonplace, it is still the only television show truly exploring the kinds of queer nuances largely ignored wholly by Hollywood. Transparent is a show that LGBT people can watch and say, “Yes. That is so my life. Those are my people. That’s my struggle. This is so real.” That includes unique challenges, to be sure, but also the very specific joys we get to experience as part of a collective other. Still, we are forced to face our inner-Pfeffermans, our acts of selfishness and self-imposed discontentedness through characters that are decidedly not us, which makes it not just palatable, but deliciously enjoyable.

Whether you’re a Syd or an Ali, a Sarah or a (goddess forbid) Tammy, Transparent helps queer women see themselves in a reflective way without flattening us down to archetypes. Season 2 has not only expanded on the multi-dimensionality of LGBT women, but inspired introspection in a very necessary way.

You can watch the Season 2 premiere of Transparent now on Amazon. The rest of the season will be available for Amazon Prime members on December 11.

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