USOT Recap: Mistress of Her Domain

 "I am dissolving the united states of Tara and declaring myself king."  —Tara

If only it should be so easy! One might wonder, of course, why Tara never thought to attempt a "benevolent dictatorship" over her alters a long time ago, but I suppose I can accept the notion that nothing constitutes a wake-up call quite like your sister telling you she doesn't want/trust you around her baby. And so it is that Tara finally decides to lay down the law in that big white conference room in her mind, resolving that her alters will only see the light of day on her terms; in other words, there will be no more hijacking of her body. Buck, Shoshanna, Alice, and even T begrudgingly consent to behave, calmly laying down their requests on neat little yellow legal pads, and everything is just peachy.

Haha! Just kidding! The legal pads, the conference room, the rational discussion among the Taras... This is not how things work in real life. She may have reached an agreement on the inside, but chaos still reigns on the outside. It should be ironic (but it isn't, really), that the sanest exchange undergone by the personalities leaves Tara face to face with her most insane-looking self to date: frazzled, mussed, and covered in four other people's contractual terms—a crazy person's manifesto of her own making—alone in the middle of an empty classroom on the day of her big Ab Psych test. (The image was so jarring that I even thought I could find a flaw of logistics in the fact that both of Tara's arms were covered in writing, but when I went back to the video, sure enough, Buck is a lefty.) It's not difficult to imagine what the big one-person treatise might have looked like from the perspective of Dr. Hattaras, who sat there and observed the whole show and, if the look on his face was any indication, just became a convert of the school of DID.

It was tough to watch that final scene of Tara acknowledging to Hattaras that her biggest fear was realized and that she is, in fact, "crazy." All throughout "Wheels," she is seen repeatedly denying her problem, and you can clearly see the doubt in her eyes as she assures Marshall that their family is all right, Charmaine that she will be a trustworthy aunt to baby Cassandra Wheels, and Max that she can handle the pressure of college. By the end of the episode, all doubt is gone and so is denial, and Tara finally admits that she needs help. It's a victory of sorts, but it isn't sweet. 

The sweet quota this week was pretty much filled by Charmaine and Neil's daughter and all the subsequent baby-gushing she inspired.

Meanwhile, back in Gaynsas (Gay Kansas)... What are Marshall, Lionel, and Noah to do in a big empty house when drunk on "80-proof mouthwash" and their own sense of intellectual/sexual grandeur? Why, recreate famous movie threesomes, of course! They're young, they're gay—sexual adventurousness is what's expected, right?

Kate was rather wasted in this episode, just a lot of whining and embarrassment over her failed Japanese experiment, but by the end of the episode she did get her eureka moment regarding flight attendant training. Called it! Whether or not she will actually succeed in this endeavor remains to be seen, but I am getting some mild flashes of Zooey Deschanel in Almost Famous from her.

Next week it looks like Tara finds herself the unwilling subject of an academic paper. Also, Marshall and Noah may or may not be having something of a teenage tryst sans Lionel. That's the thing about threesomes: Someone always gets the shaft. So to speak.