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Picture the life you’ve always envisioned, the one you dreamed of and longed for more than anything else. Now, envision a daydream so vivid that it feels like reality, where that life is yours. But then consider how you’d react and feel if it all vanished in an instant.
Stick Episode 7, “Dreams Never Remembered,” brought that exact moment to life and it’s going to be with me for a while.
In the opening scene of the latest episode of the Apple TV+ sensation, Pryce Cahill, played by Owen Wilson, finds himself unable to escape a dream that’s both beautiful and heart-wrenching. In this dream, he revives his deceased son, Jett, and shares in life’s everyday moments. These experiences—like playing superheroes with your child, fixing a toilet clogged by a misplaced toy, or grounding them for borrowing the car without permission—carry a unique charm, especially for someone who never had the chance to enjoy them.
Earlier episodes revealed that Pryce and Amber-Linn, portrayed by Judy Greer, are a remarkably friendly divorced couple who lost their son at around four years old. As of Episode 7, Jett’s cause of death remains undisclosed, but truthfully, the details are secondary. No way to lose a child can ever be considered good or preferable, a sentiment echoed by members of “the world’s worst club,” a community of parents who have suffered the loss of a child.
This all leads me to sharing that the choice to have Pryce walk down a memory lane that he never traversed, feeling and visualizing the highs and lows of parenthood (yes, that means the good, bad, and the ugly), is so narratively intriguing. Even more so when you remember that it was seemingly Jett’s death that led to his blowout on the green, which cut his career short. Now, as he has all but adopted Santi (Peter Dager) as a son during their training, he can’t help but wonder what his own life with his own son and wife might have looked like.
It’s the exact kind of gutpunch moment that Wanda Maximoff (Elizabeth Olsen) experienced in Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness where she wakes up from a dream in which her twin sons, Billy and Tommy, were still alive and with her. That WandaVision situation is slightly different because she did take over a whole town, essentially put all of its residents under a spell, and conjure her children from her own magic, but a mother is a mother is a mother, right?
I can’t quite put into words how much I loved this sequence the first time I watched it. I can, however, tell you that even as someone who has not lost a child, watching this back gave me some peace and comfort that even in the most unexplainable tragedies like the loss of a young son, there will be moments ahead that feel like it’s going to be okay.
My hat’s off to Stick creator Jason Keller and the entire writing team for crafting an unforgettable start to an equally incredible episode. This show just gets better and better, I tell you.
The first seven episodes of Stick are now streaming on Apple TV+.