‘You’re the Worst’ Stars, Creator on Gretchen and Jimmy’s Fiery Reunion

Chris Geere as Jimmy, Aya Cash as Gretchen, Kether Donohue as Lindsay, Desmin Borges as Edgar in the 'Odysseus' episode of You're the Worst
Spoiler Alert
Byron Cohen/FXX
(L-R): Chris Geere as Jimmy, Aya Cash as Gretchen, Kether Donohue as Lindsay, Desmin Borges as Edgar in the "Odysseus" episode of You're the Worst

Warning: This post contains spoilers for “Odysseus,” the September 13 episode of You’re the Worst.

“Hey…”

A simple phrase (via text!) set exes Jimmy (Chris Geere) and Gretchen (Aya Cash) on a collision course in Wednesday’s You’re the Worst. Gretchen fumed about the casualness of Jimmy’s first contact since he ghosted her post-proposal, and so she went to his place to throw his text back at him…before quickly returning to the place she shares with Lindsay (Kether Donohue).

Jimmy and Edgar (Desmin Borges) followed her, and when Jimmy tried to explain his behavior, Gretchen sarcastically forgave him. However, Jimmy was desperate to believe she was sincere, and didn’t realize anything was wrong until he tossed her the manuscript for his book—and she let it drop on the floor.

“We started to conceptualize that scene around [the fact that] Jimmy’s desperate need to make sure everything was OK seemed to play in really well to Gretchen’s desire to hurt him,” executive producer/episode director Stephen Falk says. “That seemed like a good way of her really f—ing with him: Once she sees he’s so thirsty for forgiveness, and so immediately happy to say, ‘Good, everything is fine!’ We made it as long and painful as we could. We thought a fun way to break that bubble would be for him to throw her the book, and for her to not even move her hands.”

Gretchen and Lindsay left, but Jimmy tried his best to take it in stride: He borrowed Edgar’s bowler hat and insisted, “This is fine,” as two homeless men lit a trashcan on fire behind him—an homage to the “This Is Fine” meme.

“It’s obviously a big disaster for Jimmy, but he refuses to acknowledge it went badly,” Falk says with a laugh. “And that led us to the ‘this is fine’ meme. We conceived of a way to get a bowler hat—we couldn’t get coffee—and we got fire in the background. We decided to run with the meme and bring it to life.”

Now that the duo has finally come face-to-face, “Jimmy is pretty thirsty to prove she said everything is fine, so it’s fine,” Falk says. “He’s very stubborn and has a deep need to be forgiven. And Gretchen has a continuing deep need for revenge. So, while they won’t necessarily be together traditionally, they’ll be in each other’s faces.”

Though Jimmy is in denial, he won’t have a clear-cut path of what to do next to try and win back his former flame.

“He is completely unaware of what the next step will be; he has no game plan at all,” Geere says. “Just him driving back to see her, he believes, is enough of a gesture to get away with what he did. She, understandably, doesn’t let him off in Episode 3. The rest of the season is navigating various techniques to get her back in his life. Most of them don’t work, which is where the comedy comes from. Some of them do, and that’s where the romance comes from.”

But there is an unexpected genre that plays into You’re the Worst’s fourth season.

“There is some crazy stuff that comes up: There is one scene where the reference I was given [for guidance] was a horror film,” Cash says. “That’s how dark I get.”

Uh oh…

You’re the Worst, Wednesdays, 10/9c, FXX