Standing alone in the musical stalker genre of both television and film, Crazy Ex-Girlfriend‘s heroine, Rebecca Bunch (Rachel Bloom), came a long way from season one, in which she uprooted her entire life in New York to move to California because an old camp flame essentially said “hi” to her on the street while she was having a nervous breakdown about her job. That flame, Josh Chan (Vincent Rodriguez III), led her to an entirely new way of existence in the bowels of outer Los Angeles: West Covina (it’s two hours to the beach though, without traffic! Although theoretically just a twenty-minute car ride because as Cher’s dad in Clueless put it, “Everywhere in L.A. takes twenty minutes”).
As she made her entire life’s purpose to be with Josh at any creepy cost necessary (aesthetic improvement being part and parcel of that cost–as immortalized by the “Sexy Getting Ready Song” wherein Nipsey Hussle makes a cameo), including putting a tracking device on his erstwhile fiancée, Valencia (Gabrielle Ruiz), and finding out every way possible to manufacture “organic” encounters with the help of her encouraging of her psychotic behavior best friend, Paula (Donna Lynne Champlin), Rebecca’s gradual spiral toward madness had less to do with Josh and more to do with the unfurling revelation of her mental disorder. Ultimately set up for a reveal by the end of season two when Josh leaves her at the altar with the excuse of wanting to join the priesthood instead, season three unpacks all of her neurotically obsessive behavior as she spirals to the point of actually turning to her mother, Naomi (Tovah Feldshuh), for comfort. Not wanting to admit that her actions of the past are almost as embarrassing as the ones she’s committed in the present, Rebecca chooses to lash out at everyone when Josh exposes her history of turning vindictive with boyfriends when they abandon her (this after she gets an article published online painting him as a homophobic racist).
Feeling as though her reputation is too tarnished at this point to bother with staying (particularly after a Swimfan-inspired bender in the episode, “Josh’s Ex-Girlfriend Is Crazy”), she surrenders when her mother calls her to tell her to come home–but only after Paula specifically calls Naomi to tell her to do so. Back in Scarsdale, Rebecca’s low point persists in getting lower as she Googles the most painless ways to kill herself (one of many candid and unapologetic moments about depression addressed on the show), a search unearthed by Naomi, who then suddenly becomes nice toward her after decades of berating. Rebecca doesn’t question it, so encouraged by some sign of affection from Naomi that she bursts into song with, “Maybe She’s Not Such A Heinous Bitch After All.” It is only when her longtime and constantly orbiting the periphery of her life nemesis, Audra Levine (Rachel Grate), shows up and points out the obvious to Rebecca–that her mother is up to something and wouldn’t possibly be “nice” for no reason–that she discovers her mother has been lacing her new favorite beverage with anti-anxiety meds.
This sends Rebecca into another spiral of mistrust as she boards a flight to go back to West Covina, at which time she decides to take all the pills she found at her mother’s and overdose on the plane. So it is that with a suicide attempt comes a more thorough diagnosis, her longtime therapist, Dr. Akopian (Michael Hyatt), working in conjunction with her new counsel/meds recommender, Dr. Shin (Jay Hayden), to come up with the ta-dah! assessment of: Borderline Personality Disorder.
Though Dr. Shin urges her not to look up any information about it on the internet lest she become more downtrodden over her condition, she immediately does so upon going into the bathroom and unearthing such horrifying sentences as, “One of the most stigmatized diagnoses,” “treatment often takes a lifetime,” “many psychiatrists refuse to treat patients with BPD,” “personality disorders are among the most challenging to treat” and “10% of all people with BPD will eventually commit suicide.” So no, it is not the miracle diagnosis she was hoping for, the one she assumed would, at the very least, assign her to a specific mentally ill tribe. As she woefully phrases it to her friends, “I don’t have an illness. I have a personality disorder. It’s not something I have, it’s something I am. This is what I feared my whole life. I’m broken.” Later in the series, of course, she will be seen answering questions in a You’re Borderline, Not Broken workbook. But that’s easier to believe in theory than in practice as Rebecca goes through the rigmarole of her old Rolodex, now consisting not just of Josh and Greg (originally played by Santino Fontana before the show pulled a Darrin Stevens move and brought him back in the fourth season to be played by Skylar Astin–but at least they heavy-handedly allude to it many times throughout), but also Nathaniel Plimpton III (Scott Michael Foster), an emotionally wounded rich boy posing as a Christian Grey type.
Though the two are at first at odds with one another (much as everyone else who fears him in the Whitefeather office once run with far more laxity by Darryl [Pete Gardner] before he sold it to Nathaniel’s father for some much needed cash), that contempt soon translates into sexual energy and, once again, Rebecca falls down the rabbit hole of l’amour. Or what she thinks is l’amour. But she can never really seem to be sure. Is it love? Or just a beautiful, sex-addled distraction from her own psychosis until love is no longer the cure but the source of her malady and then reversed again, amounting to a vicious and insurmountable “math of love triangle” followed by a “math of love quadrangle.”
Despite “doing the work” it takes to maintain a stasis of “non-crazy”–or at least not as crazy–Rebecca still can’t help but fall back on her old habit of relying on the initial high of a relationship rekindled. Especially when she feels as though she has so little direction toward a “dream” the way Paula, Valencia and even Heather (Vella Lovell) have all exhibited by the time the series makes its way toward a grand conclusion. While, sure, she finds brief elation at turning to a community theater production to tap into her lifelong love of musicals, she starts to realize that the songs and themes she’s based her entire life around might be the very reason she’s so cuckoo in love. When she tries to rewrite a song (from the fictional Broadway musical composer Elliot Ellison’s canon) about a prostitute wishing she could just find a husband and quit the trade, she realizes the rush of happiness she feels over getting to see Nathaniel briefly perform it before both of them are fired by the overzealous and “purist” theater director.
But before tapping into what that happiness might mean, Rebecca gets distracted again by her love quadrangle. So distracted that she would rather go to Vegas and help that old nemesis of hers, Audra Levine, by ensuring that she returns home to her husband and triplets instead of running off with an anti-Semite with a gambling problem. Sooner or later, however, she must decide. That is the mentality behind the song, “The Group Mind Has Decided You’re in Love” (even if it’s about Darryl and White Josh [David Hull]). With everyone in her circle so invested in who she will choose of her three suitors, White Josh’s bid to help her decide by setting up a The Bachelor-like date contest results in everyone at Home Base (the requisite local haunt) placing bets on who will win.
In the final episode, which takes place a year after her trio of dates, it is as it always should have been: Rebecca embraces sologamy (it’s all very “thank u, next“), chooses to put her relationship with herself above a romantic one. Of course, this doesn’t mean she’s ruling out love altogether, telling her audience at the open mic night where she is about to debut her foray into songwriting, “Whoever it is, it won’t be ‘ending up with someone.’ Because romantic love is not an ending. For me, or for anyone else. It’s just a part of your story.”
It was a long, hard road to this revelation, one in which her love monster ways couldn’t gobble up enough affection and male attention. But her true love all along, in standard millennial fashion, was herself. In this way, are we all suffering from Borderline Personality Disorder? Susanna Kaysen might argue no.
