You could make a drinking game out of it (but you probably shouldn’t): take a shot every time this season that Natalie asks someone “You okay?” or “You good?” It’s the work she feels she has to do in this world—making sure everyone around her feels comfortable and cared for. Because if they don’t, they might turn on her. And then all the years will fall away, and she’ll be right back where she started: at Dee Dee’s house, helpless to keep the beast at bay.
There’s a reason everyone calls her Sugar. At the beginning of “Ice Chips,” she is the one who isn’t okay or good or comfortable or cared for. She’s all alone in rush-hour traffic, with a trunk full of C-folds and a baby just starting to fight its way out of her womb.
Pete is on a plane, and no one at The Bear is picking up their phone. So Nat girds her literal and figurative loins and makes the call she’s been avoiding for a long, long time. The thing about people with borderline personality disorder—and Donna Berzatto is a textbook case—is that they want to be needed and they need to be wanted.
Their love is the selfish, smothering kind, and it comes with more strings than a spider web. And sometimes, the only way to escape with your sanity intact is to cut ties altogether—especially when that person was last seen driving a car through the wall of her own house. But I’ll give this to Dee Dee: She doesn’t try to sneak up on you.
“HONEY! HONEY! HONEY! HONEY! HONEY!” scatters acr.