Scanning the "Pathos" chapter of the Bunim-Murray-sanctioned Big Book o' Big Issues and realizing only child abuse, alcoholism, and growing up having only a videogame as a best friend do not make for quite enough dramatic tension, Ana delves further into the pasts of her seven captive confessors under the pretense that "the memories we have sometimes, you might connect with somebody in the program." And so they are told to find a partner and basically repeat the last three exercises where they talk and wail and beat their breasts about their miserable lives. Again. Kameelah tells Sean that she hates her stepfather. Jason shares with us in a confessional that he expects "it's gonna get more honest the longer we live together." Yeah. In the unlikely event they are ever, ever allowed to leave this visually bare, blandly decorated (and even more blandly convened group of yawn-inducers) room again and go the hell home. Anyway, Syrus begins to recount a story, and Sean's informative confessional lets us know that "a discussion arose about rape. And that's the point right there where Montana and Syrus clashed." Montana announces that rape causes women a lot of pain (thank you for telling us that, ye wise oracle), and Syrus rails back with a story about a girl he slept with who "cried rape," even though, as Syrus explains, "This woman took my clothes off! I didn't ask to come up to her room!" Oh, Syrus. The ol' "look at what she was wearing, she asked for it" argument, I see. Yeah, that'll fly with this crowd. If all that weren't enough, Syrus "has a lot of trouble believing when women say they're raped." Ouch! Silence all around, as the lead balloon that is his comment floats over the Boston skyline so loomingly and pervasively that it interrupts the transmission of my television reception and somehow causes the cable to go out. No more recapping of said scene for me. Darn.

I cannot believe. They. Are still. In this. ROOM! Please God, no more. And they're still talking about the Syrus-rape-accusation thing, like this arc is really so dramatic that I was expected to sit stock-still during the commercials, gnawing my fingernails down to the knuckle and nervously muttering, "Oh, God. If there's tension in that house, I just don't know what I'll do. I mean, who ever expected that there would be any tension?" Puh. Leeze. Montana admits to having been sexually abused in her past, and she knows "what you have to go through" to admit it, particularly taking into account a male-dominated culture so quick to discount a woman's pain and often needing "proof" of the assault. Sean jumps to Syrus's sexist defense based on his own life experience (the one where he's an absolute authority on things that have never happened to him) with the assumption, "The bottom line is that it's such a painful thing for the woman that we don't even want to question her about it." Syrus says that because of the experience he went through, he became "scared of women." Yeah, he looked real gun-shy with the ladies in last week's episode. Based on previously established behavior, I think that the only thing Syrus is really afraid of when it comes to women in Boston is running out of new targets to hit on after his first three weeks there.