Save this article to read it later.
Find this story in your accountsSaved for Latersection.
Tom Wambsgans contains multitudes.
He can surf along as Shivs supportive husband while simultaneously planning to betray her to her father.
You shouldnt have betrayed me, phony, Shiv tells Tom after he says he wants her back.
How to get money, how to keep money.
And I really, really love my career and my money.
is her way of asking a favor).
But for Shiv, the conditional is usually more than linguistic.
Its true, and its also how Shiv, consciously or not, is treating her own pregnancy.
Its an if baby, a card she hasnt played but has not yet discarded, either.
But in episode sixs glorious money speech, Tom is using if in a very different way.
Its the if of imaginative play, of hypotheticals and possibilities.
But their game-playing mode has been broken since Toms betrayal.
Shiv offers to resurrect the dynamic byplaying bitey, and its both desperately hot and desperately unsustainable.
So instead, Tom offers a different way forward: if.
What he says, though, is If I venture to say the truth.
This conditionality is a lingua franca between them.
If does not negate any of the shivering, illicit clarity of Toms honesty in that moment.
But the conditional mode allows Tom a back door out of that speech once hes done.
It was only ever an if, after all.
Whats even more powerful, though, is that Toms flipped the script.
The fact that its all inside an if doesnt erase anything.
It just gives them a bridge back to the mutual comfort zones theyd lost.
Its why the mood between Tom and Shiv seems to shift so suddenly.
They know how to be playmates again.
At some point, someones going to have to commit.
