Last week’s episode ended with Issa being let down by a handful of offbeat thrusts on what appeared to be a very uncomfortable couch. This week, two other women on Insecure found themselves in the throes of disappointment.

Early on in ‘Hella Questions’, Molly’s disappointment was set into motion once she planned to infiltrate the impenetrable—a corporate white boys club. “Whatever I got to do to get in, I’ll just figure it out, and it should be fine,” she explained to her therapist.

For black women, circumventing white male hegemony isn’t something that’s typically “figured out.” And if it is, the black women who manage it often wind up far from “fine,” damaged by the trauma of having to be three times as good to get paid three quarters as much.

That damage was evident in Molly’s eyes once she realized how futile it was to try to further her career by suffering through an entire game of professional hockey—perhaps the whitest, most boyish club meeting one could attend.

While Molly experienced the dismay of defeat in her professional life, Tasha experienced a similarly disheartening defeat in her personal life. After depositing his unemployment checks for months, gassing his nondescript business plan, and ignoring his general tendency to be monotonous, Tasha wound up rocked by the revelation that Lawrence betrayed her trust and slept with a woman who was too narrow-sighted to do any of that in the first place.

That moment shared between them was one of two scenes to debunk certain myths concerning their vague and abstract relationship.

In many ways, the silent pauses within that scene spoke louder than any sound that came from either Tasha or Lawrence’s mouth. Those pauses, filled with hurt on one end and regret on another, very clearly told us their relationship was intended to be much more than a Friday-Saturday fling—before Lawrence went and ruined it.

The weight of that conversation exemplified the depth of their connection. Given that depth, no one, except for maybe Issa, should be surprised to know their relationship wasn’t born out of some petty thirst for revenge or twisted intention of one-upping an ex. That suspicion, a thought that’s floated around the internet since season one ended, fell apart once we found out Issa had no idea Lawrence was seeing someone new until Kelli, her loudmouthed homegirl, let it slip.

If you weren’t pulling for Tasha before, one could argue you should have been swayed by that scene, given the way it cleverly mirrored how anti-Lawrence viewers have harshly and unfairly assessed her as a character.

While Issa refrained from cracking on her lacefront and wardrobe with the rest of her friends, only to stalk her physically and digitally later in the episode, we were sharply reminded that Tasha is hands down the least shitty person on Insecure.

On a show intentionally composed of unlikable protagonists, what also feels intentional—and sometimes lost—is the fact that Tasha, gently played by Dominique Perry, has managed to remain overwhelmingly chill throughout ten whole episodes of straight nonsense.

Within those ten episodes, Issa has been established as childish, immature, and irrational, while Lawrence has been established as shiftless, dense, and self-defeating—and that’s exactly why we should be in Tasha’s corner. Not because she unwisely took Lawrence back, as most women feel pressured to do after being hurt, but because her greatest offense was calling a dude ‘zaddy’ who got her caught up in some mess when all she signed up for was a relationship.

Between being surveilled by her partner’s ex and not knowing where said partner’s feelings lie night-to-night, so far, Tasha’s arc embodies the perils of dating someone after they’ve had their heart broken. She’s receiving the worst of someone while deserving the best.

She may not be as fiercely glamorous as Molly, or as charismatically quirky as Issa, but she does have one quality far more valuable than any of that—her unshakable emotional security. Unfortunately for her, as the title of the show suggests, she’s a minor piece of a larger ensemble made up characters who are considerably less secure.
This may be an early prediction (keep in mind, with the inclusion of Supermodel by SZA this week, I’ve been right on all my predictions thus far), but Tasha might be to season two what Jared, the well-meaning dude Molly screwed over last year, was to season one—a character giving one too many chances to a person who probably didn’t deserve their first.