Netflix’s Human Resources season 1 recap guide: Episodes 1 to 10

Human Resources episode 5, “Love in the Time of Postpartum”

Human Resources episode 5 tackles postpartum depression when Kitty joins Becca’s team and makes a beeline for Barry. The show has hinted at Becca’s underlying illness a few times but fully embraces it in this episode. Between returning to work and having Kitty manipulate her entire team into believing she doesn’t love Barry anymore, it’s a rough week for Becca.

Fittingly, episode 5 starts with Becca having a nightmare where she’s stuck floating at sea with her Anxiety Mosquitoes going haywire and Kitty swiping at her from the abyss. As someone who has struggled with depression, albeit not postpartum, Human Resources does a great job of portraying how confusing and lonely it can be.

The bookends for “Love in the Time of Postpartum” show Becca adrift at sea. In the beginning, she’s alone, but in the end, Barry has joined her on the giant bed floating on a metaphorical ocean. She warns him that she might “be at sea” for a while, but he assures her he’ll help her through it.

Speaking of Barry, we get to learn more about him this week, including the fact that he has his own depression kitty on his team, Cat Stevens (James III). But Cat isn’t as manipulative as Kitty, in fact, he’s quite charming and he and Emmy bond almost immediately. They almost share a kiss, before Dante interrupts them.

Emmy lets herself get manipulated pretty easily by Kitty, who builds on her pre-existing annoyance at Barry. It’s Cat that makes Emmy understand why Becca and Barry fell in love in the first place and why her team shouldn’t be so quick to give up on him just because Becca’s depression (Kitty) is telling her she doesn’t love him anymore. At the end of the episode, Emmy and Cat help Barry and Becca’s team see why it’s worth helping them give their marriage another chance.

Elsewhere, Connie enlists Maury’s help in finding a hot stud that can help Sonya get her groove back. Leaving the matchmaking up to Maury is probably not one of Connie’s best decisions since he ends up picking Rick (also voiced by Nick Kroll), one of their fellow Hormone Monsters, to sweep Sonya off her feet. Despite working with Sonya for years, Rick still thinks her name is Shauna and Sonya blows him off within seconds of their first “date.”

But then Rick shows up at Sonya’s apartment later and surprisingly, turns out to be exactly what she needs. First, he repurposes all the garbage in her house into a fort and through some kind of wise words, ends up helping her understand why she needs to quit drinking and find a new purpose.

The next time Connie and Maury go to The Mistake Factory, they find a newly sober Sonya working behind the bar. Not only did Rick help Sonya quit drinking, but he also helped her get a new job. How much of that was Rick just being Rick and how much was intentional? I think you can guess.

Human Resources episode 5 soundtrack

• End credits: “My Life Would Suck Without You” by Kelly Clarkson

Best jokes and stray observations from Human Resources episode 5

• “Last night we ate cold lasagna from a mug and watched 35 episodes of House Hunters back-to-back.” Mood.
• “I’m binging Alf. F**k you its funny.”
• “I blend my booze into my food so I don’t pass out before I get as drunk as I want to be.” Maury’s right, Sonya is a genius.
• “Becca’s trying to pretend she didn’t have a baby so her coworkers don’t know she’s a human being.”
• “I invented an app for perverts to keep in touch with each other. It’s called Creep’r because Goop was taken.”
• I could do with way less Tyler the Hormone Monster and more Rick. Tyler is kind of grating, while this episode gave Rick a lot of hilarious lines like “Garbage is just a fort you haven’t built yet, baby!”