It has been a great series, and your writing about it very well done. It's too bad there's no room in the therapy portrayed (fairly realistically) for the idea of mystery. Paul and Gina talking about funerals, seeming to agree on what death is, without any sense that it might be a great Unknown to ponder in silent awe. I guess it's enough to be grateful for a series like this that acknowledges the unconscious without expecting it to include a transpersonal dimension.
And why did Gina tell Paul to go see Laura, after going on and on about how it's not their place to tell their clients what to do? Clearly he was there to seek her approval since their first session. She withheld it until tonight.
And I am unclear about Paul's responsibility in Alex's death. Alex begged Paul to back him up with the Navy in his desire to resume flying. Apparently Paul didn't give a truthful appraisal of his doubts about Alex flying. Did he really give his ok when asked? If so, why is he not more guilt-ridden? And what were his motives for choosing not to share his concerns?
If they were Jungians, we would have room for mystery. 
I did not read Gina as giving Paul her blessing or approval at all. I heard her saying that only he could decide what he should do and she couldn't play the part of the stern rule-enforcing parent for him. I heard her "Go to her" as exasperation and resignation because this really throws it back on Paul who cannot use rebelling against her as an excuse. He really is on his own in deciding now that she won't play the enforcer for him.
It's not clear to me that Paul was called for an evaluation for Alex. Plus many of us do our best not to be in the position of doing such things because then we are in the position of allowing or denying behavior and that is not the role of the therapist. So Paul feels somewhat guilty, believing he could have kept Alex on the ground. Think how this echoes his wish for Gina to keep him from acting out.
The lack of depth of Paul's intimacy with Kate is remarkable for its shallowness. Where is he? Where is his vulnerablity? Where is his willingness to connect with her? Even on a base level. Even simply as a human being. Why so cold? So abstract? Running away from her and to the adoring, thoroughly hollow, sexual utopia which is the "idea" of Laura is just another step back from intimacy. Where is the intimacy in his life? To whom does he open his soul? Has he replaced the capacity to love with the discipline of analysis?
Paul's capacity for intimacy with his wife has always been a problem for him -- Gina points to this when she helps them see that Paul was attracted to Kate because she needed him and now that she doesn't, neither f them knows where to go with the other.
Our parents' marriages give us our basic knowledge about marriage. We know that Paul's parents divorced, that his mother became very depressed, that his father ran off with a patient and that he apparently married her, a much younger woman. This is what Paul knows of marriage. And what Kate knows also comes from how her parents related. So most of us have ot deal with these flawed lessons and reshape what we know in order to have better with our own partners. It isn't easy.
The whole point of therapy is to bring the decisions about life that we have made when we were young into the conscious mind - where they can be renegotiated and reshaped. Isn't it? So if Paul learned a negative pattern of marriage as a child, and has undergone adequate therapy to become aware of this, WHY has he not done the final work to change his mind about it and choose another model? Is the message here that therapy is a grand waste of time? A mental masturbation that identifies the decisions made in childhood, enables us to talk about them, but we remain their victims - powerless to choose a new decision and a better model? Was Alex's father right?
Good heavens -- Paul has not been in therapy for years. And I think perhaps you expect more of therapy than it can ever deliver. At any given time, a person can only go as far in therapy as they are willing and able to go. Then they take what they have learned about themselves and go on with life. Often people come back to therapy again later as new wrinkles in their lives emerge or new readiness to look more deeply into old issues come to be. But to expect that Paul could have dealt with everything once and for all when he was a young man is unrealistic in the extreme.
Not only that -- it takes two people to make a marriage work and neither Paul nor Kate has done a stellar job of it lately. They have not been in marital therapy -- they had a three session consultation.
I believe that not all marriages can be forever; that some marriages have a more finite lifespan. Couples come together for all kinds of reasons and it happens that those reasons can expire and the couple either finds new ones or they don't. In the best of all possible worlds, Kate would not have acted out as she did but would have made her stand with Paul within their relationship and that they could have decided together to get help for themselves and their relationship. But that didn't happen so they must find their way as best they can.
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