Barbara traps Oliver in the sauna

Barbara traps Oliver in the sauna during a confrontation in which the couple’s divorce has become inseparable from their campaign of retaliation. The episode turns an argument about forgiveness, money, and past injuries into a physical threat: Barbara quietly wedges the door shut, and Oliver’s refuge becomes a sealed chamber in which his confidence in his own endurance gives way to fear of death. His escape does not end the conflict. He carries his anger upstairs and destroys Barbara’s plants, answering one act of destruction with another.

The Argument Behind the Trap

The confrontation brings the Roses’ competing accounts of their marriage into the same room. Oliver accuses Barbara of having disrupted their lives and rejects her appeal to forgiveness. He calls her unreasonable and urges her to take money rather than claim the whole home, arguing that such a claim would erase both his existence and the work he put into paying for it. His language frames the divorce as a dispute over recognition as well as property: he does not want the house treated as though he had never helped build the life it represents.

Barbara answers his appeal to reason with examples from their own retaliatory campaign. She asks whether ruining her meat pastries was rational, then challenges him over her orchids. The exchange makes their accusations reciprocal: each presents the other’s destructive acts as proof that the other has forfeited the right to moral superiority. Oliver’s objection to Barbara’s claim on the home thus meets her insistence that his talk of rationality cannot be separated from the damage he has already done.

The argument also carries the strain of Mercedes’s death. Oliver understands that Barbara’s anguish about Mercedes has made a confrontation inevitable, but he rejects the idea that he could have killed her. The scene therefore places Barbara’s grief and suspicion beside the couple’s conflict over money, the house, and earlier acts of sabotage. No single accusation remains isolated; every grievance is drawn into the same struggle.

As the argument continues, Barbara remembers having once coveted Oliver’s body, a recollection that sharply contrasts with her present hatred. Oliver tells her that the court will decide; she says she will appeal and let the case continue indefinitely. His reply, “Nothing is forever,” sounds like a final dismissal of her threat to prolong the legal fight. But the scene’s immediate action gives the words a darker edge: their conflict has moved beyond what the court can decide, into the physical space they share.

The Door Is Wedged Shut

Oliver removes his clothes and goes into the sauna. Barbara watches him enter, then looks around the workshop. Her attention settles on a line of chisels and a wooden mallet hanging nearby. She takes one of the chisels, carries the mallet to the heavy redwood door, places the chisel’s cutting edge in the crack, and drives its wooden handle with the mallet until the tool wedges firmly in place. The trap depends on ordinary workshop equipment, used not to repair or make something but to prevent another person from leaving.

Barbara’s muttered instruction, “Make him well done,” casts the sauna’s heat as the means of harm. She runs upstairs without confronting Oliver about what she has done. The separation between her brief, deliberate action and her quick departure gives the trap its force: Oliver hears the bang but pays little attention to it, mistaking the sound for a moment of rage rather than the placement of a wedge. He does not know that the door has been secured from outside.

Oliver’s Ordeal and Escape

The sauna has usually served Oliver as a private refuge from depression. He experiences the small redwood room as warm and isolating, a place where anguish is shut out. On this occasion, he deliberately tests his endurance, waiting until the temperature reaches the red danger point of 220 degrees before preparing to leave. The same enclosed space that had offered comfort becomes dangerous when he pushes at the door and finds it immovable.

He first tries again, then braces his shoulder against the door. When force does not open it, he beats the wood with his fists and screams. He drops to the floor, where the air is cooler, and kicks at the door with the soles of his feet. Only then does he realize that he has left the sauna running. He switches the dial to OFF, but knows the temperature will fall slowly: the room is tightly constructed from carefully fitted redwood, and the heat does not dissipate at once.

Oliver’s panic sharpens when he hears no answer to his cries for help. He recalls the earlier thump and now understands that Barbara must have wedged something into the crack. With his strength ebbing and his chest hurting, he recognizes that no one is close enough to hear him: the others are two floors above. His thoughts turn to the possibility that he may not escape, a prospect he has never had to confront so directly apart from his earlier false heart attack. He also recognizes a change in Barbara, though his disbelief at her capacity for such an act remains entangled with his fear.

As the room slowly cools, his panic subsides, but he is too weak to stand for long. Eventually he falls into a profound drowsiness. When he wakes, he is cool and strong enough to move. Instead of pushing at the middle of the door again, he finds the place where the wedge has been set and uses the bench supports to brace himself. He kicks below the wedge; after several blows, the door gives way and the chisel falls to the floor. Shaky and still physically affected, he goes to the shower and turns on cold water.

Retaliation and the Escalating Conflict

Oliver’s first response after escaping is to imagine going upstairs, breaking down Barbara’s door, and beating her. He also fears the strength of his desire to kill her, and that fear keeps him from immediately confronting her. Still naked, he takes the chisel upstairs like a dagger and searches for something of Barbara’s to destroy. The tool that had helped trap him becomes an emblem of the violence he is now prepared to direct elsewhere.

In the moonlit sunroom, the smell of Barbara’s African violets and Boston ferns brings his destroyed orchids to mind. He cuts the plants’ stems with the chisel, pulls them from their pots, and gathers them on a rug. The act does not satisfy his urge to retaliate. He carries the plants to the kitchen, puts them into a large stockpot, fills it with water, and sets it over a low flame. The sequence extends the couple’s pattern of answering one person’s destruction with the other’s: Barbara has trapped Oliver; Oliver responds by destroying living things that belong to her.

The episode’s decisive reversal lies in the sauna’s change of meaning. A room Oliver had treated as a controlled test of will becomes a trap whose heat and tight construction limit his control. His escape depends not on overpowering the door at its center but on locating the wedge and striking below it. Yet physical survival brings no reconciliation or restraint. He recognizes that his retaliation is pointless and mad, but feels better afterward and goes to bed. The scene thus converts the divorce from a contest argued through courts and property into a dangerous domestic war in which each act of injury supplies the next.