Having been told by one of her new friends that she doesn't have the skills as a pianist - despite having taken secret lessons back in Brooklyn - Esty chooses to sing. In the final episode, the timelines converge as Esty auditions for a scholarship that could guarantee her a future pursuing music in Berlin.

Esty learns she is pregnant just as Yanky asks for a divorce, and takes that as her cue to get away. So as we see Esty fall in with a crowd of worldly young musicians, we also see her married off to Yanky (Amit Rahav) and his subsequent anger when her vaginismus makes it appear as if she won't be able to immediately bear children, as is expected of her. The narrative jumps back and forth in time, depicting Esty's early experiences in Germany in tandem with the events in New York that lead to her escape. When it finally reaches the shattering finale, there's a callback to that earlier wedding celebration that's an extraordinary and almost hidden inversion of what came before. Co-written by Deutschland 83's Anna Winger, Unorthodox is a coming-of-age story that's not about a rejection of faith as much as it is about finding faith in new communities. The show, loosely adapted from a memoir by Deborah Feldman, follows Esty (the remarkable Shira Haas), a 19-year-old who flees her marriage and the restrictive Satmars in Brooklyn for Berlin, where she has a right to citizenship through her maternal grandparents. It's shot beautifully and the characters on-screen are joyous, but there's a sense of dread hanging over it. In the middle of Netflix's miniseries Unorthodox, there's an extended sequence of a lavish wedding in the Hasidic Jewish tradition. This post contains spoilers for Unorthodox.

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