AA sponsors are mainstays in addiction narratives. 

Usually, they’re relegated to subplots, rarely the central focus. 

But The Fifth Step mines the relationship between sponsor and sponsee as the primary fodder for drama, spinning a warped picture of how this process might actually unfold. 

Instead of a textbook unfolding, this new two-hander depicts a sponsor from hell…all while suggesting that maybe his brand of Hades is what the proverbial doctor ordered, albeit haphazardly and perhaps even inadvisably. Their kinship bleeds the osmotic borders between mentor and mentee, father and son, fucked-up friend and fucked-up friend.

In all, their dynamic is a crash course in the upsides and downsides to relying on a similarly wired person; they’re capable of relating in a way few others could, yet prone to veer down the same harmful paths…

Do they check each other, or enable each other?

Exactly.