White Flag: 'It was good to hear you' says two things

Gately's answer to Erdedy is the scene's small demonstration that the catchphrase Erdedy finds patronizing has a working double-bottom. The rote closing line means both that what you said helped me AND "it was good to be able to hear you. To really hear" — and Gately earns the reading out of his own slow passage from Compare to Identify ("for like the first sixty days or so I couldn't hear shit… I'd just sit there and Compare"). The cliché isn't shallow; it encodes the exact distinction — listening vs. hearing — that took Gately sixty days of humility to feel. It's the lobster-waters again in retail form: the phrase looks like empty AA-speak and turns out to hold the whole discipline of getting out of your own ironic head long enough to receive another person.