Summary
Maggie has a certain charm, and much of that has to do with winning turns by Rebecca Rittenhouse and David Del Rio.
This recap of Hulu’s Maggie season 1, episode 1, “Things Begin Where They End,” contains spoilers.
Read the season 1 review of Maggie.
Maggie season 1, episode 1 recap
Maggie starts with a psychic hired for a party who breaks up a wedding accidentally. It began when a woman about to get married takes a reading with her best friend/maid of honor. Except, Maggie sees she started a new relationship with a guy who had monogrammed pillows with the letters “JM” on the bed. Immediately, the bride-to-be is enraged that, of course, her maid of honor must be sleeping with her fiancé because he has the same initials. That’s when things turn weird for Maggie. At the party, she meets a guy, Ben (David Del Rio), and they have adorable banter. When he brings over a bottle of tequila, she gives him a reading, and something unexpected happens — when she sees him falling in love with a woman, it is her.
Have you ever wondered if psychics have their psychics? Well, Maggie has one, Angel (Ray Ford), and she runs to him the next day to talk about Ben. As soon as she saw herself, Maggie ran to her car. Angel informs her that it is rare but not impossible for her to see her future. Besides, she shouldn’t be fighting it. She should be excited. Maggie, though, tells Angel that she is awful at relationships. She has the same conversation with her parents Jack (Chris Elliott) and Maria (Kerri Kenney) later. She even talks to her best friend, Meg, who likes to use Maggie as her loser reader. Meg wants her psychic friend to come out tonight to see if the new guy is a serial killer or at least good in bed. “His name is Glenn with two N’s. That’s proof he doesn’t know when to finish.”
While that night Meg’s boyfriend turns out to have his own, a guy named Orlando, Maggie predictably runs into Ben. He is out for a drink with his family, and his sister Amy (Undone‘s Angelique Cabral) and her husband Dave (Leonardo Nam) to celebrate his birthday. They hit it off, and Ben uses his bag of tricks to charm, with jokes about how to not blow out a candle, and later asks him over to eat old Chinese food in bed incorrectly using chopsticks. They talk and kiss each other casually like they have been dating for years. So, is this the first kiss? It doesn’t even appear they have slept together yet. It’s an odd yet charming moment.
The ending
Have you ever heard of the term “p***s crushed”? Well, Ben works it into the next scene. After spending the night together, Maggie seems to have given herself over to the fact she is falling for Ben and trusting her vision. As they drink coffee, Ben grabs her hand, and she sees him marrying another woman. She immediately breaks up with him because she is never wrong (boy, is that a metaphor for any upcoming marriage). He is crushed. In fact, as we said at the beginning of this paragraph, he is “p***s crushed,” which is the one-night stand equivalent of being heartbroken.
So, Maggie moves on, but in a confusing time frame, her parents finally find a better tenant in their building. And that new tenant is Ben and his girlfriend, Jessie (Chloe Bridges). It is unclear if he cheated on her or, as Ross would say, they were on a break. We all know that Ben framed the fortune cookie prediction he opened with Maggie talking about how good things come in threes. Jessie explained they broke up twice, so the third time must be a charm.
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The recapper missed some things. The best friend is named Louise (Lou), not Meg. Ben and Maggie have slept together by the time we see them eating Chinese. They’re literally sitting in bed eating the food and make a couple of little references to having just had sex. I agree the vibe is like they are an old couple and it’s confusing to the viewer. I actually rewound to make sure I hadn’t missed something, but nope they just went right to that (maybe because she thought she knew they were soul mates?). It’s also very clear that Ben was not cheating on Jessie. That scene happens six weeks after their encounter and Jessie explained that Ben and Jessie have been in an on-again/off-again relationship since they were in high school and that he contacted her after receiving the fortune we saw him get with Maggie and they got back together and got this place together.