Summary
A dense episode full of zingers excels both comedically and dramatically as Palm Royale continues to build momentum and quality.
It didn’t take Maxine long to realize that Palm Beach high society is built on a bedrock of lies, secrets, and blackmail, but what she starts to realize in Episode 6 of Palm Royale is that once you take those things away, there’s little to replace them with.
With Norma’s Rolodex destroyed and the gun gone for good (or so we think), in “Maxine Takes A Step”, Max is faced with the task of making the Beach Ball an event that people want to attend even if they’re not being blackmailed to do so.
At a tour of NASA — the show’s set in late 1969, so this is right ahead of the Apollo 12 mission — Max tells Evelyn about the kompromat having been destroyed, and she predictably goes ballistic. As the other ladies remind her, the Beach Ball needs the threat of Norma’s secrets looming over it to be a desirable event. Maxine alone isn’t enough of a draw. The event needs an all-star, one-of-a-kind guest, like an astronaut about to walk on the moon, or perhaps… the Prince of Luxembourg.
The Prince of Luxembourg
It’s Douglas, of all people, who gives Maxine the idea of inviting European royalty to a Palm Beach shindig. He and Perry are working on a (totally legitimate, I’m sure) condo development in West Palm Beach that they’re marketing on the strength of the Prince’s name and allure, and they’re about to seal the deal during a nice dinner.
Maxine turns up — in the national colors of Luxembourg, hilariously — and finds it isn’t exactly a boys’ night, as Douglas claimed. Dinah is there, playing the dutiful wife until the deal goes through so Perry will have enough money in the bank that she can divorce him and be set for life, since he has found out about her affair with Eddie and is currently living as, in Dinah’s words, “a Boheme”.
Just Friends
Palm Royale | Image via Apple TV+
That house of cards is about to come tumbling down sooner rather than later, then, and Maxine worries that her own marriage might follow suit after she tried it on with Robert in Episode 5. Dinah, though, thinks Robert is gay.
Maxine confronting Robert about his sexuality — “Do you wear loafers? Do you… stand lightly in them?” — is much funnier than it should be, but Robert gets the point. He has been with women, but he is gay, and he didn’t sleep with Maxine because he’s her friend. He might well be the only one she has, since everyone Maxine has dinner and plays tennis with, which is apparently her measure of friendship, isn’t her friend at all.
A Very Royal Scandal
Douglas isn’t much help either. He and Perry manage to close the deal with the Prince, but it becomes obvious rather quickly that they’re being conned. Finalizing everything requires half a million dollars in seed money and a cool quarter-mill directly to the Prince for the use of his name and likeness. All of this has to be wired from Norma’s remaining estate, which leaves the Dellacortes broke.
What’s worse is that when Maxine later meets the Prince at a party themed around Apollo 12, it’s blatantly obvious to the audience, if not everyone present, that the Prince and Princess are fakes.
The Truth Will Set You Free
Maxine reaches the end of her tether in Palm Royale Episode 6, and it’s partly thanks to Ann, the intrepid reporter who has continued digging into Max’s former pageant wins. All the winners had names of dead Palm Beach socialites, but their pictures were all of Maxine.
Max explains that she was abandoned as a child and raised in an orphanage. She was a nobody. The only thing that kept her going was the women in The Shiny Sheet, and she used the names of socialites she’d read about for fun. This is why Palm Beach high society has such allure for Max — it was the dream she let herself believe in when she had nothing else.
However, becoming that person, the new Norma, will require Maxime to take some drastic steps (hence the episode’s title.) After the Prince refuses to attend the Beach Ball and a furious Evelyn lectures Maxine about the damage she has done to the social order by destroying the kompromat that kept everyone in check, it’s Robert who comes to the rescue.
Invitations, Revolvers, and LSD
Robert knows that an expose printed in The Miami Herald is going to sink Perry and Douglas’s development deal. So, he gives Maxine Norma’s handwritten Beach Ball invitations, each of which contains all of the blackmail information that was stored in the Rolodex. They’re all threats, written to force influential people into attending the event.
All Maxine has to do is send them. And she does, muttering “I am somebody,” as she does so. Apollo 12 streaks across the sky behind her.
At the same time, Skeet dies. He and Linda spent the whole episode together, finally freed after learning that the gun from the wedding was now gone. They take LSD together and, in his cosmic trip, Skeet slips away.
And, finally, we see that Robert’s one-night-stand is the “Prince of Luxembourg”, and that the word Norma has been trying to say all episode is “revolver”. Alone, she staggers over to the wall and retrieves one from the display stand. But what does she intend to do with it?
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