‘All’s Fair’ Episode 2 Recap – Thank Goodness For Glenn Close and Naomi Watts

I have a personal theory that most things would be improved by the presence of Sarah Paulson, and this seems as true of All’s Fair as it is of anything else. It’s especially true when Paulson is in this mode, flinging incredibly barbed insults in Kim Kardashian’s direction with weapons-grade venom. Paulson is the only member of the cast who seems to know what kind of show she’s in, which, to be fair, is pretty reasonable given how hard the show’s intentions are to pin down. I will say this, though. Episode 2, “When We Were Young”, is immediately improved over the premiere.

Some continuity helps. Glenn Close is back, for instance, now working for Grant, Ronson, and Greene to help Allura handle her divorce from Chase, which is becoming nastier by the moment. You’d think a top divorce firm would have a handle on this kind of thing, but they forgot to do the most obvious thing, which was calling Carrington to create a conflict of interest so she couldn’t represent Chase. By the time Allura gets around to that, Chase is already in her office. This is becoming pretty personal.

But even the case of the week has a bit more sting. A chemist lays out a sad story about being duped by her businessman husband as part of a long con that left her liable for hefty tax bills in multiple floundering businesses, but just as we seem to be introducing a case that the ladies won’t be able to win without at least a little bit of effort, the client leaps off the office balcony to her death. This is genuinely unexpected, I think, because the premiere conditioned us to expect a lot less resistance than what “When We Were Young” offers up right out of the gate.

Even Dina’s return to work has an edge of trauma to it. She’s trying to keep her mind off her dying husband, and in the scene where she explains this, you immediately see the value of hiring Glenn Close in this kind of part. Of course, Kim K undercuts it with a joke, but since when has Ryan Murphy, of all people, ever understood tonal consistency?

Liberty’s love life is also brought up here. She apparently has one of the painfully few “good guys”, who is repeatedly referred to just as “Dr. Reggie”, and he evidently doesn’t mind that she’s almost always styled to resemble some sort of witch. We don’t see him for a while, though. Instead, Liberty’s seemingly resolved case from the premiere continues in the form of an auction, with Sheila selling off the personal possessions Liberty helped her retain. But this sequence mostly exists to put Carrington and the others in the same place so Sarah Paulson and Glenn Close can have a catty exchange in the bathroom. This is absolutely where All’s Fair excels, and it’s reassuring that Episode 2 has made clear what its strengths are, since initially, it wasn’t so obvious.

But anyway, Reggie. By all accounts, he really does seem to be one of the few nice guys. And he also seems to be legitimately into Liberty, to the extent that he proposes really charmingly at dinner. She’s not so sure, though, and flees without giving him an answer, putting their relationship in jeopardy. There’s a life lesson coming, you can feel it, and it comes in the form of Dina kissing the auctioneer behind her husband’s back. It isn’t obvious at first, but how she deals with that — backing out at the last minute, and then coming clean to and talking it through with her loving husband — creates a rubric for how Liberty can handle her own love life. Theoretically, anyway.

Naturally, it isn’t that easy for women to trust men when their careers are contingent, generally speaking, on men continuing to be horrible and trying to exploit their wives through the institution of marriage. That’s what the suicide at the top was all about — a reminder of the very real consequences of how some men often treat women, even those they profess to love, and that’s what Liberty struggles with when she considers getting engaged to Reggie. But thanks to Dina, she eventually decides to bite the bullet.

Allura’s love life remains a mess, though, especially now that it has come to light that Chase had multiple affairs with much younger women — including Milan. Some revenge is going to be in order there, even though I couldn’t help but laugh at Dina’s motherly instruction for Allura to “get mad” doubling up as a reminder to actually show some emotion when she’s acting. She doesn’t quite manage that, to be fair, but it’s the thought that counts, and she has a good go at it when she smashes Milan’s car to bits using a baseball bat colour-coded to match her outfit.

Milan’s justification for the affair — that she basically just wanted to be Allura — is so ridiculous that it beggars belief, and speaks to all the show’s issues with trying to find an identity for itself beyond the novelty of “Kim Kardashian is in it”. There’s a much better show here than the one we’re getting in scenes built to reinforce how beautiful and rich and stylish its lead is (she already built a career on that — we know.) But there is a last-minute twist for good measure — Milan is pregnant with Chase’s baby. So, maybe that will yield some riper dramatic fruit down the line.

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