Summary
All’s Fair makes some interesting story choices in “I Want Revenge”. It remains a weird show that only intermittently works, but there’s something here that was probably unexpected.
I never thought I’d hear the term “revenge vagina”, but here we are. There are certain things you can rely on Ryan Murphy for, and it’s probably stuff like this. But there is a method — albeit a clunky one — to Episode 3 of All’s Fair opening with its cast sitting around discussing their “self-care” routines, which involve a lot of experimental treatments to stave off aging, and some more analog ones to stave off loneliness. It isn’t just giving Glenn Close an excuse to tell everyone else in no uncertain terms that they’re all nuts. It’s also contextualising the case of the week.
This case involves Lee-Ann, a woman in an abusive marriage with a rockstar husband who forced her into drastically contorting her entire body with the help of a surgeon named Matt Costa, otherwise dubbed “The Butcher of Beverly Hills”. The partners of Grant, Gordon, and Greene have some cheek sitting there telling Lee-Ann that there’s nothing wrong with growing old gracefully, given how far they’re going to avoid it themselves. But that’s the point, you see. We always enjoy a bit of irony.
Similarly, despite all of Allura’s myriad wellness and ageless beauty techniques, Chase’s affairs encompassed more than just Milan, and included a trans sex worker — Murphy’s gonna Murphy — which really throws Allura for a loop. She and Milan have to attend an exclusive STD clinic together to find out whether Chase’s extramarital dalliances gave either of them anything untoward. Milan also takes the opportunity to reveal that Chase had her wear a strap-on, which is news to Allura.
But it informs the divorce proceedings, obviously. As in the second episode, Carr sparring with Dina is the highlight of “I Want Revenge” by far, and the case is becoming pretty knotty. Dina’s banking on the NFL not considering a star athlete’s affair with a trans sex worker to be especially marketable, but Carr counters that in 2025, he’ll be seen as a brave hero for it, an image embellished by his willingness to out himself as a sex addict, which always plays well. Of course, he had several other, less optically-contentious affairs too, but Carr has a trump card — Allura’s frozen, fertilised embryos, which are being stored in Encino and which Carr promises to eat with A1 steak sauce if her client doesn’t get a million dollars a month and half of the law firm.
All’s Fair Episode 3 gets a bit more interesting by introducing Maria, the sex worker, as a proper character instead of just a way to scandalize the plot further. Chase and Maria seem to have a genuine connection, and she’s not falling for Allura’s play to provide her a “platform to tell her side of the story”. She’s already very clear about how she’s going to tell her story. Once Chase is officially divorced and becomes the most eligible bachelor in the country, she wants a date, which will mean a photo op, which will legitimise her entire community in front of the whole world. Just don’t read the comments.
Everything coming out about Chase puts Milan off, understandably, opening a way for her and Allura to repair their relationship a little. But the embryo thing makes this weird. Allura and Chase had fertilized embryos frozen so they could focus on their careers, and now there’s a chance that Allura might be too old to have a viable pregnancy, and even if she does, she’ll be giving birth to a child with a cheating sex-addict father and raising the kid as a single mother, which might not necessarily be ideal. But Milan being pregnant by Chase — which she hasn’t told him about — gives Allura something to fixate on and idealize, and shortly after, we see her at a clinic having her own embryos implanted, risking potentially becoming pregnant with twins. It isn’t that this is a bad thing, per se, but it feels like an incredibly rash decision stemming from a pretty drastic set of circumstances, and she also forges Chase’s signature to make it happen.
Consequences, that’s the word. There are always some unexpected ones, and one of the stronger elements of this show, which remains very strange in its broad strokes, is that it doesn’t quite allow anyone to get away with something too easily. Interestingly, this was my primary criticism of a too-easy premiere, so things are at the very least getting a bit better. Whether it’s Lee-Ann receiving a generous settlement only to ruin her life by throwing sulfuric acid in her ex-husband’s face, or Allura breaking the law to take away Chase’s trump card and, probably subconsciously, prevent Milan from having the one thing with Chase that she always coveted, there’s always a piper to be paid. The bill’s going to come due sooner or later.
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