Summary
Sarah Paulson is undeniably a standout of All’s Fair, and she’s the focal point of “Divorce Is Like a Death”, but the script is unavoidably wonky, and the arch dialogue and inconsistent characterisations quickly overwhelm even her committedly demented performance.
Remember when Ryan Murphy inexplicably spent a whole hour of All’s Fair trying to make us feel sorry for Carrington Lane? That was weird, right? Then again, the whole show’s weird, so what can you do? Episode 6 wants you to forget about that anyway. Carr’s back to being the villain again immediately in “Divorce Is Like A Death”. She eviscerates Chase about his hairstyle – I still have no idea what this show wants us to think about these two – and inspires him to ravage Allura’s entire life in the divorce proceedings to line both of their pockets and settle a decade-old grudge.
And fair enough, since that’s what Carr’s here for, but it does make the previous episode feel a bit sillier in hindsight. Nevertheless, it does remember that Chase has been revealed as a slightly more complicated figure than his jock body, absurd good looks, and insatiable gender-impartial sexual appetites suggested. This makes him oddly incompatible with Carr, since she thinks his performance during the pre-trial meeting is thanks to her wasabi-laced tissue, but it’s obvious that he means it.
Allura might have doomed herself, though. The embryos she had illegally implanted are revealed in this episode not to have taken; when she emotionally storms out of the meeting, it isn’t because of what Chase said, but because the sudden arrival of her period has left her liable for destruction of communal property – a charming way of describing potential children – and made her a lot more vulnerable during the proceedings. She’s even forced to confess to Dina. But luckily, she’s able to rally enough to prey on Chase’s very earnest lingering feelings for her, which causes him to reconsider the entire divorce.
The central tension of All’s Fair Episode 6, then, quickly becomes whether Chase is going to be able to go along with Carr and Alberta’s dirty, ruinous tactics. And he’s going to have to decide quickly, since Alberta has dug up an angle pertaining to the prenuptial agreement. As she smugly makes her explain, when Allura was a teenager, her mother, with whom she enjoyed a fraught relationship, sent her to an abusive reform school. Eventually, her father got her out, but the guilt of her having been sent there in the first place led him to essentially drink himself to death. In his honour, Allura set up a scholarship in his name. But she also purchased the reform school and shut it down – an acquisition that isn’t reflected in the asset declarations.
Of course, Chase, who’s already rich, wouldn’t be interested in an abandoned building in rural Vermont, but the deception creates a worrying precedent, so the mediation has to proceed under different terms. Ironically, this revelation – prompted largely by Alberta – creates more sympathy for Allura from Chase and, weirdly, Carr, but the latter’s feelings on the subject are extremely difficult to parse since the show can’t stay consistent with her characterisation from one scene to the next.
Case in point: Right after expressing some measure of empathy for Allura’s situation, she’s immediately gloating in the mediation about the potential of instructing the fertility clinic to flush Allura’s embryos down the toilet like goldfish. Allura’s gambit here is to confess to having implanted the embryos, because she has obviously sussed that Chase would be sympathetic to the idea (he’s not infertile, after all – the only person who loses here is Allura). And she’s right. He won’t let Carr pursue charges of manslaughter and just wants to get through the proceedings as painlessly as possible, visibly sympathetic to Allura’s plight.
When Dina is called away suddenly by a hospice nurse, Emerald has to take over. And this is convenient, since she had earlier pushed to use illegally-obtained evidence to fight Allura’s corner, which Dina wouldn’t let her do. Allura’s a bit more flexible, though. So, Emerald reels off the tea, including Chase’s match-fixing to pay off his gambling debts, which isn’t admissible, his serial cheating, which has no legal relevance either, and, crucially, Carr’s own improprieties. These include what we saw in the previous episode, including the dash-cam footage of Carr being arrested after her DUI, boasting about her relationship with Chase, and wailing that she needs a man. This leads to the standout sequence of All’s Fair Episode 6, with Carr mounting the table in a rage and going on one of the most demented rants I’ve ever seen in my life. Sarah Paulson is amazingly nuts in this, and this is exactly the mode her character should be operating in at all times. And yeah, I get that the context provided by the previous episode underpins why she’d act so extremely, but I firmly believe that this is one of those cases when we don’t need the backstory. Just let her be awful uncomplicatedly.
The ending of “Divorce Is Like A Death” is weird, since it takes the sympathetic angle after all this. Carr’s breakdown is treated as a cry for help, and both Emerald and Allura make overtures towards her that help to squash the beef that – let’s not forget – has given the entire show its shape. Why is this happening now? And in this way? I just think it’s a little weird, and highlights how weak this show’s writing can be when it tries to take on too much. Tearful hugs all around? Get out of here.
This isn’t an upside, and it shouldn’t be taken as such, but the fact that Dina’s husband dies is more dramatically fruitful in my eyes than anything that happens between Allura, Chase, and Carr, at least in part because we can rely on Glenn Close to sell wonky material in a way the others can’t. And where’s Liberty when you need her? A question for next week, maybe.
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