Summary
All’s Fair has always been difficult to take seriously, but “Letting Go” is by far its most ludicrous and unserious effort yet, so much so that it makes it impossible to determine what the show is ultimately trying to be.
Sorry, but what is going on here? All’s Fair hasn’t exactly been easy to take seriously since the beginning, but Episode 7 takes the show’s blurring of drama and comedy to such an extreme that I have no real idea of whether it’s finally revealing itself as an outright parody or is simply so rubbish that the distinction has become meaningless. Time, I suppose, will tell.
Either way, “Letting Go” is pretty openly a comedy episode with minimal serious drama, which in and of itself isn’t a terrible thing. But the subjects that it chooses to make light of are bonkers. As we saw at the end of the previous episode, Doug has died, leaving Dina bereft. As we also saw in that episode, Allura and Chase have more or less finalized their divorce, or at least agreed to a reasonable distribution of their assets. There’s nothing funny about either of these things, but they are nonetheless the avenues that All’s Fair decides to make as ludicrous as humanly possible.
Dina, for instance, isn’t coping with Doug’s death well. His corpse is still in the bed, and she’s basically just carrying on a normal life around him while he turns — as Liberty puts it a bit later — to compost before her eyes. Speaking of Liberty, who was missing entirely from the last episode, she has decided to express a sentiment that she has never before even hinted at throughout the duration of the series: She feels left out of the gang on account of being British. Okay! This means that she takes Dina’s refusal to speak to her especially personally and decides to assuage her own imposter syndrome by visiting Dina at home and making herself useful.
By chance, she happens to arrive at the same time as Carr, who is taking the opportunity to… well, it’s a little unclear. Gloat? Atone? Ultimately, it doesn’t matter, since her sole focus immediately becomes ostracising Liberty even further, exploiting Dina’s grief to further Liberty’s feelings of isolation — which, you’ll note, she wouldn’t even know about — and dropping a series of vicious barbs that completely undo all of the progress she made last time out. Although they’re very funny — Sarah Paulson is once again the standout of the entire episode.
But this is very stupid. Glenn Close has been one of the few consistently grounded presences in this show, and yet her biggest actorly moment is consistently undercut by what becomes an increasingly ridiculous game of one-upmanship as Carr and Liberty wildly overcompensate to try and prove who’s the better friend to Dina in her time of need. Close does get a couple of moments to sell her grief, including one with Emerald during a swanky wake that Carr organizes and Liberty ruins with a coterie of bagpipers, but at no point does it ever feel like it’s being taken halfway seriously. It’s like everything else — a showcase for Sarah Paulson pulling faces and hurling snarky insults, the only difference now being that the script can’t decide whether she’s part of the core group or not.
In the B-plot of All’s Fair Episode 7, Allura wants to finalise her divorce from Chase, and includes in the caveats what essentially amounts to an apology tour, with him working through a copious list of wronged extramarital sexual partners in comedy montage form. This is fine since it turns out that Matthew Noszka is a very good comedic actor, but there are a couple of moments which are clearly intended to be a bit more serious that end up coming across just as preposterous.
One of these, crucially, involves Milan, who has scarcely been seen since it was revealed that she was pregnant with Chase’s child. She’s the last name on Chase’s list of people he needs to make it up to, and he asks Allura to help him facilitate a chat, since she doesn’t want anything to do with him. Allura does, on the condition that she legally represents Milan, but Milan goes absolutely postal in the mediation and starts throwing things at Chase — a situation that, inexplicably, Chase is repeatedly portrayed as the bad guy in, even though he’s correct that he really does have some rights. The whole thing’s bizarre.
More bizarre still is what this all means for Chase’s relationship with Allura, since at the end of the episode, she turns up at his house to sleep with him despite guaranteeing earlier that she wouldn’t. This isn’t the weirdest thing that has ever happened in TV — there’s only so long two people this good-looking can stay away from each other, I guess — but it’s totally contrary to all of Allura’s established characterisation and indeed the events depicted in the rest of this very strange episode.
Still, at least Dina finally agrees to let Doug be taken away before he melts into the bedsheets. Silver linings and all that.
