Summary
Maximum Pleasure Guaranteed raises the stakes in “YABA” by having Paula’s predicament spill over to her family, while Maslany’s performance continues to anchor every implausible twist.
If I’m being completely honest, Maximum Pleasure Guaranteed has been so Paula-focused thus far that I never stopped to consider Trevor’s perspective. Luckily, Episode 2, “YABA”, has me covered. There’s still plenty of Paula, don’t get me wrong, but the episode opens with a bit more information about Trev, introduces us to our bad guy, turning this into a whydunit instead of a whodunit, and largely reshapes the terms of the story we thought was being told.
Sure, there’s every chance that Trev was a bad guy of some description, but now much less of a chance that he was quite as involved as we were led to believe. In fact, he seems like the biggest victim thus far, since he’s the only character — for now, anyway — who’s dead rather than inconvenienced. Something tells me that the body count will be mounting in short order, though. Let’s break it all down.
To begin with, our bad guy. I don’t have a name for him right now, but he’s played by Murray Bartlett from The White Lotus and is introduced as Trev’s boyfriend. Granted, it can be hard to tell with a sex worker, but the two of them meet in person, not online, and their conversation isn’t charged by the hour. Trev is pitching a money-making real estate scheme that he needs some investment to bring about, so I suppose we’ve potentially got motive here, but Murray’s character — I don’t think the episode reveals his name, and IMDb won’t tell me either — seems a bit too comfortable with murder and dismemberment for this to feel like just a deal gone wrong.
Besides, it was Trev who put up 30% of the initial asking price for a motel he intended to turn into apartments, presumably using the proceeds from the scams he has been carrying out on women like Paula. He seems to have most of the liability. But I guess the specifics will emerge as we go. What we know for certain is that Murray’s character snuck into Trev’s apartment and garotted him with a length of chain — causing the slashed-throat injury — and then stole a USB flash drive that was hidden in his fridge. This was after he was attacked on stream to Paula; in actual fact, it was minutes before Paula arrived at Trev’s place at the end of the premiere.
The Big Bad went out to the car to retrieve the power saw, which is when Paula went inside, and then returned to the house and began heading upstairs, which is where we left things. Here in Maximum Pleasure Guaranteed Episode 2, Paula tries to sneak out, makes a mess, and then makes a break for it, falling off a fire escape and into a dumpster, getting the sharp lid of an open tuna can wedged in her arm in the process, then does a runner, leaving behind a little pink bag without realising.
The rest of “YABA” largely comprises Paula trying to go about her everyday business with all of this going on, which naturally proves to be easier said than done. It’s a classic case of the protagonist not going to the police when they absolutely should be going to the police, but the show gives one of the better justifications for not doing so in recent memory, since Paula just has so much going on. Her phone never stops, to the extent that I wondered aloud at one point why she didn’t turn her message notifications off. It was becoming overwhelming even for me.
First, there’s Karl, who calls moments after Paula’s great escape to remind her that she’s in possession of Hazel’s new cleats, which she needs for soccer practice. I didn’t mention this in the premiere, but Hazel is a really good approximation of what kids that age are like, and you really get a sense of that here, since her football woes are, to her, of incredibly outsized importance. Paula’s inability to see them that way, given her own predicament, is very relatable. And Karl’s code-switching whenever Hazel is or isn’t around gives a good sense of why their marriage broke down, a story that Paula later recounts to her colleagues in a moment of frank openness that Maslany sells to the moon and back.
We also meet Mallory, Karl’s new squeeze, and there’s no love lost between her and Paula. This conversation isn’t super clear, but I definitely got the sense that these two perhaps knew each other before the relationship began, which would explain the resentment. Karl evidently fell on his feet during the divorce, which is probably what led Paula to take solace in age-appropriate cam-men and not someone like Steve, one of Hazel’s soccer coaches, with whom she develops an immediate rapport. More on this in subsequent episodes, I feel sure.
“YABA”, by the way, is an acronym of “You Are A Badass”, a little reassuring catchphrase that Paula shares with Hazel. It’s also written in her new soccer cleats, which just so happened to be in the little pink bag that Paula left behind at Trev’s place. Problematically, the Big Bad discovers this towards the end, drawing his attention to Hazel. Given he seems to have used the power saw to remove Trev’s tongue and give it to his cat to play with, this is extremely bad news.
Potentially worse news, at least as far as Paula is concerned, is that Detective Gonzales has clearly started to view her as the prime suspect in Trev’s death. When she turns up at Paula’s workplace to tell her about the body being discussed, Paula smartly confesses her presence, but she doesn’t seem to realise that everything she’s saying is giving her a fairly compelling motive. By the end, it’s obvious that Gonzales is looking at her in a different, more suspicious light. As if she didn’t have enough problems.
