‘Maximum Pleasure Guaranteed’ Episode 3 Recap – Should Have Gone to Idaho

I don’t know how much pleasure would constitute the maximum amount in a show like this, but I’m willing to go out on a limb and say that Paula isn’t getting it. This was already true in a two-part premiere that first made her a witness to a murder and then made her a suspect in the same. But it’s especially true in Episode 3, “Chunnel”, which lands her even deeper in trouble, implies there’s a similarly mortal mess hiding somewhere in her past, and then starts killing off people in her life. Sure, nobody’s going to be especially sympathetic about Mallory, who, to be fair, seems to be alive for the time being, but one gets the sense that she’s only the tip of the iceberg in Maximum Pleasure Guaranteed.

With Trevor dead, you’d think the cam-boy focus would be largely abandoned, but not quite. There is a cam session that forms the cold open and frames the episode — I’ll leave you to work out what the title, “Chunnel”, means on your own — to keep the subject in the back of our minds. There’s also a plot point that we got a hint of in the previous episode, where the USB drive taken from Trevor’s fridge contains a load of cam sessions from people who weren’t, in the words of his killer’s tech guy, “targets”. It’s a wider web of intrigue around the mystery that got Trevor killed that also raises the possibility of many other victims like Paula, trapped in similar predicaments and clinging to the same digital, pay-by-the-hour lifelines.

Speaking of Trevor’s killer, he finally gets a name here: Dennis. And he’s keeping himself busy. Having found Hazel’s missing cleats, he cleverly creates exact replicas fitted with GPS trackers and drops them off at local elementary schools like a concerned citizen. When one starts moving, he follows it, which takes him directly to Hazel, and thus to Karl and Mallory. There’s probably a degree of irony in the idea of Paula’s custody woes saving her life, at least temporarily, but the net is closing either way. Dennis jumps Mallory while she’s out riding her bike and ties a bin bag around her head. But he recognises from the lack of an ankle tattoo that she’s not the woman he’s looking for. Maximum Pleasure Guaranteed Episode 3 ends with confirmation that she’s still breathing inside the bag, but for how long is anyone’s guess.

Mallory hasn’t really done anything wrong, beyond being what seems like a loving step-parent, but she is complicit in a scheme with Karl to manipulatively relocate Paula to Idaho by essentially paying her off with a rental property. To be fair, this is a pretty generous offer, and there’s a way of looking at it that makes Paula seem like the bad guy for not accepting it, but under even the slightest scrutiny, it kind of falls apart. Paula realises she’s being treated like a child for the sake of their convenience. She doesn’t want to move to Boise. And on some level, she knows Karl doesn’t either.

Either way, though, the move seems to be happening, and it’s something that Paula has to grapple with while also wrestling with the threatening phone calls she’s continuing to receive, demanding that she wire $15K by 3 pm lest her life be ruined. When Paula tries to tell Detective Gonzales about this, she isn’t at her desk, so Paula has to come up with her own improvised solution, which is to take the routing and account numbers to the bank and wire the account a single dollar. Doing so creates a transaction receipt, which, thanks to some federal guidelines, identifies the recipient, a dummy company called OBG Properties LLC.

After receiving the dollar, the blackmailer is so furious that they threaten to kill Trevor in response. However, as we know, Trev is already dead, which means his murderer is not the blackmailer, and whatever scam he was running is seemingly disconnected from Dennis’s motivation for killing him. There seem to be two concurrent plots playing out at once here. The blackmailer is a young woman named Ash, who, one assumes, was the person running the scam with Trev, who is now going to start her own investigation into what might have happened to him.

That’s going to give Gonzalez, who we learn in “Chunnel” likes to gamble, plenty to do, since the discovery of Paula’s prints on the hockey stick flag in the system. She apparently already has experience with a dead body back in Portland, and if she wants to stop Gonzalez from looking at her as a suspect, she’s going to have to open up about that. There’s also the small matter of Geri, Paula’s colleague, snooping through her laptop while she’s out. It isn’t clear what — if anything — she knows about what’s going on, but if she starts sticking her nose in, there are going to be even more problems. Or, perhaps Paula will have some unlikely allies?

I guess we’ll have to wait and see.