Summary
Maximum Pleasure Guaranteed raises some interesting questions about Paula’s past in “Raisins”, but this also felt like the slowest, least-eventful episode thus far.
There’s an old saying that suggests if you meet an arsehole in the morning, you met an arsehole; if you meet an arsehole in the afternoon, you were unlucky enough to meet two arseholes; but if you’re meeting arseholes all day long, you’re the arsehole. And I’m starting to get that impression about Paula. Maximum Pleasure Guaranteed has presented her as a sympathetic protagonist in Season 1 thus far, but with Episode 4 revealing her Portland past that was recently hinted at, you have to wonder how a person can be this unlucky without some complicity of their own. At what point does someone stop being unlucky and start being a grand-master self-saboteur?
Paula was ostensibly happy with Karl when they were back in Portland, although she needed consistent elaborate roleplay to be able to sleep with him, which isn’t typically a good sign. But a passionless marriage isn’t a crime, is it? Even in her relative heyday, Paula was prone to flights of fancy, a character trait we probably shouldn’t ignore. But I’ll grant you that when I was first introduced to her handsome but drunken neighbour, Caleb, I assumed the story was going to go in a very different direction to where it ultimately ends up going.
Paula’s marital dissatisfaction was clearly compounded by Karl being an insufferable douche. We see him at his most pathetic trying to curry favour with his boss by lavishing his son with needlessly expensive birthday gifts, all while blatantly carrying on what I’m assuming was an already ongoing affair with his co-worker, Mallory, right under Paula’s nose. Maslany sells Paula’s embarrassment and anger at being neglected so publicly really well. It’s no surprise their marriage didn’t last. But how do we get from this to Paula having fatally reversed over Caleb while pulling into her driveway?
She’d had a few drinks. She was furious about Karl and Mallory. It had been established earlier in the episode that Caleb was drunk, and weird, and liked to loom a little too close to the car. But it’s probably telling that we don’t see the event take place for ourselves. We see Karl get a frantic phone call, see Paula sitting on the front stoop in shock, and see Caleb’s corpse bleeding in the driveway. But Paula seems more focused on Mallory’s presence than what might have happened, and the fact that Karl and Mallory quickly help to cover up and downplay Paula’s involvement, getting her to drink to calm her nerves so a toxicology report doesn’t suggest she was drunk-driving, and pulling in favours to make sure the police don’t look too closely at her, all just seems a little suspicious.
When Maximum Pleasure Guaranteed Episode 4 returns to the present day, you can see why Gonzales and Baxter fancy her as a suspect, even if they can’t quite connect the dots just yet. Baxter, in particular, seems fixated on her being guilty, and even tells her as much over the phone. Knowing she’s a genuine suspect changes things for Paula. She has to turn to the only potential allies she has, who are Geri and Rudy, and even then only because Geri snooped through her laptop and decided to do some sleuthing of her own. Paula is initially furious about this betrayal, but Rudy and Geri are fact-checkers too, so they can help. At a trivia quiz, Paula reads them both in and shows them the footage of Trevor being “attacked” as part of the kidnapping scam. Geri recognises the ring his “attacker” is wearing from his Instagram, implying it’s someone he knew personally, so that’ll presumably be their first port of call next week.
In the midst of all this, Dennis is getting away with murder — literally. After receiving a picture of Paula’s driving licence from his tech support guy, he practises exhibiting human emotion in his car’s rear-view mirror before cutting a sympathetic figure for Gonzales and Baxter. Again, the latter takes a particularly strong stance here, which doesn’t go unnoticed; he believes Dennis is innocent, and swallows his alibi about being at a physical therapy appointment at the time of the murder. CCTV footage seems to back it up, but we later learn that Dennis uses a two-hour appointment in a sensory deprivation tank to sneak out of the window and go about his business with a built-in alibi. It’s worth noting that Gonzales’s instincts are immediately correct here, even if she, too, has fallen for the ruse for now (and lost $50, since she can’t help placing a friendly wager at every opportunity).
What Dennis is actually doing is making his way to Paula’s house, presumably to kill her, which is where “Raisins” ends. I’m sure Paula will be fine, especially since Dennis didn’t even manage to finish off a helpless Mallory, who wakes up alive in this episode, if not necessarily well, and even more adamant about moving than ever. But the police’s fixation on Paula, and by extension Karl, not to mention Dennis’s well-honed professional assassin routine, doesn’t exactly bode well for our heroine. Maybe it’s best if there’s a little more to her than meets the eye after all.
