Summary
Maximum Pleasure Guaranteed does a fine job of depicting Paula’s stress and confusion as she is forced to navigate normality after potentially murdering a man — but, as ever, things are even more complicated than that.
I don’t kill people very often — not anymore, anyway — but I think I’d do a better job of it than Paula. Then again, she feels like she’s going insane, and Maximum Pleasure Guaranteed is built to support that idea. There’s something extremely discombobulating about Episode 7, at least in its earliest stages, which pick up right where we left off, with Paula having killed Dennis. Or so she thinks! Despite the fact that Dennis looks very dead, his rapidly disappearing body seems to imply otherwise.
But Paula doesn’t know that, not initially. She staggers to a store in a haze, still covered in blood, and does her best job of wiping it off when she spots a reflection of herself in the rack of sunglasses. Then she wanders back home, back to the midst of a kids’ pizza party, which is arguably the worst place to be when you’ve just shot someone. Nobody’s any the wiser, though, at least not until Geri and Rudy call, and Paula tells them what happened.
The logical move here is to call the police. It isn’t totally clear why Paula doesn’t; perhaps it’s because she doesn’t think she’ll be believed, or that her having the gun in the first place seems like premeditation. Perhaps it’s just stress and confusion, which “Flighting” does a wonderful job of depicting through creative use of sound design and slightly off-kilter visuals and close-ups of Tatiana Maslany trying to feign whatever emotion is most applicable to the situation she’s in.
She also, again for reasons I imagine she’d find difficult to explain, took Dennis’s phone. It’s locked, but she, Geri, and Rudy use it to unlock Dennis’s Amazon account, where they find a shipping address for a bunch of parcels ordered under the name “John Smith”, which is so unnoteworthy as to be noteworthy, as David Mitchell might say. Geri also claims she knows someone who can break into the phone, so she takes it with her.
Geri’s telling the truth, but not all of it. Her associate, Drew, with whom she seems to have been at least moderately intimate at some point in the recent past, bypasses the security in record time and sends the phone’s contents in an email to Geri, but she doesn’t tell Paula. Instead, she’s using the information — or trying to, anyway — to flesh out the story she’s writing behind Paula’s back. I’m still generally of the opinion that Maximum Pleasure Guaranteed will allow both Geri and Rudy to become proper allies down the line, but Episode 7 certainly throws a few spanners in the works in that regard.
Geri’s secret article is the first. The second is Rudy’s mounting belief that Paula might be delusional, and his reluctance to get involved in whatever she’s mixed up in even if she isn’t. When all three of them go to the address on Dennis’s Amazon account, they find a sweet old lady who claims that she randomly receives parcels addressed to John Smith and politely returns them to UPS. Paula thinks she’s lying, which it’s later revealed she is, since she immediately calls up Brian, the guy who Dennis was liaising with earlier in the season, and tells him what happened, sending him video footage of her three visitors taken from the doorbell. Brian calls someone named Jen and tells her that he’ll be requiring her services after all, whatever that means, but since Rudy isn’t privy to any of this, he continues to believe that Paula’s just imagining things and sulkily goes home in an Uber.
The only upside of Paula’s day is that Steve asks her out on a date, which she accepts despite her mind being elsewhere. She gets into the mood, but the evening takes a turn when Gonzalez and Baxter arrive to arrest her for the murders of Trevor and Sky. Despite Gonzalez earlier saying that she still didn’t fancy Paula for the crime since “the numbers add up but the sum is wrong”, she seems to be the prime suspect after all. Did new evidence emerge in the meantime? Or is this just due to pressure from on high? Either way, Paula is arrested, and as she’s being driven away, she sees Steve happily walking towards her apartment with a bunch of flowers.
At least he didn’t see her being folded into the car in handcuffs. That wouldn’t have been good for the custody battle character references.
Speaking of which, Karl remains reluctant to be as merciless as Mallory about all that, and if I’m not mistaken, I think the show might be presenting him as a potential ally down the line. And then there’s Ash to consider. She spends the episode driving out into the middle of nowhere with a shovel and digging up a Florida Gators lunchpail that contains a gun, a bunch of money, and a bag of flash drives. They’re recordings of Trevor’s interactions with his various cam clients, male and female, but there’s also a video of him, Ash, and Sky preparing to dupe Paula with the kidnapping scam. What’s she planning to do with all this? We’ll have to wait and see.
