Summary
Maximum Pleasure Guaranteed makes solid progress in the main plot in “Erroneous”, while also allowing Rudy some welcome time in the spotlight and building toward a genuinely effective cliffhanger.
We’re a week out from the finale of Maximum Pleasure Guaranteed, and things are finally starting to take shape. I’m beginning to suspect that Season 1 won’t have time to tie up the main plot, since even though Episode 9 provides a lot more insight into what’s really going on, it still leaves more unresolved than a single episode can necessarily get through. However, since Apple TV tends to bank on the long-term value of its originals more than most other streaming platforms, I don’t think this is something that we need to be especially worried about. Not yet, anyway.
In the meantime, though, we’re making progress. Things pick up where we left off, with the fake Rebecca Halliday, aka “Jennifer”, tracking Dennis’s burner phone to Rudy’s apartment. She masks up, picks the lock, and finds him sitting there reading. “I think you’re in the erroneous apartment,” he says, giving the episode its title, before she smacks him upside the head with his own bong and retrieves the phone. The fact he survives the encounter is good news, both because he’s genuinely funny to spend time with and because it completely fast-tracks his arc. Now he knows Paula was telling the truth, which means he knows how big a mistake Geri is making by publishing her story.
This gives Rudy much more focus in “Erroneous”, and he really makes the most of it. He confronts Geri and tells her about his own attack and what his attacker was looking for, which eventually leads to a reconciliation between the two, even though it seems like Geri still doesn’t quite understand what she did wrong in the first place. Still, Rudy’s able to convince her that she’s a talented enough writer to produce a story that will further her career without harming her friends. And do I detect a little bit of romantic chemistry between the two?
Episode 9 is also the point in Maximum Pleasure Guaranteed where the cops finally figure some things out. Gonzales visits Rikers Island to investigate Paula’s claims about being visited by two Rebecca Hallidays and verifies that she was telling the truth. At the same time, Baxter gets suspicious about Dennis’s phone being off. Gonzales gets the security footage and the plates of the vehicle that Rebecca/Jennifer drove to and from the prison, while Baxter goes to check out Dennis’s place and finds the suspicious aftermath of Paula’s fight with Ash. These details will all become important.
None of this is to say that things are going well for Paula, obviously. Brian tells Jennifer to clean her off the board, for instance, and the news about her arrest has spread like wildfire among the soccer moms, leading to the dreaded expulsion from the group chat and greatly harming her ongoing custody battle with Karl and Mallory. When Paula tries to attend Hazel’s art show, Karl insists that she leave. In a way, he’s trying to protect her, or at least protect Hazel, but it’s hard for Paula to see it that way, especially since he and Mallory are still pushing for full custody in a hearing slated for the following week, while Paula will still be on bail.
Paula’s only ally socially is Steve, who at least photographs the entire art show and AirDrops Paula all the images, which is a super nice gesture. But his lingering look at Paula had a bit more than a romantic connotation to it, if you ask me. Is he a stealth villain? It’s something to keep in mind.
Paula at least has concrete professional allies in Rudy and Geri, though. When they both visit her at home to apologise and explain what happened with Dennis’s burner, Paula reveals the fruits of her investigative legwork. Using reverse image search, she managed to look up and contact several of Trevor’s webcam clients. In almost every case, Dennis visited the client with footage of their interactions and used it to blackmail them into corporate espionage favours — mining rights, zoning permits, and the spec for an experimental strain of fast-rising yeast, worth tens of millions in revenue. In the case of the yeast, the patent was later filed by another company named Northeastern Food Group.
Paula thinks that Dennis is a middleman working for someone else, which we know is a correct assumption. To confirm it, she, Rudy, and Geri visit Joyce, the Yale admissions officer, to find out what Dennis wanted from her. She isn’t inclined to tell until Rudy gets so angry that he dramatically threatens her, stomping along behind her in the pool she’s swimming in. She eventually reveals that she was forced into getting a kid named Blake Vanderwalle a spot at Yale. When Paula looks up the name, she discovers he’s related to the CEO of a company with dealings with Northeastern Food Group.
Everything comes together towards the end of Maximum Pleasure Guaranteed Episode 9, as Paula heads out to a golf retreat to confront the CEO, Jennifer follows behind her, and Baxter follows behind her, with the stolen car having pinged the system. Jennifer readies herself to shoot Paula with a sniper rifle, but Baxter gets the drop on her. We don’t see what happens; we simply hear a single gunshot, but given that the rifle was suppressed, it’s either Baxter shot Jennifer, which seems unlikely, or Jennifer shot Baxter with a hidden sidearm holstered in her jacket, which the camera made a point of showing us. I know which way I’m leaning.
