Summary
A fantastic Tatiana Maslany performance anchors a twisty finale that arguably provides too little resolution to set up Season 2.
Maybe it’s just me, but I expected Maximum Pleasure Guaranteed to end a bit more convincingly than this. Granted, I did imply that there wasn’t enough time to tie up every loose end, but the Season 1 finale goes out of its way to upend basically every subplot, denying the audience any resolution beyond the extremely short term. Arguably, everyone is worse off than they were before Episode 10 started, especially Paula, despite things seeming to go her way temporarily.
It’s about time, too. This season has been one long string of bad luck, but the most interesting move the finale makes is implying that maybe Paula is more deserving of trouble than anyone first realised. We perhaps should have known by how little she was rattled by having shot Dennis in the face, but he kind of deserved it, so you could rationalise it on that level. The last-minute cliffhanger ending suggests an altogether different kind of killing, though, one that puts a giant question mark against everything we thought we knew about Paula. More on that soon, though, as we’ve got other things to discuss in the meantime.
Paula Makes A Deal (Sort Of)
At the end of the penultimate episode, Paula had confronted Cecilia from the Souter Group, a “global risk advisement firm” that had clearly hired Dennis to strongarm various influential people into furthering their own interests. Initially, it isn’t immediately clear whether Cecilia has any idea what Paula is talking about, something that isn’t concretely clarified even by the end of the episode; Brian is her caddy, so it seems like he might be the one pulling the strings from the shadows. But events do imply Cecilia’s involvement, as we see.
Paula can’t prove most of her claims, but she can prove that Dennis bribed Joyce to get Cecelia’s son, Blake, into Yale. And she’s willing to blow the whistle on that if Cecilia doesn’t ensure she’s exonerated. The outcome of this conversation isn’t immediately clear, since Paula is ushered away by the golf police, but it becomes so later.
For this, we need Dennis, who, it turns out, is alive. Not for long, though. He’s awoken by a man and a woman who usher him outside on the pretext of getting some air. What they’re really doing is leading him to the edge of a rooftop. One of them slips a suicide note in his pocket, and they both push him off the building to a splattery demise. The note confesses to the killing of Trev and Sky. Paula is off the hook.
Karl Doesn’t Get His Redemption Arc
With Paula having been exonerated, the primary reason for Karl and Mallory to seek full-time custody of Hazel has disappeared. Still, though, out of pure vindictiveness, they decide to go through with it anyway, meaning that the finale of Maximum Pleasure Guaranteed spends at least some of its runtime as a court drama.
The custody hearing isn’t initially kind to Paula, who gets hammered for her relationship with a sex worker overlapping with her time with Hazel. The Portland incident is also brought up. It doesn’t exactly paint a rosy picture of Paula, but Tatiana Maslany nails an extremely impassioned speech about Paula’s post-divorce loneliness and relationship with Hazel that moves everyone present, especially Karl, who had already been totally blindsided by the mention of Paula’s Portland past.
But Karl is still too much of a coward to speak up. He isn’t quite as bad as Mallory, who spends most of the hearing rolling her eyes, but he doesn’t come to Paula’s defense even though he should. The judge ruling in Paula’s favour leaves Karl at a loss, unsure of how he’s going to figure his life out logistically since he and Mallory are still, ostensibly, moving to Ihado, while Hazel will be remaining with Paula. When he asks Paula for advice, though, she rightly tells him that she’s Hazel’s mother, not his. There are some things he’ll have to figure out for himself.
Love Is in the Air
There is romantic development in two areas in “Queens”. First, at her exoneration party, Paula finally makes good on her attraction to Steve, though they’re interrupted by the arrival of Gonzales, who tells Paula about Baxter having been shot by the fake Rebecca Halliday. She thinks that Paula knows something that’ll help her put the missing pieces together, and she does, but Paula isn’t willing to play ball with the police, which is kind of understandable given how she has been treated thus far.
Elsewhere, Geri and Rudy get pretty close — they even hold hands for as long as it takes Rudy to confess that he and Vi got back together, which rains on Geri’s parade somewhat. The problem is that she’s wounded enough to lash out by doing the one thing she knows Rudy doesn’t want her to do, which is finish her tell-all article about Paula.
Loose Ends
After shooting Baxter, Jennifer, Brian’s pet assassin, went to ground and changed her appearance. But she was also still adamant about taking Paula off the board, which Brian was seemingly supportive of, since he was under pressure from “up top” to get everything squared away, especially after Paula’s visit to Cecilia, Dennis’s “suicide”, and Baxter being shot in the woods.
However, it’s all a ruse for Brian to kill Jennifer and snip off that particular loose end. Given what Gonzales knows, this is likely to have the opposite effect and draw even more attention, but we’ll have to wait and see.
Elsewhere, Baxter also survives his gunshot, and he wakes up to find Gonzales at his bedside, promising him that they’re going to figure out what went down.
Paula Isn’t Entirely Innocent After All
The ending of Maximum Pleasure Guaranteed delivers a big reveal in the form of Paula once again getting blackmailed. This time, she gets a call from a withheld number, which she doesn’t answer, but it’s followed by a message including home security footage of her encounter with Caleb back in Portland. He confronted her about something they were inevitably in cahoots over, and Paula deliberately killed him. The footage is pretty clear.
The messages continue, telling Paula that “they” own her, and that she’s going to do “them” a favour. As the finale ends, she answers the phone.
