Photo: Jake Giles Netter/Max
This season three finale is all about break-ups (plus one beautiful make-up). Only one pair really emerges from this episode closer than they were before. Everyone else either splits or stays together under less-than-ideal circumstances (blackmail). That’s showbiz, baby.
Do you ever think about how some people are just better off as exes? It’s too bad that how you can’t skip ahead to that part, but it’s lovely to see Deborah and Marty do a little tango in his office after she returns the master key to the Palmetto and tells him that she is moving to Los Angeles to host Late Night. He’s so happy for her! She’s going to teach him how to unlock his hips! He’s still marrying Victoria, who is in the finals of a pay-to-play Backgammon tournament, but this is as it should be.
I thought Deborah and Kathy were going to start with something extremely low-stakes, like coffee, re: rebuilding their relationship. But instead they planned a sister weekend, which, of course, Deborah has to flake on at the last minute because of her Late Night commitments. The whole thing gets downgraded to a Sunday afternoon, which Deborah spends on the phone, even at the mausoleum which Kathy wanted to visit but where, it turns out, their parents are no longer interred: Deborah had them moved when a corner plot opened up right by her in Vegas. And she never told Kathy!! Or even ASKED her!?! True sociopath shit because you know Deborah knows that Kathy probably comes here all the time. I’m proud of Kathy for going to therapy, where she learned that useful analogy about trying to buy milk at the hardware store and where, I assume, she developed the grit that allowed her to say, really without malice, that she doesn’t want to try to be friends with Deborah after all. “Why have I spent my entire life trying to make amends to someone so awful?” she wonders. I believe Kathy’s therapist would call that a breakthrough.
Back on the ranch, Deborah watches old footage of herself and sees the name Biff Cliff as the credits roll: The legend who ran the network is still alive because “men like him live hundreds and hundreds of years,” she tells Ava. (Perfect line-reading by Jean Smart. God, what a PRO.) Deborah is getting anxious now that she’s on the precipice of getting what she always wanted. She is ready to relitigate the past. When her Sunday opens up on account of her sister no longer wanting her in her life — what a totally calm and normal emotional place from which to launch this visit — she bops over to Biff’s place to find out why he rejected her all those years ago.
What does she learn? Nothing she didn’t already know, except that hers was their highest-testing test pilot ever. That wasn’t enough, though, because (I’m paraphrasing here) Deborah was a woman, which is worse than being a grown man who dated a 14-year-old. As a woman, Deborah must hope that NOTHING will give anyone an excuse to say no to her, seeing as she is already starting from behind, because being a woman is gross and sad. Never mind that the circumstances of her initial passing-over seem pretty extreme and unlikely to be repeated — she’s unlikely to burn Kathy’s house down again — Deborah, we will learn, takes away from this meeting that her best moves at Late Night will be the most risk-averse ones she could possibly take.
So perhaps she spoke too soon when she asked Ava to come back to Late Night as head writer. In a lovely moment, Ava shows Deborah everything she’s been working on during the time she was allegedly working on her own material: It’s all just stuff for her Late Night show. Ava believed in Deborah the entire time. They have never been more solid. In accordance with the laws of good television, this means their relationship is about to come crashing down. But HOW?!
Sidebar: speaking of things crashing down, Marcus is leaving, presumably for that QVC job, and Damien is not prepared to take over. (I love that the real safe is in the floor of the pool. Genius!) “I DON’T WANT TO KNOW WHEN ONE FISCAL QUARTER ENDS AND ANOTHER BEGINS,” Damien sobs, and you know what? I, too, would be a happier person without this knowledge, and I will be keeping Damien in my thoughts and prayers.
Ava tells her On the Contrary boss that she’s leaving. It all goes so amicably. He even makes her a counteroffer: What if he made her head writer of On the Contrary? In my opinion, this exchange is doing a lot of work to lead us to believe that Ava is qualified to be a head writer anywhere. It seems like a big jump, right? Like, of course, she should be staffed on Deborah’s show, but she’s only been writing for On the Contrary for, like, one season, right? Or did I miss something? It feels like this offer basically exists in the world of the show to lend credibility to Ava’s claim that she deserves the head writer role on Late Night beyond her Deborah-whisperer abilities. I’m not mad about that; just curious what you all think.
Ava gets very cart-before-the-horse about the whole thing, even getting new headshots taken. So it is quite the gut-punch when she learns from Deborah that the head writer job will go to Steve, the same “crusty old white dude who has been there for 20 years.” Deborah reports this as a mandate from management. HMM. So Ava’s still on the staff but it’s a demotion, since she turned down the other head writer gig. Perhaps that would’ve been the end of that, except she runs into Winnie at a valet stand, and when she makes an impassioned case for herself, she is told, lightly, that Deborah can hire whoever she wants. Which, what do you know, wasn’t Ava after all.
Should we take a detour to Kayla and Jimmy before we get into the big showdown? Jimmy has been taking meetings at a Coffee Bean that he knows too well, including the special yank you need to give the bathroom door handle to get it to open. But Kayla has come through with a client meeting: Bella Donaldson, a former Disney kid who is proving she’s a grown-up by acting in a Darren Aronofsky movie. Jimmy chastizes Kayla for doing work that’s “too high-stakes,” but he’s excited to meet Bella, who Kayla knows from school.
At the meeting, Kayla is uncharacteristically nervous when Bella (Kathryn Newton, of Big Little Lies and Lisa Frankenstein fame, who is also a professional golfer! The RANGE [golf pun!]) arrives, and we soon learn that Bella was Kayla’s bully. I know some of you have felt like Kayla’s a one-note character. Still, I think this season has given her a lot more to do, and, in this scene especially, Meg Stalter really delivers. The little winces whenever Bella calls her “Pepperoni Stick”; the quiet, desperate way she tries to talk Bella out of telling humiliating stories from their adolescence, including a “prank” that left Kayla with a concussion. (“Is that why you dress like that?”) From the Christmas episode, we know that Kayla’s parents can be pretty neglectful; from Bella, we learn that Kayla spent her twelfth birthday watching American Beauty with Bella’s mom. Kayla’s enduring denial that what’s happening to her is not a “hilarious dynamic, where I was always the funny one and she was always laughing at me” does not hold water with Jimmy, who gallantly walks out on the meeting, much to Kayla’s horror, who worked hard to set it up. Burning with shame from being embarrassed in front of the person whose opinion matters most to her, Kayla accuses Jimmy of seeing her as some hopeless fuckup. “You don’t really care what I think.”
Kayla needs to get out of L.A. to clear her head. But because she bought her plane ticket on the company card, Jimmy knows exactly where to find her. This brings us to one of the best moments of the entire season: Jimmy doing the grand romantic — excuse me, it’s just a platonic work thing!!! — gesture of chasing her onto the plane to beg her to stay with him. Kayla is a great outside-the-box thinker! And yes, inside the box are things like calendars and texting the right person back, but she can get an assistant for that! Kayla is a MANAGER. I absolutely lost it at Jimmy’s escalating pleas to the woman trying to film what she thought was a proposal to cool her jets, especially when he went down on his knees because a flight attendant said he couldn’t be standing in the aisle. Kayla states her demands: She has her own assistant and her own office, and she gets to show him three funny videos that she made every morning. It’s a deal! They are hugging on the plane!
Are you feeling all warm and fuzzy inside? Well, too bad because it’s time for a huge fuckin fallout and a major betrayal. Maybe get yourself a pack of cigarettes and a White Claw, then return to the recap.
Fresh off her friendly chat with Winnie, Ava confronts Deborah. Deborah insists that Steve is the only choice because the network has to feel “comfortable” with whoever she picked — that while she technically can hire whoever she wants, that’s not what the network really means. Deborah, who has waited decades for her shot, has never understood why Ava thinks the road shouldn’t be so obstacle-laden for the women coming up today. Deborah would have leaped at the chance to be “the woman behind the man behind the woman,” but Ava is not about it. With Steve, Ava argues, the show will be what it always was, except in a dress.
Ava explodes at Deborah for encouraging her ambition, but only until Deborah is inconvenienced by it. For the second time in two days, Deborah is told to her face that she is selfish. Her reply, which she will surely come to regret, is: “Yes, I am, and you have to be.”
Here the episode gets its title: Late Night, Deborah says, has to be “bulletproof.” Fantastic stuff by Hannah Einbender here when she starts to weep and Deborah (who also has some tears in her eyes, just saying!) demands she stop crying. Ava issues an ultimatum and Deborah says she is willing to lose Ava, too, on the altar of this dream, and Ava’s face just collapses. Ava realizes that Deborah will never do for her what Ava has done for Deborah, so she throws in Deborah’s face that she’s always lonely and will die that way, too. Oof.
Ava meets with Jimmy at his new office — he already had it professionally saged! — and tells him she has no idea what to do. “Now people are only looking for shows that already exist with one tiny tweak or huge global hits,” Jimmy tells her, and for this reason and so many others, he encourages her to keep working for Deborah. Be a staff writer for now; trust that she’ll get the promotion later. Deborah and Ava need each other, according to Jimmy.
But later, Ava has an idea. A much darker idea. I feel like it came on for her after she bought the cigarettes but before the champagne, no?
On the first day of work, Deborah (license plate: LADIVA98) is early to work. But Ava is earlier. Deborah’s joy at this is snuffed out almost instantly, as Ava coolly reports her latest insight: “I also realize it would be really, really bad if people realize you slept with the CEO of the company right before he gave you the show … So I think I am your head writer after all.” The girl has ICE in her fucking EYES. This is not the same Ava who groveled through the Ring doorbell camera for intel on her Wolfgirl ex! Deborah has a real Dr. Frankenstein-have-you-met-your-monster moment when Ava points out that this is what Deborah would do. Anything for the dream.
