Hulu ought to embark on a venture of selling Carrington Lane action figures and posters, with a balloon representing her in the Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade. Imagine the streets named after her – Carrington Lane Lane, a testament to her legacy. Statues in her honor should stand tall in every park, both public and private, across the land.
Carrington Lane, a motherly figure, has already been established as such. But in this week's episode, we discover that she's not just a mother but a literal one, to a preteen daughter with the same haircut as hers, a macabre pair reminiscent of the Gilmore Girls. Like her mother, Amabel, Carrington's daughter, is an outsider at school, which eats away at Carrington's heart. Adding to her woes is her strained relationship with Amabel's father – Sebastian, a gay friend she seemingly reversed The New Normal with, albeit without Nene Leakes' involvement. When a photo of the trio pops up during an important meeting, Carrington can't help but cry, prompting her client to call her out and leading to her resignation before she gets fired. As she storms out, however, the lawyer on the other side of the divorce (Lorraine Toussaint as Alberta Dome) intercepts her and offers her a card.
Despite losing that client, Carrington still has Chase. She meets him at his lavish house (a place Davina from Selling Sunset would spend at least three seasons trying to sell), to ensure he doesn't have any other skeletons in his closet. But as they chat over wine and she neggs him and his greasy man bun, the atmosphere becomes sensual. The show seems to believe that if they light enough fireplaces, any two characters could feasibly have sex – and they're right. The flirtation culminates in them recreating the hair-washing scene from Out of Africa. The slow-motion soapy lathering reminds us of what we all know to be true: Ryan Murphy missed his true calling to make soft-core porn and had to settle for television instead.
Just as he goes in for a kiss, she pulls back, saying she can't because she's trying to be a good mom. So instead, she decides to drive home drunk. A recap of this show often reads like Mad Libs: "Carrington Lane gets a DUI while singing 'Edge of Seventeen' while dressed like Lydia Tár." Conveniently for her, she still has the lawyer's card from earlier in the episode, who comes to her rescue and bails her out of the drunk tank. But why is she suddenly being so nice to her? Nobody is ever nice to Carrington Lane! It turns out that she wants to team up and asks Carrington to be her partner so they can take down Allura Grant together. This is music to Carrington's ears, of course, but not just because she hates Allura. She's finally being chosen.
As I often find myself doing, the conversation between Allura Grant and Milan revolves around whether or not to reveal the pregnancy to Chase. Milan ultimately decides to do so, and Allura agrees that Chase deserves to know, which ironically mirrors Allura's own secret embryo implantation. However, yet another episode passes without an update on that matter. When Milan calls Chase at the boxing gym (where boys, as it seems, belong), she begins, "Chase, I'm pregnant." A long pause follows before she adds, "And, um...with a baby. And it's yours." The clarification that she is pregnant "with a baby" was a surprise to me; what else could it be but a baby?
As we delve into the topic of children, Carrington's daughter's prospects for transferring to a better school are looking up—if she can write a compelling application essay about someone who overcame hardship. And what should she write about? You guessed it—her mother's past as a cutter and her current use of fancy gloves to hide the scars. Together, they outline how this experience changed her, her fear of her mother relapsing, and what would happen if Carrington "unalived" herself. While you might think "unalived herself" is cringey TikTok slang—and it is—I actually support its use here. I believe it reflects how this language, initially created as code to override a social media app's censorship, has entered our (and particularly young people's) vernacular. It may be the most realistic dialogue in the entire series thus far.
The next step in bringing Carrington and her daughter's lives together is making up with Amabel's gay father. We learn that they made it as a happy nontraditional family for nearly a decade until Carrington sued Sebastian's partner for child endangerment because they took her for a hike without her backup inhaler. Iconic behavior, indeed. Her description of the partner as a "circuit party cum dump who was draining your IRA so he could hoover pink cocaine off a urinal at Boy Bar" is equally iconic. A woman in Carrington's position should know almost none of those words, but I'm glad she does. Ultimately, this attempt at brokering peace ends with Carrington owning up to being a bitch but telling him that this is her trying and that she needs help raising their daughter.
So much has been happening with Carrington this week that I almost forgot that a man is dead and one of our leads might have killed him. I'm reminded when the police show up at the firm with a warrant to investigate the potential murder of the man who attacked Emerald, but the person they want to talk to is Allura. They tracked her phone to the area of the killing that night, but she explains to them that she was at Milan's before Dina bursts into the room to end the interrogation and tell the detective, "Believe you me, my dear, if one of us were to commit murder, we'd be much, much better at it."
In this week's episode, Brooke Shields portrays Juliana Morse, a character seeking a divorce due to her husband's unfathomable audacity of developing Alzheimer's disease. As usual, the weekly cases serve as a perplexing anticlimactic device, but I can imagine it as a dream role for any actress. Simply turning up for a day to sit in that conference room, delivering a Vagina Monologues-esque diatribe, and getting to spend time with Niecy Nash is a treat. However, this particular case is tough to invest in because, as her lawyers point out, what's the point? But she explains to them and her daughter that she simply desires freedom.
The case serves as a mere backdrop for the lawyers' own independent stories. Liberty's opposition to getting a prenup for her upcoming nuptials seems not just out of alignment with her profession but also with the character, who has been established as commitment-phobic. I would have thought she'd be eagerly embracing the chance to get a prenup, no? While hearing about Juliana's prenup helps her come around to the idea, the entire digression feels like a snoozefest that was shoehorned in. It's like Naomi Watts accidentally showed up on her off day and they scrambled to give her something to do.
The Alzheimer's storyline hits particularly hard with Dina, who has been taking care of her own ailing husband. She asserts that the vow to stay together in sickness and in health shouldn't have been made if Juliana didn't mean it. As she cares for him in their bedroom designed to look like a Cheesecake Factory, he tells her that he doesn't have much time left and is essentially preparing to die. She retreats to the kitchen, where Glenn unleashes some truly remarkable acting skills. In one fell swoop, she knocks everything off the kitchen counter, shatters multiple vases, and crumples to the ground in grief as the tea kettle whistles. And people wonder why everybody except Halle Berry was jumping at the chance to be in this insane show?
