#hacks fandom

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FIRST: WHY XENA MATTERS HERE (or where this sapphic ship that launched a million sapphic ships landed in Las Vegas)

Xena: Warrior Princess ran from 1995 to 2001.

On paper it was an action-adventure show about a reformed warlord and her traveling companion. In reality it was six seasons of two women being each other’s entire world, dying for each other repeatedly, while the network put “just friends” in every press release and the actual show dared them to keep a straight face about it.

The thing about Xena and Gabrielle is that their love story didn’t just exist in the subtext… it *became* the subtext. The template. The blueprint that every sapphic fandom that came after built on. Queer representation on television in the 1990s was rare, and when it existed it was almost never the central relationship. It was a side character, a special episode, something that could be quietly walked back. Xena didn’t do that. The love between these two women built episode by episode, death and resurrection by death and resurrection, until it became so culturally undeniable that the show started winking back at the fandom that had been doing the heavy lifting. The subtext didn’t go mainstream despite the network. It went mainstream because the fandom made it so impossible to ignore that the writers stopped pretending they didn’t see it too.

One of the clearest examples of that shift is Season 6, Episode 18: “When Fates Collide.” Caesar rewrites history using the Loom of the Fates, creating an alternate timeline where Xena is his Empress and Gabrielle is a celebrated playwright who has never met her. Strangers. They meet and it is immediate… Gabrielle tells Xena: “When I’m with you, this emptiness that I have felt my entire life is gone.” As Xena is facing crucifixion, Gabrielle burns the literal Loom of Fate to save her warrior. The episode’s thesis is that some things are meant to be across every timeline, across every version of your life, no matter what fate you’re handed. Two women who have never met, in a world designed to keep them apart, finding each other in the first ten minutes and unable to look away.

Then there’s the two-part series finale, “A Friend in Need.” Xena chooses to die in battle fighting the evil spirit Yodoshi, freeing 40,000 trapped souls. Gabrielle fights her way to the Fountain of Strength on Mount Fuji, stands beneath the falling water, and runs back to Xena. The only way to transfer the sacred water is through her own lips. Gabrielle kisses her… as droplets from the Fountain of Strength pass into the Warrior Princess. A kiss that gives life. And then Xena prevails, but chooses to remain dead so the souls can be freed. Gabrielle is left holding her ashes.

Lucy Lawless said after the finale that watching Gabrielle revive Xena with that mouth-to-mouth water transfer, filmed to look like a full kiss, was when she came to believe their relationship was “definitely gay.” She got there by watching it played back. Not while filming it. Not during six years of making the show. She saw the kiss and understood what the fandom had understood for years.

And still. Xena stayed dead. Gabrielle sailed away with her ashes. A fandom held that grief for twenty-five years.

What moves me most about that finale is Gabrielle’s devotion. She crossed every obstacle, fought through an army, nearly lost the ashes off a cliff, found the sacred water, and delivered it the only way she could. All of it to give Xena the kiss of life. That devotion carried the entire weight of six seasons of subtext and made it feel undeniably real… even without the show ever formally naming it.

Here is where it becomes a blueprint for Hacks. Not literally. But metaphorically? Ava gave Deborah back to herself. She came into Deborah’s life when her career was hollowing out, her voice was going stale, and the world was writing her legacy in unflattering terms. Ava gave her the kiss of life. And we see across the seasons how complicated and resentful Deborah can be about that, because Deborah doesn’t like needing anyone, and being saved by someone you love is the most disarming thing that can happen to a woman built the way Deborah Vance is built. But by the end of Season 4 and into Season 5, we’re watching Deborah finally stop resenting the salvation. The devotion of Gabrielle is in the room with us and she’s Gen Z and a Jack in the Box girlie named Ava.

And we can only hope… unlike how Xena ended… that this show gives them some time that has nothing to do with either of their careers. Some time that is just theirs.

Which brings me to the fact that the Hacks writers put Gabrielle herself in the final season. Renée O’Connor appears in Season 5 in an episode called “Number One Fan,” at a fan convention no less. The show that set the blueprint for sapphic subtext showed up in person for the finale. That tells you everything about what kind of love story this is. We’ll get there.

Ok yeah… I know about the fan written ending that was acted out by Lucy and Renée at the Xena Con… I’ve watched that video way more than is healthy…

Anyways…

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SEASON 5: THE TRUE LEGACY OF DEBORAH VANCE AND THE MATCHING SET OF SALT AND PEPPER SHAKERS

The final season. Madison Square Garden. Legacy on the line.

This season is about equal footing. Ava is no longer a subordinate. Not a protégé. Not an employee Deborah can move around a board. That is new for Deborah, who has spent her entire life making sure nobody stood beside her unless she put them there. Ava didn’t ask for the position. She just kept showing up until the ground leveled out beneath them. It’s Ava’s devotion.

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Episode 1: EGOT (the one with desperation is not a fitting legacy for Deborah Vance)

Deborah is doing something ridiculous to chase an EGOT, and Ava… who has spent the better part of a year feeling responsible for Deborah burning down her dream job and drinking herself into a fog in Singapore… has been saying yes to everything. Deborah tells her directly: stop agreeing with me. Push back. Challenge me. Because Deborah has been surrounded by yes people her entire career and she only fully understood what she was missing when Ava wasn’t there to be the one who said no. In the first episode of the final season, Deborah Vance explicitly asks Ava Daniels to be herself. That is not nothing. That is everything.

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Episode 2: Number One Fan (the one where we see how “fans” are super important to Deborah) ( or the one where I DIED DEAD WHEN RENÉE SHOWED UP!! 💀)

First, the Little Debbies. Furious with Deborah. She stopped engaging, stopped the newsletters, went dark… and the reason she doesn’t admit at the convention. She admits it to the one person who means the most. For most of her adult life she was always popular but never had real friends. She leaned on her fans as a substitute. And then Ava came along.

The convention is also the day Ava turns thirty. Deborah knows this without looking at a calendar. She is reminded of that last night in Singapore and the hurt she volleyed at Ava. So what does Deborah do? She throws Ava a surprise party… but not just any 30th birthday celebration. Favorite foods, the people who matter, cupcakes from a queer bakery, Jesse McCartney performing live because Ava’s mom is a horrible snoop hahaha!! Deborah made sure Ava felt her importance. Deborah, who does not do things for people without a reason, did all of this because yes, she genuinely hurt Ava in Singapore. But I think we can all agree that the way Deborah looked at Ava when everyone was paying attention to Jesse McCartney is not something easily described in words. Jean Smart should have an EGOT just for her nonverbal acting as Deborah Vance, for fuck’s sake!! I’m ok…

After the guests leave, Ava asks if the party was just guilt. Deborah denies it. And then they tell each other the truth.

Ava goes first: “You are my only friend. What hurt me was that you said it was weird, ‘cause I don’t think it is.”

She’s not ashamed. She is thirty years old and Deborah Vance is her closest person and she has made her peace with that. What wounded her wasn’t the fact. It was that Deborah thought the fact was something to be fixed.

Deborah doesn’t flinch. She admits she has spent most of her adult life without close friends. Always popular, always alone. She leaned on her fans because there was nobody else. And then Ava showed up.

Deborah calls Ava her best friend. Ava says: “I’m your number one fan.”

Think about where we started. Season 1, Ava barely knew who Deborah was. Called her a hack. Five seasons later she is sitting on a couch after her own birthday party saying out loud that this woman is her whole world, and she is not weird about it. And Deborah, who has spent seventy-something years keeping everyone at arm’s length, is saying it back. That couch scene is five seasons of growth made quiet and simple and devastating. We see the look on Deborah’s face. I ached for her. We felt it. It resonates as truth for us shippers because it is their truth.

I know I’m jumping around, I’m sorry guys.

The show also puts Renée O’Connor in this episode. Gabrielle herself. The reason I talked about Xena in the first place. This show knows its place and observes itself. I literally screamed and had to pause and cry for a bit. Watching my two favorite sapphic ships sailing next to each other is a whole other level of phenomenal for me.

I’m ok…

This is where the show completely understands its fans, the importance of us Avorah/Avadeb shippers, and how much we hope to not get hurt again. I love Jimmy and I love that we see why he puts his heart into what he does. He is a fan of stories and the characters we live with in those stories. After a delightfully real and somewhat awkward interaction with Renée, Jimmy pitches her on a Xena rewatch and she signs with his agency by the end of the episode. In an episode about fandom, about parasocial love, about the person who matters most… the Hacks writers put Gabrielle in the room. That is not a coincidence. That is a signal flare.

I sincerely hope we haven’t seen the last of Renée. Like, holy fuck!! If Lucy Lawless shows up in one of the final episodes, if Xena and Gabrielle are in the same room as Deborah and Ava in the final season of this show… that would be the most perfectly constructed circle in television history. I know, it’s a lot, but I’m shooting for the stars. Renée O’Connor showing up isn’t random and I will die on this hill.

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Episode 3: No New Tricks ( or the one with heterosexuality exits stage left)

Both women try dating men. The important thing is how each attempt functions as evidence, not a detour.

Ava meets Eli (I actually enjoyed his character), a sex worker with great manners, genuinely her ideal on paper. Completely on board until the second date, when she finds out he considers himself a magician who does sex work to pay the bills. She cannot do it. She is embarrassed by it. Honestly, same hahaha!! I think this is some of Deborah’s influence living in Ava’s nervous system now. Five seasons of Deborah’s standards, her taste, her understanding of what it means to be serious about your craft. Ava has absorbed it. Something in her has shifted and she cannot unshift it. Could I be reading into this? Fuck yes!!

Deborah meets Nico Hayes at his residency opening. Young (close to Ava’s age), genuine, nearly perfect for her. Deborah assumes it’s about publicity… because how can a young man want to date someone so much older, right? She tips off the paparazzi, Deborah being Deborah, career and legacy ambitions first, assuming Nico is operating the same way. She is genuinely shocked that he is legitimately interested in her. I loved this because it’s bringing Deborah into dating in a completely different time, with a man unlike the men of her generation. The fluidity of Nico in a Harry Styles type of way.

Deb is being pulled closer and closer to Ava’s world outside of their career and professional focus.

That night Deborah comes home giggling about inside jokes she and Nico already have, and Ava is in the kitchen helping her draft texts… no emojis, she advises. (I love emojis wtf?!) And there is a flash of jealousy on Ava’s face. Not about Nico specifically, but about the fact that someone else made Deborah laugh. A theme we saw with Marty making Deb laugh back in Season 1. Making Deborah laugh is something very sacred to Ava. That is Ava’s position, where she has found safety for five seasons: *I am the one who makes her laugh. I am the creative partner. I am the one who gets her.* Anyone else in that space, even briefly, lands wrong. She doesn’t examine why. She doesn’t want to. We see ya, Ava!!

The internet brands Deborah and Nico “Nicorah.” At first I felt a little upset… as fandoms go, 9.999 times out of 10 the show laughs at the fandom community. I’m used to the ridicule of finding things in the in-between spaces. I know I’m not the only one. I saw many of us sit with the feeling of “they used a version of our ship name to make fun of us.” I was sad for a few days, because our show feels so different than the others. We have an intimacy with these characters that runs deep.

After sitting with it, I remembered all the times the Avorah fandom could have been shoved off a cliff and wasn’t. Deborah and Ava always came back to each other. Even at the most heart-shredding moments, they came back together. *cough* Xena and Gabrielle *cough* Nicorah… Avorah. It didn’t have to happen, but it did. It’s a wink: *we see you, please know that we do, but we still have story to tell. Stay with us.* That is not accidental. I believe fully in our ship being canon, guys.

The episode also closes out Marty’s arc. Worth pausing on: back in Season 3, at the golf charity tournament, Marty sat with Ava at the bar and said: “I’ve known her a long time and over these past couple years, she’s really changed, and I’m pretty sure that’s right about the time you showed up, kid.” Marty has the longest history with Deborah of almost anyone. He was watching the same woman from the outside and telling Ava directly: *you did this.* In Season 5 he proposes… the most definitive possible gesture… and Deborah walks away from it. They leave each other with their usual joke about if neither of them is married by a hundred. Fond. Funny. Final. Marty is not for this evolved version of Deborah. He would have been ideal for the Deborah that existed before Ava. The heterosexual door doesn’t just close in Season 5. It gets a deadbolt, gently and with zero drama, which is almost more definitive than if it had ended badly.

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I know I’m skipping episodes 4 and 5, but I’m hitting certain points in certain episodes. Please add any you want in the comments. I know I’ve missed A BUNCH. 😘

Episode 6: QuikScribbl (the one where we all get to collectively hate AI and it shows growth in the intimacy of disagreeing together)

A tech investor wants to train an AI chatbot on Deborah’s material. Deborah is initially flattered. Ava is immediately and comprehensively opposed, armed with research on the environmental impact, the labor impact, the creative displacement. She lays all of it out while Deborah is in her bedroom folding Ava’s clothes.

Pause on that. Deborah is folding Ava’s clothes and listening. That is a domestic intimacy the show keeps showing us in Season 5 without commenting on it. Close proximity, little privacy, taking care of each other in the small unremarkable ways of people who have quietly become each other’s home base.

This episode takes a clear stance on AI and it is so true to Ava’s crusade to leave the world better than she found it. Deborah, true to form, initially sees opportunity. She brushes off Ava’s concerns: “everything’s unethical if you think about it too much.” And Ava holds her line. She tells Deborah flat out: “If you do this, that’s your choice, but don’t use my material or I’ll sue you.”

In Season 1 Ava would never. In Season 2 Deborah was the one doing the suing. The fact that Ava can say it now, calmly, without flinching, is five seasons of Deborah accidentally teaching Ava to hold her ground. I had a very perverse moment thinking Deborah was probably a bit aroused that Ava would sue her… let’s be real, Deb is litigious and sees suing someone as a form of intimacy hahaha!!

(If someone has fics about Deborah taking Ava to court and then screwing her brains out in the courtroom after everyone leaves, you are required to send it my way. Thank you in advance!!)

What actually changes Deborah’s mind isn’t Ava’s research. It’s when Sweeney implies the AI could eventually write Deborah’s jokes for her. (I’m fucking scared that this is where we are being driven, guys.) That’s the nerve. Deborah tells him: “Why are you trying to optimize the creative process? Art is only art because of the humanity behind it.” This is Deborah arriving at her own version of Ava’s ethics. Yes, she should have balked earlier, but there’s a real reckoning here about where her career and her legacy are walking a line. She walks away from the deal.

Afterward, Ava says she’s glad she got through to her. Deborah: “No, this was an amoral decision based on a nerd being a loser to me.” Ava rolls her eyes. Deborah almost smiles. They both know the truth is somewhere in the middle and neither of them needs to say so. Think of that growth between them. No knock-down fight. No one storming off. Two women on equal footing, disagreeing with integrity, landing in the same place anyway.

Then Deborah scraps the giant self-statue for the Diva and decides to build a proper comedy club instead. More on that in the theories section.

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Episode 7: Montecito (the one we’ve been waiting for and holy fucking fuck they fed it to us and called us good girls for eating so well. Pun fully and with the filthiest of intentions)😈

We see Deborah “naked”… the teeth falling out. Yeah, it’s an anxiety dream and Ava comes to the rescue. But we see Deb truly naked later on.

Deborah needs the white chiffon beaded ensemble Carol Burnett wore in *The Carol Burnett Show* finale for her MSG performance. She calls Bob Mackie. He sold it years ago. The buyer? Kelly Kilpatrick, played by Cherry Jones (fucking LOVE her sm)… a fellow comedian who despises Deborah partly because when Kelly came out at the VMAs, Deborah made jokes that skewed homophobic. Specifically: “She should go back into the closet and pick something else.”

The closet gets brought up a lot this season. 👀

Ava shows up at their lunch to return Deborah’s phone, which she left in the car again, a recurring domestic detail that keeps showing up in this season especially. She fusses at Deborah about her caffeine intake, how it keeps them both up. Kelly watches this exchange. Without a word spoken about it, we are shown how they have fit into life together and what their normal is. Unnamed. Domestic. Lived.

Kelly (and I believe she and Monica are the avatars for us Avorah/Avadeb shippers), openly gay for decades, sees immediately what the audience has been watching for five seasons. She assumes they’re together. And then Deborah opens her mouth to say she isn’t gay. What comes out is: “I’m… gay.”

Ok Ellen. 🙄

She needs the jumpsuit. She can work with this. If anyone asks, Deborah has a valid reason to lean into a situation that carries deep personal discomfort… see the Captain’s Wife episode in Season 2.

Kelly invites them for the weekend at her Montecito home with her wife Monica, played by Leslie Bibb (I love her!!). An age-gap couple. Kelly close to Deborah’s age. Monica close to Ava’s. A mirror… a huge sapphic-shaped, bright and shiny mirror in case we weren’t already seeing it.

I want to pause on Cherry Jones specifically. Her real-life history of relationships with younger women is well documented. It could have been anyone playing Kelly Kilpatrick, but she was an intentional choice. Anyone in the LGBTQIA+ community, let alone us sapphics, clocks that casting immediately. JPL knows this. The show is operating on multiple levels simultaneously, observing itself from the outside. I really fucking love it!!

On the walk to the front door, Ava notices Deborah texting someone. Deborah plays it off as Damien, but Ava knows Deb. I love these micro-scene moments!! Good story happens in those beats because that’s how life actually happens. Then, just nanoseconds before Kelly answers the door, Deborah drops it: “By the way, Kelly thinks I’m gay and you’re my secret wife, so we’re spending the weekend pretending to be lesbian lovers to get the jumpsuit.”

I screamed so fucking loud!! The door opens immediately. Ava is thrown in with zero runway.

The trope is troping until it isn’t.

Ava is introduced to the mirror couple in her new role. She’s immediately attracted to Monica and Deb clocks it of course. One room. One bed. Ava gains the high ground (call me Obi-Wan haha!!) and makes it transactional immediately: “You’re paying me for this.” Deb fires back: “You’re sleeping in the tub.” Both of them think they’re in control of what the distance is going to mean.

Kelly asks how they met. Ava tells the real story. Not a fabricated meet-cute. The actual story from the pilot. And she doesn’t have to change hardly anything to make it sound like a love story, because it already is one… minus the physical intimacy of a romantic couple. Kelly and Monica buy it completely. Of course they do. It’s grayed truth.

Then Ava asks for the kiss. Just a peck, to sell the bit. Deborah gives her one. Quick, controlled, over before it starts. Then Ava goads her: “You were so confident on the car ride up, and now suddenly you’re shy?” Enjoying having Deb at her mercy for once. And Deborah, because Deborah cannot back down from a challenge, leans in. What starts as performance becomes something else in the middle. If this were a normal fake-dating trope, Deb would have stood up and either spilled the beans or stormed off. She didn’t. You can see the exact moment it shifts on her face. She is in it. And then she realizes she is in it, and she retreats. That is not someone tolerating a bit. That is someone who just touched the edge of a truth they are not ready for.

Jean Smart said: “It is the first and last time you see Deborah Vance completely helpless and at Ava’s mercy, where she cannot fight back. She cannot talk back.” Not helpless because of the jumpsuit. Helpless because Ava, for one whole weekend, is holding all of Deborah’s truth in her hands without fully understanding how much of that truth has to do with herself.

The label conversation at the dinner table. Hold up. Before I get into this scene, I keep thinking about Season 3, Episode 4, “Join the Club,” where Deborah is at a table with comedian men she thought she respected. Ava wasn’t there, but Deborah defended Ava… or maybe she defended both herself and Ava. This was Deborah’s world: the one where cisgender, straight, white men ruled and she knows how to play the game. Until those men started tearing down members of the LGBTQIA+ community. That was a line she couldn’t cross. Not anymore. What I found most fascinating was Deborah using the phrase “an elite few who are attracted to both genders” with no labels, notably. Labels are concrete things for the Boomer generation, especially when the men at that table proved the point by mocking them.

Labels are not a friendly thing for someone in the closet hoping to acquire a jumpsuit. At the Montecito dinner, Deborah uses the word “lesbo” casually, trying to find her footing, and watches every face shift. She recalibrates. “Labels are stupid… unless it’s Pucci!” Gets the laugh. The moment of normalcy for Deb. Moves on. But something registered. She is sitting in the domestic heart of a life she has never allowed herself, and it looks warm and real and familiar.

Then Monica asks if Deborah straps. And Ava, gleefully: she’s a pillow princess who also loves eating Ava’s ass. Deborah’s face. Hahaha I was laughing so hard!! The information landing like a file her brain has no folder for. Absolutely hilarious and also the show using a punchline to smuggle something real: Deborah encountering the physical language of sapphic intimacy and not knowing what to do with what it does to her. The jolts to her system keep coming and it becomes harder to hold onto whatever she uses to escape them.

The drinking. The dancing. All four of them in the living room. Deborah, loosened by alcohol, turns to Kelly and says quietly, watching Ava: “Look at our girls.” Did the plot of getting a jumpsuit require Deborah Vance to claim Ava as *one of our girls*? No. That is someone living in a moment they haven’t let themselves have before. That quiet line could have been left on the editing floor. It wasn’t. Things are intentional because JPL knows where they’re heading. And they know who is watching every detail.

The hot tub. This is where the fake-dating trope would have offered a natural exit. “You guys go ahead, I’m turning in early.” Nothing would have seemed out of place. Deborah doesn’t do that. She gets in. Submerges everything below the waterline. Keeps her head just above. And sits in the discomfort of two women living openly in a life she’s spent decades walking away from, while Monica openly flirts with Ava right in front of her. She stays. That means something. Or it’s just the jumpsuit in the fucking closet.

Back inside, Ava and Deborah alone. Deborah goes back to the dinner conversation… a legitimate pressure valve.

Deborah: “Don’t you dare bring up A-S-S after you said I eat it!”

Ava: “You will not turn this around on me. You brought me here under false pretenses, which isn’t surprising, ’cause I know you were lying. I have confirmation that you were in Beverly Hills last week.”

Deborah: “I actually wasn’t, but that’s not the point.”

Ava: “I thought we were finally being honest with each other.”

This is the real wound underneath the whole weekend. Not the fake relationship. Not the jumpsuit. Ava thought they were past the lying. That is a specific kind of hurt that has nothing to do with a professional relationship. It’s the friction of deep betrayal in a push-pull situationship that had finally started feeling real.

The kitchen. Late. Deborah catches Ava and Monica about to kiss. Walks Ava back to the bedroom. First thing out of her mouth:

Deborah: “How dare you cheat on me!”

Ava: “I am not cheating on you, because we are not in a relationship! It’s a lie, which is your specialty!”

Deborah: “Well, if you fuck that nympho trophy wife and Kelly finds out, I will never get that jumpsuit!”

Ava: “That’s not true, because Kelly and Monica are open!”

Deborah: “Well, we are monogamous! That’s what works for me!”

I have watched this scene so many times to make sure it wasn’t a fever dream. Deborah leads with *how dare you cheat on me.* Not *you’re going to ruin the plan.* The jumpsuit comes third… after the possessiveness, after the claim, after *we are monogamous.* There is no strategic version of Deborah Vance that needs their fake relationship to be sexually exclusive in order to obtain a costume. Unless something else is happening entirely.

And Ava defending herself… *I am not cheating on you because we are not in a relationship*… is Ava trying desperately to hold a line she built for herself. She has already been here. She knows what this costs.

Monica and Kelly come in. Monica says: “When you’re in a relationship with an older, more powerful woman, it’s hard to find your voice.”

Deborah, without thinking: “She is my voice.”

That. Right. There. The biggest truth, offered up without a net. Ava Daniels is Deborah Vance’s voice. Deborah never intended for anyone but Ava to know this fact. Kelly and Monica, our avatars who have been seeing everything all weekend, are witness to it now. Because true things keep escaping Deb before she can catch them.

Despite the bathtub arrangement, they end up in the same bed. Ava settles in: “I hate when we go to bed angry.” This is shown to not be a new thing. They’ve gone to bed angry before. Just like a couple. And then they sleep.

Morning. Ava has coffee with the sapphic sage who is Kelly.

Kelly tells her: “For someone like Deborah, letting her guard down is the opposite of safety. Don’t force intimacy with someone who isn’t built for it yet.” Kelly is framing this as relationship advice. Because she is watching a relationship. (All of us avorah/avadeb shippers collectively scream from being so seen)

Then the table of truth-ish. Deborah tells Ava about the mass. The procedure she hid. She shows Ava paperwork. I have watched this scene multiple times. Jean Smart’s face is doing something very specific. Deborah is performing reassurance. She is showing Ava enough truth to make the lie hold. I believe she showed Ava a document carefully chosen to close the conversation rather than open it. I believe Deborah has cancer. I believe she knows it. I believe Ava does not have the full picture.

Hannah Einbinder said Ava is devastated she wasn’t able to be there for it. “Why would you hide this from me?” That is not a professional question. That is someone who expected to be called. Like a life partner would. The way it’s left felt too easy, too quick, and something hangs in the background.

When they confess to Kelly and Monica, the moment lifts as if a weight has been set down… maybe…

When Deborah says she is not gay during that confession… I actually think that is true. I don’t think Deborah Vance is a lesbian. I think she has spent most of her life without the language, the safety, or the permission to figure out what she is. Remember, in season 2 The Captain’s Wife Deb said being with a woman was never seen as an option and then we proceed to watch Deb thrive for a bit amongst a ship full of sapphics.

Anyway, we watched her flinch from a word at that dinner table and retreat behind a Pucci joke. We watched her choose to get in the hot tub and stay. The label conversation is not Deborah lying. It is Deborah genuinely not knowing which box applies and not wanting a box at all. She said as much. Maybe she is bisexual. Maybe she is fluid. Maybe the only thing she knows for certain is that she is specifically and profoundly in love with one particular person and has never felt anything like it before and does not have a word for that yet.

So when she confesses the fake relationship… the lie was the performance. The fake marriage, the fake dating, whatever la bel they landed on. What she cannot say is that the rest of it was completely real. There is a lie inside the truth and a truth inside the lie. And this whole thing could have been resolved halfway through the weekend. Deborah could have said at any point: *this is ridiculous, we’re just colleagues who live together, I’m sorry for lying, can I please have the jumpsuit.* She didn’t. That is not a woman running a con. That is a woman who could not bring herself to leave.

Kelly doesn’t believe the confession. Of course she doesn’t. She has been watching them all weekend. After the episode aired, Cherry Jones said: “I think they really are lovers. They’re just closeted, and they can’t deal with it.”

That quote got published. The showrunners let it get published. Cherry Jones is our avatar in this episode… the witness saying the quiet part out loud on behalf of everyone who has been watching this show for five seasons. And the show keeps doing this all season. Deborah literally in a closet in “No New Tricks,” calling out to Ava to tell her where she is. On the nose enough to be funny. Loaded enough to mean something.

The car ride home. Ava and Deborah agree, laughing, that a relationship between them could never work anyway, because Deborah is entirely out of Ava’s league. It lands as a joke. But before the joking, if you pay attention to Ava in the silence before she breaks it, you can watch her building the wall back up. Because it is safer in there. Because she has already survived this once and she knows what it costs.

The episode ends on the song “Seabird” by the Alesia Brothers… a song about emotional isolation and longing for connection. Almost unbearably on the nose for an episode where a woman spent an entire weekend hiding underwater, keeping her head just barely above the surface, trying to convince herself she could still breathe normally. But she got to live in her deepest truth for a small amount of time. That can’t leave her now. Montecito shifted something. And yes, Deborah got her jumpsuit… out of the closet of an openly sapphic woman with a younger wife. 🤔

Jen Statsky said in a Collider interview: “by waiting until Season 5, when there’s all this history and all they’ve been through, that makes you realize like, oh, yeah, this is a long, long love story that has been told.” *(Collider, May 9, 2026)*

A long, long love story. That’s not my reading. That’s the showrunner. On the record.

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THE THEORY: WHAT I THINK IS COMING (or the one where I’ve gone full tilt into delirium)

We have three episodes left. Anything is possible. And we have to remember that however far Deborah has come, her default settings are still in there. The armor is thinner. It is not gone. The next three episodes could make things better or worse before they land wherever they’re landing. That is just who Deborah Vance is and the show has never pretended otherwise.

On the medical situation: I’ve watched the Montecito truth-ish table scene multiple times. Jean Smart’s face when she shows Ava that paperwork… I can’t let it go. Deborah would be far more upbeat if it were truly good news. Her energy is low, almost defeated, like someone who told the truth-ish the night before and knows it doesn’t change the fact that she has cancer and could lose Ava and people would start treating her like a weak elderly person. She has to maintain whatever control she has left. So she shows Ava truth-ish proof to make the lie hold. I think Deborah has cancer. I think she knows it. I think she showed Ava a document carefully chosen to close the conversation rather than open it.

Think about why. If Ava knows the full truth, everything changes. The dynamic. The way Ava looks at her. The way Deborah gets to feel in Ava’s presence. Deborah cannot afford that before MSG. And she is telling herself she needs Ava to be Ava for professional reasons… because she needs the writing, needs to be challenged, needs the real Ava and not a grieving one. That is true. It is also a lie. She needs Ava to be Ava because she loves her and cannot bear to be looked at differently by the one person who has ever seen her so devastatingly clear.

Jean Smart said about the ending: “I never asked them in all these years how the show was gonna end. I wanted to be surprised. But when they first talked to me about how it was going to end, I was not sure I was happy about it. But I said, hey, you know, I trust you guys. I always have. It always turns out great. And it did. So now I think it’s kind of perfect.” And then: “There’s a twist at the end. But I won’t spoil it.” *(Variety, April 2026)*

That is not the quote of someone whose character rides off into the sunset without complication. And Lucia Aniello has said: “A lot of things we’ve been building on for all five seasons finally pay off.” *(Deadline, April 2026)*

Ok… here are the three ways I think that could go.

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Option 1: The love is never named beyond friendship.

Legacy intact. MSG happens. The Diva is built. Ava carries the torch. Deborah dies. I do not think this is where they are going. This show has been too deliberate and too brave to close that door without opening it first. But I am including it because finales can disappoint… Stranger Things, I will never forgive you, they had SO MUCH potential and they stuck the landing into a wall… and I am not in the writers’ room.

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Option 2: The full truth at MSG.

They still haven’t cracked the opener. What is the first thing Deborah says when she walks out onto that stage? The answer the show has been building toward since Season 1 is the thing Ava taught her: truth is the funniest thing there is. The most radical thing a comedian can do with a microphone is stop being funny for one moment and just tell the truth.

So maybe the opener is both truths at once. The illness. The love. Said out loud in front of her Little Debbies, who have always been a significantly queer community, the quiet witnesses to who Deborah really is. Something in the vein of: *you all thought I lost my mind when I burned my late night show to the ground. I didn’t. I was telling the truth. I was saying there are two things I am not willing to lose. My voice. And Ava Daniels. And Ava Daniels is my voice. And also… I’m dying. And I have some rewriting to do before I go.*

Then Paris. The real bread. (We’ve seen the BTS pics and the one with the Eiffel Tower in the background.) The baguette. Back to a throwaway line in the Pennsylvania woods in Season 3 that was actually a promise Deborah was making to herself about what she needed to do before she ran out of time to do it. Deborah passes. Her legacy lives on through everything she and Ava built together: the Little Debbies, the Diva, the comedy club not just for the big names but also for up-and-coming performers, the passing of the torch to Ava’s own show… an updated *Who’s Making Dinner*, queer and grounded and real, dedicated to Deborah Vance. Ava begins her own legacy carrying the one Deborah left her.

This is the Xena ending corrected. Xena died before they named it. Gabrielle held the ashes. The fandom held that grief for twenty-five years. Hacks cast Gabrielle in the final season. They know that history. They are deciding which side of it to land on. Option 2 says: we are going to name it before the death. We are going to let the love be said out loud while there is still time. And then we are going to Paris to eat real bread.

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Option 3: Everything in Option 2. Plus a twist.

The MSG show. The truth. Paris. The baguette. Except at the end we find out it was a misdiagnosis. Deborah is not dying. She gets however long she gets, which might be a lot. And now she has named everything she needed to name and she gets to keep it. Deborah and Ava. The Diva. The legacy. The love. All of it.

The twist Jean Smart mentioned.

I’ll be honest: Option 2 wrecks me and I think it is probably where this is going. *She had to make peace with it.* That is grief work. That is not someone who found out their character gets a happy ending with no cost attached.

But Option 3 is the one that would make me lose my entire mind in the best possible way. Because it would mean that Deborah Vance, after a lifetime of everything being taken from her, gets to keep something. Gets to keep the person. Gets to walk into whatever time she has left having said the true thing out loud and still being here for the answer.

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Either way, Hacks will have made television history. Not just for queer representation, though it will have done that. But for showing that women in their seventies get to fall in love. That significant age gaps don’t disqualify love. That armor can come off after a lifetime of wearing it. And that legacy is not only what you made… it is who you made it with.

We will have watched something historic. And we will have seen it coming from the very first episode, when two women who couldn’t understand each other got on a bus together and couldn’t figure out how to leave.

Or.

I could absolutely be wrong about it all.

Regardless, I have loved this show and this beautiful ship of ours that will live forever in all of our fics. I love the passion and storytelling of JPL, Jean, and Hannah. I love that Jean found Hannah. Honestly, I think I love that aspect more than the show.

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SOURCES AND CITATIONS

Jen Statsky on “Montecito” being a long, long love story: *Collider*, May 9, 2026.

https://collider.com/hacks-season-5-episode-7-lucia-aniello-jen-statsky-interview/

Jen Statsky on the dream changing: *Hollywood Reporter*, May 2025.

https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/tv/tv-features/hacks-season-4-finale-deborah-ava-season-5-interview-1236232828/

Jean Smart on Deborah’s vulnerability in “Montecito”: *Collider*, May 9, 2026.

https://collider.com/hacks-season-5-episode-7-hannah-einbinder-jean-smart-interview/

Hannah Einbinder on Ava’s reaction to Deborah’s medical secret: *TVLine*, May 2026.

https://www.tvline.com/2167165/hacks-hannah-einbinder-interview-season-5-episode-7-montecito/

Cherry Jones on whether Deborah and Ava are really lovers: *TV Insider*, May 2026.

https://www.tvinsider.com/1262938/hacks-season-5-deborah-ava-kiss-cherry-jones-leslie-bibb-lesbian-montecito/

Hannah Einbinder on Ava’s “not over your ex” moment: *Variety*, 2025.

https://variety.com/2025/tv/news/hannah-einbinder-interview-hacks-deborah-ava-romance-1236390330/

Episode transcript, “Montecito”: TV Show Transcripts.

https://tvshowtranscripts.ourboard.org/viewtopic.php?f=1327&t=77076

Marty on Deborah’s change: *TV Insider*, May 2024.

https://www.tvinsider.com/1137515/hacks-deborah-marty-christopher-mcdonald-happy-gilmore-golf/

Lucia Aniello on the birthday party: *Collider*, May 9, 2026.

https://collider.com/hacks-season-5-episode-7-lucia-aniello-jen-statsky-interview/

Jean Smart on not liking the ending at first: *TV Week*, April 2026.

https://www.nowtolove.com.au/entertainment/hacdk-season-5-finale/

Jean Smart on the twist: *Variety*, April 2026.

https://variety.com/2026/tv/features/hacks-final-season-jean-smart-heart-surgery-lesbian-episode-1236706725/

Lucia Aniello on five seasons paying off: *Deadline*, April 2026.

https://deadline.com/2026/04/hacks-jean-smart-hannah-einbinder-season-5-finale-ending-1236771311/

Gabrielle/Xena kiss scene, “A Friend in Need Part II”: Hercules and Xena Wiki.

https://hercules-xena.fandom.com/wiki/A_Friend_in_Need_Part_II

Lucy Lawless on Xena and Gabrielle being “definitely gay”: *Wikipedia*, Xena: Warrior Princess, citing Lawless interview with *Lesbian News* magazine, 2003.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xena:_Warrior_Princess

“When Fates Collide” episode details and Gabrielle dialogue: Hercules and Xena Wiki.

https://hercules-xena.fandom.com/wiki/When_Fates_Collide

“A Friend in Need Part II” finale dialogue: *IMDb*.