#hacks thoughts

The opening of this episode was amazing. Incorporating the song from the end of last season, and then having those first few minutes being mostly silent. Even Deborah’s first confrontation with Ava is quiet, although deadly. I was on edge. I think this is one of my favorite episodes so far of this series.

Damn, Deborah brought out the c-word.

I was surprised that Ava said that Deborah doesn’t have any feelings. We all knew Ava was doing this for Deborah, but it turned quickly to acting out of hurt.

Poor Jimmy.

Um, why is Deborah going through Ava’s dirty underwear???

Confirmed that Ava was living at Deborah’s once they went back to L.A. So, did Ava tell Ruby to ship her stuff to Deborah’s house, or was there a stop at a storage unit along the way? Because I would have loved to have heard that convo with Ava telling Ruby that she is more permanently moving in with Deborah.

During the harassment training Ava mentioned that Deborah told her she needed to dress for her body, and then Deborah mentioned the nude photo that Ava took in Season 1 and how freckled Ava was. Lady, how long were you looking? I don’t know. We already know your obsession with Ava’s hands. And now her body as well? I think that’s kinda gay of you. Not to mention your flinching at Heaumeaux (homo).

When Deborah first got up on stage for the press conference and started dancing, you know Ava was having cruise ship flashbacks.

Speaking of the press conference, I thought it showed really well how this isn’t like Vegas for Deborah. She may have been big in Vegas, but anything she did wasn’t making national news. This is a MUCH bigger spotlight with more eyes and having to bend to sponsors. Deborah is in over her head. She doesn’t have the power here. Adding to this Bob Lipka confronting Deborah at his party. He isn’t Marty who she can fuck around with. He could blacklist her worse than Frank.

What broke me during this episode was Deborah’s cruelty. We’ve seen and heard of times when Deborah was mean, but not like this. Throwing Ava’s drug use past in her face and humiliating her by having the drug test request in public is a new low. Then, later how she physically hurts Ava with her nails.

We also learned that Deborah’s special was not as cathartic as it seemed at the end of Season 2. At that time, it felt like she really let go of a lot of her anger over what happened (even if seeing Kathy in Season 3 made her hurl), but clearly Deborah is still holding on to her past and all the pain that comes with it.

Ava’s “I don’t give a fuck about the Bates Motel” was just like her “I don’t give a fuck about the Obenshain-McMillens.”

“We are in the yard where it happens.” Jimmy, you are such a nerd with your reference to Hamilton.

“I’m always happy to take orders from women.” Ugh, Bob, you jerk.

But even while hating Ava, Deborah still protected her from Bob. Deborah has known too many guys like him.

The PR lady saying that Deborah “loves women.”  Oh, come on. Like a gay anvil dropping from the sky.

Love Winnie so much.

“You broke my heart.” / “You broke my heart first.”  Well, both you bitches broke my heart.

Deborah trying to act tough like she doesn’t care, but then that subtle scared look when Ava says “good” after Deborah said she would never speak with Ava again after the show is done. Jean Smart, you genius actor. Give her all the awards already.

Love is commitment to the spiritual growth of another person. Love must involve knowledge, trust, commitment, care, affection, responsibility and respect. And, in hooks’ opinion, love has an unparalleled ability to heal. 

This passage just screams everything I want for Deborah. It perfectly encapsulates why I think her opening up to the love that Ava offers is so vital to her journey. 

“Love heals. When we are wounded in the place where we would know love, it is difficult to imagine that love really has the power to change everything. No matter what has happened in our past, when we open our hearts to love we can live as if born again, not forgetting the past but seeing it in a new way, letting it live inside in a new way. We go forward with the fresh insight that the past can no longer hurt us.” 

ayy you and @trying-to-get-somewhere-real both shared the brain cell on this one so here goes with some (potentially hot) takes!

blorbo (favorite character, character I think about the most)

if it's not clear by the profile pic, ava damn daniels. we're incredibly similar people at times and she's the kind of queer disaster representation i've been missing all my life. scarily relatable, unnervingly attractive, and overall attainable loml.

scrunkly (my “baby”, character that gives me cuteness aggression, character that is So Shaped)

if i wasn't committed to choosing different characters for each of these, it would also be ava, but because i am, it's gotta be deb. mainly bc even when she's scary she looks scarier than she is, and gives such like, loyal, protective, caring vibes? (for proof of cuteness aggression, see new eyes at 26:50)

scrimblo bimblo (underrated/underappreciated fave)

josefina!! she's so dry and witty and seems to be very close to deb and i want to know more about how long she's been running the house and her opinionated gay niece.

glup shitto (obscure fave, character that can appear in the background for 0.2 seconds and I won’t shut up about it for a week)

was gonna go for cute casino waitress but it's probably gonna be ruby tbh. she seems like a really cool person! it's clear ava likes her a ton and as much as they didn't work, she seems to get ava pretty well. i really hope she's in more of season 2 so we can flesh out more of what went on there and get more color about Ava's LA life. also lorenza izzo is beautiful and she and hannah look very good together and i personally would love to see more of ava kissing women

poor little meow meow (“problematic”/unpopular/controversial/otherwise pathetic fave)

honestly marty. the side of deborah he brings out is fascinating and kind of neat. he feels very much like deborah's "devil you know", and regardless of how much i like him as a human being, he's an interesting, well written character with complex motivations and is clearly at least half as endeared by deborah as the rest of us are. it's obvious he's in love with her and i want to know why when he could've had deborah for the past twenty-plus years, he's had a revolving door of twenty-somethings that haven't come close to challenging him the way she does. it's clearly a complicated and mutual denial but sometimes i want to bop him over the head with a rubber mallet and just give his dumb, rich, money laundering butt a stern talking to.

horse plinko (character I would torment for fun, for whatever reason)

a solid tie between lemony snicket and the hotel concierge who refuses to give ava her well-deserved toothpaste. they seem like they would scream in an amusing way.

eeby deeby (character I would send to superhell)

Finally!

So that's where that's been.

She wouldn't have done that for Marty. Avorah4Evr!

This is long, I know. The tl;dr of it is rewatching this episode with a different mindset made me see this episode differently and enjoy it a lot more than I did the first time.

I decided to rewatch this episode before writing my thoughts, keeping in mind the posts by @sapphicscholar and @sapphcblues. My initial thoughts were that the episode was just okay and it didn’t hit me the way I wanted it to, especially with all the hype from jpl and cast about how we wouldn’t see the ending coming and what a shock it would be. By the end, I thought, “that’s it?” Now on rewatch, I do see the episode differently. There was a lot going on that I didn’t get the first time around.

We start with how desperate Deborah is to get out of this contract that she is going to a bottom of the barrel lawyer. I do appreciate that they address how Deborah may have not looked as closely at the 18-months provision in her contract when she is such a “contract hawk” and Deborah responding “you never think you are going to give up your dream job.” She wanted it so badly she was blind to some of the terms, which makes this loss even more devastating. It’s like how she didn’t know what was in the contracts that said Frank owned everything with their sitcom—in essence, owned her and her way of making money. Here she is again being bound to contract terms against her when she thought she had something amazing.

The scene with Ava and Jimmy, we find out that Jimmy knows about Deborah and Bob Lipka—he says to Ava, “I don’t need any more of my clients doing stuff with him.”

Along with Josefina’s birthday on the calendar, there is also what appears to be a doctor’s appointment. Also, is Ava living with Deborah again at the L.A. house? She wouldn’t have income to pay for the rent at the Americana, and then later, we find out they are in Singapore for months (8 months according to Paul), which is a long time to pay expensive rent on an empty apartment.

“If I’m not on that stage I have nothing.” (Sounds very familiar to something said in an email a few seasons ago…) Everything is about the external validation for Deborah—the validation from strangers: the people from Florida, the QVC shoppers, the Late Night viewing audience. Ava is too personal and knows her too well, and she is not yet willing to let Ava in to see the really ugly stuff. I’m no world-famous comedienne but as someone who has had my own trauma when I was younger, who has used work as a source of validation, and can be very shut off like Deborah when I feel someone getting too close, it is like feeling the worst things about yourself all at once and you have no idea why anyone wants to be around you or wants to know you personally. Deborah has the means to hide, so she does. Seeing everyone around Deborah grow into much healthier people (Ava, DJ, Marcus) highlights how much Deborah has not personally dealt with her shit. I think Season 2 was a kind of misdirect to make us as viewers think she was working through all of her trauma as she was workshopping the new show, but being able to tell a funny story about something bad that happened to you isn’t the same as dealing with the real feelings about what happened. It seems like it could be a defense mechanism instead—if I tell this story and people laugh, then I can tell myself it wasn’t that bad and not have to deal with the ugly parts of it.

“18 months is a long time for me.” Even though they had that talk in the woods in Season 3 about Deborah not having much time left, I think Ava’s youth doesn’t allow her to grasp the reality of that. Maybe after Deborah’s fake death, she will get it.

What is Marcus doing working at a solar factory? I thought they offered him a job at QVC, and he was going with the DV Industries sale?

KFH you genius, you. In Deborah’s stay-at-home montage, when we see Deb eating the cookies in bed, I’m pretty sure those are the zebra pajamas Deborah is wearing in Season 1 when we see her start her day at 5:15 am. On second viewing, I do appreciate this montage more, especially if compared to the one in the beginning of Season 3. In Season 3, Deborah isn’t sleeping and clearly misses Ava, but there is still a feeling of “what’s next?” Here, I doubt she is even thinking about Ava and is doing everything she can to NOT think about her feelings.

I don’t want to see Marty and Deborah together romantically, but I do like them as friends.

OMG—I just realized there was an Ace Ventura Pet Detective callback. In Season 1, the slot machine Ava wins on with George’s last dollar is an Ace Ventura slot machine, and then later she imitates Ace Ventura when she tells George how is she not a “looooser.”

In another forum, someone said Deb’s story has some similarities to Debbie Reynolds. Debbie Reynolds, at one point, owned a hotel in Vegas. I wonder if they are going to take that path as Deb’s next thing. I kind of hope not because in Debbie Reynolds’s case, she lost a bunch of money from it and had to declare bankruptcy.

When Ava starts rattling off about all the meditation and then the sensory deprivation chamber where you can be alone with your thoughts for hours, Deborah looks horrified. She is also sitting very closed off, curled into herself. Even though she invited Ava to be with her on this trip, Deborah is stuck in this push-pull of wanting Ava close but also wanting to push her away. I don’t think she wants to think about her feelings for Ava, either. We never see them alone together. Even if they are sitting by themselves, there are other people around them. The only moment we see them alone together is when Ava thinks Deborah is dead and runs to Deborah’s room. Ava hugs her, and Deb is like no, no, no and pushes her away.

I know some people were disappointed with Deborah being drunk all the time, but it honestly tracks given that her dad was an alcoholic and DJ even said Deborah was an addict, just at the time, it was addicted to getting laughs. In Season 3, Deborah also said when her father drank he wasn’t very nice. She is repeating the pattern with Ava. In the scene on the boat, the man says he is going to get Deborah more champagne, and she responds, “or anything.” That is the sign of an alcoholic—an alcoholic isn’t going to care what the drink is as long as it is alcohol. And then the defensiveness about drinking too much.

“Why are you still here?” with the start of Young Deb When She Was Happy playing underneath. Oh, Deb. That girl loves you so much, and you refuse to see it. And you are drunk. Jean is so good in this scene on the boat. She’s purposefully picking a fight with Ava to make Ava go away, and when Ava says that she will go, Deborah has that look of “see, everybody leaves” even if she is the one pushing people to leave her. Also, there was a lot of projecting there. Ava does have friends. Deborah doesn’t have friends except for Ava. Saying Ava needs a he/she/they-friend and being mad about it. Ava has had those, and she always comes back to Deborah. Who has Deborah had? Does she know what she wants?

I love that this season they had Jean say both cunt and motherfucker when she was so scandalized by both those words during the Season 2 promo interview on Buzzfeed.

This episode was better than Episode 3, but it doesn’t top Episode 1 and 2 for me and doesn’t touch anything from Season 1. I was hoping for the connection between the episodes this season like there was in Season 1, but I’m not feeling it.  For example, Episode 3 was all about trying to create this big opening for the new show and the next episode it isn’t even seen or referenced again.  This episode had many moments that I loved, but I didn’t love the episode as a whole like I did with Season 1 episodes. More below the line….