Good Trouble – Playing The Game

By: Marnie Faith

A lot went down in this week’s episode starting with Alex (Dustin Ingram) being able to add racist to his Tinder bio, right next to misogynist and all round jerk. Davia (Emma Hunton) found love in a rather questionable place whilst Alice (Sherry Cola) had to simultaneously deal with a toilet roll epidemic and confront her feelings towards helping to plan her best friend’s wedding. Wedding planning is tough enough, but throw in the fact Alice remains in love with bride to be Sumi (Kara Wang), it’s understandable why she ended the episode crying in a cubicle..

The most stand-out moment to me this week was the fact Davia, a plus-sized self-loving queen, got her own sex scene. In a medium where romance and intimacy feels as though it’s reserved for the couples who fit conventional standards of beauty, to see Davia look so sexy and confident in herself throughout the scene felt like such a breakthrough. There was no pillow talk that consisted of her being insecure with the guy in the equation telling her how he still loves her regardless of her weight. No. Instead, we were given well lit, close up scenes of her and friend-with-benefits Jeff (Chris Sheffield) making out. We were even gifted the pair spooning post-sex. Davia’s situation is less than ideal, though. Jeff, her self-confessed hometown sweetheart, comes to LA on a semi-regular basis. It’s during these trips the pair continue to hook up, whilst Davia continues to further develop feelings for him. You may wonder, “What’s so bad about that?” It’s the fact Jeff is married. To add insult to injury, Davia even sang at their wedding. She justifies their secret affair by claiming that the marriage is an unhappy one and he makes her feel good about herself. When confronted by Mariana (Cierra Ramirez), she simply brushes it off and assures her to “keep doing you boo and I’ll keep doing me.”

Whilst Davia is upstairs sleeping with Jeff, Alice is downstairs trying to catch a break. If she’s not fetching endless supplies of toilet rolls because she promised her residents it to be free, she’s forking out a $90 service fee for a WIFI problem that doesn’t even get resolved. All of this is whilst the Coterie has no money. It’s a wonder how she’s lasted four episodes before reaching breaking point. Between trying to mother every single resident and dealing with the fact the best friend she’s still very much in love with is getting married to someone that isn’t her, I’m desperate for Alice to catch the break she rightfully deserves. It’s evident she tries to take the maternal role in the community, but even mothers have their limits. For Alice, it was someone flushing an excessive amount of toilet roll, which resulted in a clogged toilet that she knew no one else would sort. Eventually, after a deliverance of tough love from Malika (Zuri Adele), who’s quick to remind her that she isn’t “the Mother Theresa of ass wiping,” a house meeting is called. Alice breaks the news that she’ll no longer be able to provide toilet paper and it thankfully goes down better than she expected.

This maternal role Alice has undertook is clear to run deeper than providing basic toiletries. Malika reminds her of how much she’s done for her, jogging her memory their first encounter. She’s quick to reiterate the fact it was Alice who took Malika in when she was living in her car and even went as far as giving her three months to clean her act up, get a better job and start paying rent before she’s back out on the streets.

Outside of the whirlwind of sex and breakdowns happening at the Coterie, Callie (Maia Mitchell) finds herself in a rather tense BBQ with her work gang. The clerks are trapped playing “Twenty Questions: Law Edition” with Judge Wilson (Roger Bart) whilst his wife (Jessica Tuck) looks on. The rules are simple: if one of the clerks correctly guesses the legal figure/case that the Judge has selected than they’re given the opportunity to steal a fellow clerk’s case. What this whole game basically means for Callie is that she has to win or risks losing the Jamal Thompson case. It appears that the question is up for all answers until Judge Wilson’s wife tells Callie the winning answer, due to the fact she hates watching her husband pit his clerks against each other. Plus, there is the fact she likes Callie the most. However, cheating her way into victory would be taking the easy route.

Wilson was in on his wife’s plan all along and witnessing Callie take the loss makes him ensure all the clerks lose out. This results in Wilson reassuring Callie that she’ll get to keep all her cases. However, their seemingly smooth afternoon is soon cut short when Wilson loses his turn at twenty questions, failing to recognize Hulk Hogan’s status as a legal figure, which turns the whole endeavor sour. The clerks quickly resign to a bar, drinking away the awkwardness that was their afternoon.

Prior to their arrival at the bar, Callie realizes she left her phone in Judge Wilson’s bathroom. When going back to retrieve it, she encounters his son (Zachary Gordon). This is the same son who Wilson told them was doing a semester at sea, but in reality is confined to their house on an ankle monitor. Having reassured the Judge that this reveal will stay between them, she only goes as far as telling Ben (Ken Kirby) and Rebecca (Molly McCook) that she saw him and confirmed he wasn’t abroad.

Over at Spekulate, things aren’t going much better for Mariana. After the revelation that Alex is racist as well as misogynist, she is selected to partake in an interview that demonstrates how diverse and supportive is the company. Though it all sounds well and good on the surface, Mariana soon realizes the only reason she was selected was due to her Latina identity. She’s frustrated by the fact she can so vividly remember falling trap to the company’s pride in being so diverse when instead it appears its marketing campaigns rely solely on exploiting the handful of people of color and women they employ. It goes without saying, the whole concept doesn’t sit right with Mariana at all.

Mariana decides that she’ll use her interview time to expose how awful the Spekulate work environment is – recounting just how difficult it is to be both a woman and a Latina in the workplace. She seems dead set on ripping the whole company to shreds. That is until her saving grace Casey (Chloe Wepper) steps in and talks her out of it. She recounts to Mariana that this has happened before – a Latina woman spoke up of the inequalities she faced and instead of being listened to she was forced to “seek other opportunities” whilst her white male coworker received a promotion. Casey empathizes with Mariana, assuring her that she hates “having to work twice as hard to get half as far as the white men,” but she refuses to watch Mariana self-sabotage and cost the company one of the few female Latino engineers they have. The pair agree that their predicament isn’t right and it certainly isn’t fair, but it’s just how it is for them. They decide to just continue working through it.

The technique of voicing characters actual, entirely inappropriate but totally correct opinions before cutting to them saying something much more diluted is used several times throughout the episode. Mariana’s interview is one of them as we see her begin to tell the camera, as well as the audience, how much she can’t stand the injustice the Spekulate environment harbors before going on to actually spout how brilliant it is. Following the interview, Mariana bonds with Raj (Dhruv Uday Singh). He shares how much he hates the Indian jokes their team make towards him, but continues to laugh along in fear of appearing too sensitive. Mariana rightly comforts him by questioning “Why should we have to laugh alone when we’re the ones getting hurt?” As dejecting as their whole bonding scene is, something good comes out of it! They agree to go for a drink together! Poor Raj – he really was misled. Cut to Mariana in a bar, dressed to the nines, and Raj drinking in the sight of her. He (and I) were clearly led to believe this will be a date. Instead, Davia and Bryan (Michael Galante) join the pair and Davia wastes no time in pointing out men who are totally Mariana’s type.

The episode ends on a cliffhanger that assures us trouble is brewing. Despite Callie denying knowing Malika in a personal sense to Ben earlier in the episode, by the end credits he’s not so convinced. Having walked Callie home, his advances for a night cap in her apartment are swiftly rejected, leaving him alone outside the entrance to the Coterie. It’s here he sees alleged stranger Malika enter the building minutes after Callie. In short: that poor girl can never stay out of trouble for long.