Date of release: June 23, 2017 (Netflix)
This episode ended with a huge downer, and this after Bash and Ruth had all the reasons in the world to just storm into the room and tell Sam about the excitingly good news while he was trying to coke another line through his nose. Ruth and Bash could have celebrated with all the women in the parking lot, because Bash’s mother decided not to be a huge dick to her son and for once listen to him, helping him to advance his dreams, as weird and nonsensical as those might be. But I guess the writers weren’t interested in giving Sam any of the good news by the end of the episode, because the season finale is around the corner and something extraordinary needed to happen in Sam’s character arc before that fateful episode was ringing the bell, as it’s the standard of television to screw up some of the characters’ lives in the penultimate episode.
And in comes Justine, as she revealed herself to be Sam’s daughter and not the 18-year-old teenager with a crush on Sam who knows a little too much about his probably terrible movies. Justine didn’t come into the room to snort a line of coke with Sam or have sex with him, just so GLOW can put a checkmark on another 1980s Hollywood cliche. She just wanted him to know that he is a father. That he is her father. It turns out that the blood relationship between the two is more interesting than the sexual crush was over the past couple of episodes, thanks to the fact that the writers have already killed the premise of Sam sleeping with one of his wrestling stars (if he also had gotten Justine into bed, it would have been a repetitive storyline). And with a daughter in tow, there might be a reboot of Sam’s character arc, now having to think about being a father to a girl he never knew.
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| You get to look at attractive ladies while your car is being washed. |
This episode also happened to have standard soap opera writing 101 (which I was not at all bothered by), and considering that Debbie realized wrestling is like a soap opera, it’s astoundingly fitting that Justine, a potential wrestling star in the making, would turn out to be the wrestling show’s director’s daughter. Imagine a soap opera sometime in the 1970s or 1980s, in which an old man was in a relationship with a younger woman before both of them knew they were father and daughter or related in any other way. It’s a soap storyline TV writers used in a different fashion in GOSSIP GIRL and THE O.C. – only those I can remember right now, but there were probably multiple shows over the past decade that have employed this twist. It’s quite intriguing that it’s still a storyline for some writers and TV shows and that it can still be a dramatic storyline even in the 2010s. I was certainly a little saddened by the fact that Sam didn’t seem to be interested in listening to Justine or even thinking about what just happened here. Maybe it’s the coke in his brain, maybe it’s because he just lost his movie and his TV show in the same evening, or maybe it’s just that Sam is a sexist prick. Justine came to the wrestling show in the hopes of probably having a relationship with her father she never knew. And now this happened.
Meanwhile, the question of money was raised multiple times throughout this episode. And I was sort of thinking that one of the women might have had some rich uncle or so, and whoever that was would show up at the end and give Sam and Bash their happy ending. But the way the writers solved that story was pretty nice. I can’t imagine how you turn a ballroom into a wrestling show’s setting (since it should cost money to turn the ballroom into a ring with audience seats around it), but I don’t need to worry about that right now, even though the next episode is already the finale and I am a little worried about the time constraints GLOW had at this point. With Sam and Bash getting the money at the end, the writers created a new storyline I sort of liked: Bash and his seemingly evil rich mother and whatever kind of complicated relationship they may have. Just that she wasn’t evil, because she did help her sorry excuse of a son. It makes me wonder if she could be considered an associate producer of the wrestling show and if she would actually be happy about that title, in case the show is turning out to be a success (which means she probably wants to make a little money out of that, too).
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| The daughter has some serious daddy issues right now. |
Ruth opening up about her own rock-bottom story on the steps was nice, although I saw that as something of a cheap way to mend the bond between Debbie and Ruth, and to create a way for them to become friends again and not continue their strained relationship for another season. I don’t mind that development at all, because that is what I have been hoping for, but it did happen a little too fast for my taste, even if the writers took the timeline of about ten weeks or so for Debbie and Ruth to grow closer again. But if the writers were planning to destroy this relationship once more, the way to Mark is a short one, and Ruth could always get drunk and horny again and screw her best friend’s husband one more time. Especially after it seems quite obvious that Mark is sticking around in Debbie’s life a little longer and therefore has proximity to Ruth.
