Palm Royale recap: This is Allison Janney’s show now

Give it up for Allison Janney, ladies and gentlemen. After half a season of essentially twiddling her thumbs, the woman is on fire throughout this week’s Palm Royale. Let me run down some of my favorite Evelyn Rollins lines from this episode:

• “You dumb fucking dum-dum!”
• “What did you do with the rolodex, you spoiled little shit?”
• Somehow, she even made “Lead on, Linda!” sound like an insult.
• “Don’t you get righteous with me, you murderous twat!”
• “Oh eat a dirty sock, Linda!”
• “You’ll throw a giant expensive gala whose guest list is composed only of the ding-a-ling ladies of Palm Beach, and you will be roundly ridiculed as a bunch of garish ice sculptures melt around you.”
• “You backwoods bumblehick.”
• “You thought that day when you scaled the hedges of the Palm Royale that you were escaping the barbarians, when actually you were the tip of the barbarian spear bringing chaos right to our feet.”

Do they give out Emmys for best bitch face? Give Allison Janney the hardware. What had her in such a rage this week? Well, in the episode’s opening moments, Maxine (Kristen Wiig) tells Evelyn—in a NASA space simulator, no less—that she threw the gun into the ocean and Linda (Laura Dern) burned the rolodex. All of Norma’s (Carol Burnett) blackmail leverage is gone, and the Palm Beach residents are free, Maxine says. What Maxine somehow doesn’t realize is that this will unravel the Beach Ball, the social contract of Palm Beach, and potentially even Evelyn’s marriage. She does not take it well.

Maxine quickly realizes Evelyn is right. Though she posits to Mary (Julia Duffy) and Raquel (Claudia Ferri) that she’ll be a different type of socialite, they make it clear they wouldn’t attend anything without the threat of blackmail—or a marquee guest. Fine! Maxine will lure an important someone to attend the Beach Ball, and lucky for her, Douglas (Josh Lucas) is courting the prince of Luxembourg to buy one of his and Perry’s (Jordan Bridges) condos. Unlucky for her, Douglas says it’s just a boys’ dinner, and she thinks he’s icing her out because he can tell she threw herself at Robert (Ricky Martin).

One of my favorite exchanges of the episode (aside from the aforementioned gems from Janney) was between Maxine and Robert when she accuses him of telling Douglas about the other night. “Maybe that sort of thing happens to someone all the time, so it wasn’t a big deal,” Robert says. This is capped off by Maxine’s very loud “Hi Norma!” and Burnett’s dismissive wave of the hand.

Meanwhile, Evelyn tears into Our Bodies Our Shelves ready to rip Linda limb from limb. In the process, she makes it clear to Virginia (Amber Chardae Robinson) that Linda has disposed of the rolodex, stirring up issues in their friendship, as Virginia was keen to use the secrets to bring down people in power. But once Linda knows the gun is in the ocean, she immediately goes to visit Skeet (Bruce Dern).

What follows is a real heart-to-heart between father and daughter in which they both apologize for they ways they’ve hurt and damaged each other. Skeet tells her he’s ready to go, and she tells him he can, and she’ll be okay. As usual, the scenes with Laura Dern feel out of tone with the rest of the show.

Back to Maxine: She tries to show up to dinner with Douglas’ blueprints, dressed like an insane person in Luxembourg’s national colors, but is furious to see it’s not a boys’ dinner because Dinah (Leslie Bibb) and the prince’s wife are both in attendance. Before she can make a scene, Dinah sweeps her off to the bathroom for some girl talk, lest Maxine ruin the deal. Yada yada yada, Dinah’s irritated because Perry knows about her affair and is fine with it, Maxine reveals that he’s boinking Mitzi (Kaia Gerber) and then expresses insecurity that she threw herself at Robert, who rejected her. Dinah tells Maxine what everyone already knows, that Robert is gay. (“He’s a fruit, Maxine. We’ve all tried with Robert.”) But wait a second? Wasn’t it Dinah who suggested Robert to Maxine last week as a possible affair when they were in the golf cart? I’ve learned not to think too hard about this show.

Maxine confronts Robert about this in as many roundabout ways she can think of (“Do you wear loafers? Do you stand lightly in them? Are you a man who always rings twice?”), and he insists he’s been with both men and women until she follows up with, “What’s wrong with me?” and he instantly, hilariously, cops to being gay. He also, in a somewhat heartwarming moment, calls himself Maxine’s friend (her one true friend, really).

They’re interrupted by Norma shouting. She’s trying to get up and slurring the same syllables she did when she first woke up: “Ruh-ruh-ra!” “Yes, I’m Robert,” Robert replies, and I guess he and I are the same breed of dum-dum because I also thought she was saying Robert when she first woke up, when it’s clear she’s trying to say “revolver.”

Evelyn also pays a visit to Skeet, convinced that he’ll try to divorce her now that her leverage is gone. On death’s door, he makes it clear he won’t do that, but he repeatedly compares their marriage to a prison regardless. “I will take care of you when the time comes,” Skeet tells her, which might be a threat or a genuine promise to keep her financially stable after he’s gone. It could go either way. We’ll likely find out which way soon, since Skeet does actually die at episode’s end while enjoying a LSD trip with Linda and watching the rocket launch.

Dougie and Perry somehow close the deal with the prince, so Douglas has Maxine transferring money to everyone ($250,000 to the prince to use his name, $500,000 to Perry for seed money, etc.). Maxine takes this as an opportunity to get some face-time with the prince and ask him to be a guest at the Beach Ball. Douglas agrees to let her give him the check herself at a party at the club celebrating the launch of Apollo 12. The prince and his wife say they’re skittish about publicity/photos and decline Maxine’s invitation to the Ball, a rejection she does not take well. But also, these people are con artists, right?

Now this is when Evelyn gets to do her big dressing down, after warming up with Laura and Skeet all episode. The Beach Ball is doomed, and Evelyn is all too happy to call Maxine trash and make her cry at the launch party. Robert eventually finds her and tells her he’s going to take her home. He’s starting to literally take care of her the way he also takes care of Norma, and that includes handing over Norma’s invitations for the Beach Ball with their handwritten threats. If Maxine just mails them out, everyone will show up to the Beach Ball, pay her and infuse the trust with cash once more. “You don’t need money for the Beach Ball. The Beach Ball is the money.”

Maxine has a crisis of confidence about sending them out, but Robert eggs her on. It’s just one time! She’ll save the Dellacortes! Isn’t this what she always wanted? We’ve seen Maxine do some pretty horrible things, and sending out these invitations does not top the list. As she puts them in the mailbox, she repeats to herself over and over, “I am somebody.”

At the same moment, Norma finally gets out of her bed and pulls a different gun off the wall. “Revolver,” she says to herself. It seems like that missing gun might have been a decoy?

Stray observations

• Evelyn to Maxine in the space simulator is exactly me to my children about pretty much anything: “Do you know what you’re doing? No, you don’t. So stop touching.”
• At the party, The Miami Herald’s takedown of Perry Donahue hit stands, and Robert alerts Douglas, who leaves in a hurry. Hope you can cancel those checks, bud!
• Ann (Mindy Cohn) confronts Maxine about her pageant wins. She wasn’t the runner-up, she was the winner, but she won under different names (Palm Beach socialite names from old Shiny Sheets). Maxine was an orphan, a nobody, and she used fake names when she began the pageant circuit, always aspiring to Palm Beach. Ann won’t print it because, frankly, it’s not going to be interesting to her readership, but earlier in the episode, she tells Maxine she was rooting for her because “wouldn’t it be great for nice to win?” But once again, I’m asking, are we meant to believe that Maxine is “nice”? Does she have a moral compass, or is she a cutthroat manipulator?