Palm Royale Recap: Where There’s a Will

Surprise, surprise, after the big exposé in the Miami Herald, Perry’s real-estate deal came toppling down like one of his shoddily built condos. Not only that, but the Feds have taken him away, and next on their list is Douglas, who admittedly greased a few palms himself. And on top of all that, somebody is dead. Skeet Rollins is now fist-bumping the big hand in the sky, so naturally Palm Beach’s big social function this week is his funeral — and even more importantly, his will-reading. The episode gets practically the entire cast together at the same event, all of whom are there with their own agenda. They each have their own video-game-like side quest to complete, so let’s run through the funeral’s guest book and look at everybody’s respective missions.

With things not looking good for Perry, Dinah has her own future to look out for, so she sees Skeet’s funeral as a matchmaking opportunity and spends it cozying up to Skeet’s wealthy contemporaries. After this series began with everyone judging Maxine’s desperate attempts to be around wealth, it’s funny watching everybody else do the same thing. And Dinah’s not the only one with her financial future on her mind this week.

Evelyn is not only bracing herself for the will-reading, where she suspects she’ll be left with nothing but is already laying the groundwork for her backup plan. “Shrapnel can travel. It might have taken 20 years for that assassin’s bullet to hit its mark, but I’ve consulted with my lawyers and they’ve assured me there’s no statute of limitations on murder,” she tells the funeral-goers, signaling that she’s prepared to spin Skeet’s death as a long, slow murder in order to get Linda locked up — classic wicked-stepmother behavior.

However, Linda doesn’t think she’ll get anything anyway, so she’s taking the opportunity to make the most out of what might be her last time at the Rollins mansion. She hatches a plan to have all of her bookstore pals rob the place so they can pawn off the goods and use the money to get Sylvia’s husband safely to Canada before he’s set to be shipped off to Vietnam. It’s like The Bling Ring if Alexis Neiers was a pacifist. But it doesn’t seem like Linda will have to make a call to Nancy Jo to defend her crime because when the will is read, she finds out it all belongs to her anyway. The bad news is that Evelyn is more determined than ever to get the fortune back, which means sending Linda to prison — and she’s already trying to team up with Douglas to corroborate her witness testimony. That pairing will be a real test of how much power Maxine holds over Douglas and if she’s able to stop him from taking down her friend.

Meanwhile, Maxine’s other new friend, Robert, is spending the funeral entertaining a date — sort of. Despite encouraging his new gentleman friend, the prince of Luxembourg, not to come to the funeral, he insisted, with the princess and Norma acting as each of their respective beards. He giddily confides in Maxine and Linda, who give him two different perspectives on being DL, which mirror their own approaches to feminism. Linda wants him to live loud and proud, while Maxine doesn’t think he should have to be a movement if he doesn’t want to. In any case, things don’t stay too discreet for long when Maxine accidentally rolls Norma into a room where he’s hooking up with the prince. It turns out Norma didn’t know about Robert after all, so what’s the story there? Is this really Norma’s one relationship where blackmail isn’t involved, and if so, why?

Meanwhile, Mary’s mission is the episode’s highlight. She still hasn’t gotten her hands on the check for the charity gala that Maxine owes her, so she spends the funeral sneaking up behind her and ominously saying, “Fibrosis …” When she finally corners her, she tries to guilt her into forking over the money by telling her that 17 people a year suffer from the disease, and without her check, the 17th — Little Shelby from Montana (which Mary pronounces like it’s her first time hearing of it) — will succumb to the illness. When Maxine wonders why the very wealthy Mary can’t just write the life-saving check, she says that that’s not the point. It’s perhaps the best exploration of wealth and charity in the show thus far.

Another MVP of this episode is Ann, who doesn’t let something like a funeral stop her Shiny Sheet reporting. She pokes around for comment about Perry’s legal woes, and even snaps a photo of the royalty in attendance despite their very strict and sketchy “no photos” rule. We find out just how serious that rule is later in the episode when the princess attacks her, snatching away her camera, which results in Ann running after and launching herself onto her to take her down. Mindy Cohn should be in everything.

Norma’s mission this week is even more violent, as she seems intent on killing Maxine. We saw her finally get her hands on a revolver at the end of last week’s episode, and now she’s packing heat to Skeet’s funeral. Though it might seem counterintuitive to shoot someone at a big group event, it did work for Linda … so far. After helping cover up that shooting, Norma probably figures she’ll have no problem getting away with shooting Maxine, who nobody particularly cares about. Plus, who would suspect sick, old Norma? Unfortunately for her, she keeps missing her moment, and later in the episode, when Robert finds her gun, he takes it away along with all the other guns in the house. “Boo,” Norma says.    

So there’s only one dead body at this funeral, but with death comes new life, and amid all of the above hubbub, Sylvia’s water breaks and she takes to the tub to give birth. This brings back tough memories for Maxine, who we know lost the pregnancy that led to her and Douglas’s wedding. But this week we find out that that actually happened before the wedding, and she finally comes clean to Douglas. Maxine is a very interesting liar, because all of her lies are always almost true. Like being a Dellacorte: sure, kinda. Or a pageant winner: yes, but with a fake name. Or living in the mansion: no, but eventually. The math is typically just a little fuzzy, which means we’re able to easily brush past them, making them relatively stake-less. Maybe all of these inconsistencies can stand on their own, but it’ll take them building up to really have an impact.

When it comes to this latest one, the timing of Maxine’s pregnancy, we don’t yet know if Douglas can forgive her because the funeral is interrupted by the feds. They’re there to collect Maxine, but we find out that Douglas told them that it was all him, and he gets taken away instead. Who says chivalry is dead?     

The next morning, Robert tells Maxine his plan to run away with the prince to the South of France, telling her that he knows Norma will be alright because she has her. Yeah, because things have been going so smoothly thus far. But when he finds out that Douglas has been taken away, he cancels those plans to stay with Maxine. It’s remarkable how close of friends these two have become so quickly. He was fully prepared to abandon a sick Norma, who he’d been caring for for years, but draws the line at leaving Maxine, who was his nemesis just a few episodes ago. But Maxine sees herself in Robert’s budding whirlwind romance and, despite how wrong it went for her, tells him that she doesn’t regret a thing. So she encourages him to go, even though she doesn’t care for the prince, who won’t return the money they gave him for the now-defunct condo, and more importantly, encourages him to spend every cent of that money by living large.

But later, at the bank, she sees a familiar face on the wanted poster: Robert’s prince. He was, in fact, a scam artist, and she realizes that he’s a bigger fish she can turn in to the feds to save herself and Douglas, even if that means destroying Robert’s romance.

It’s sad to watch Robert get stood up, waiting at the edge of the driveway with all the hope drained from his eyes. This was Robert’s first romantic prospect as far as we’re concerned, and Ricky Martin does a great job of conveying that hopeful, childlike innocence and an even better job as those dreams get crushed. But is Maxine the bad guy here for turning in Robert’s prince to save her own skin? Perhaps, but at the same time, she could also have been saving him from a con artist. Robert’s heartbreak could have been much worse had he found out the “prince” was a liar further down the line, particularly if he became one of his victims. After all, look at Maxine, who had already compared Robert’s runaway love to her own, which almost ended with her husband getting her locked up. The real misstep might be not just telling Robert the truth, but since secrets are this show’s engine, I guess that option wouldn’t make sense in Palm Beach.

Shiny Sheet Headlines

• Because the federal agent is continually referred to as the “man in the fedora,” anytime they say “the Feds” my brain registers it as being short for “fedoras.”

• I’m not seeing enough Leslie Bibb. Bibb’s Dinah played a key role in earlier episodes, and now, much like Mitzi, she’s been relegated to popping up here with second-hand updates. At least this week we get to see her on the prowl for a rich geriatric, but it’s not enough. Thank God her turn on The White Lotus is on the way.

• Why is nobody smoking? I can suspend my disbelief, and I certainly don’t want to compromise the lungs of anybody in this cast, but it’s rare to see a project set during this period where the shots aren’t littered with cigarettes. Sarah Paulson could never.