“Maximum Pleasure Guaranteed” — Episode 3 Recap: Chunnel
Episode three of Maximum Pleasure Guaranteed is named “Chunnel” for a sexual act that you do not want to Google. It’s briefly mentioned in a Live Stream from Trevor (Brandon Flynn), but thankfully is not shown. When we catch back up with Paula (Tatiana Maslany), she’s trying to get her life back to normal. Trevor is dead, which should, hypothetically, mean the blackmailing will end. However, the phone calls and the threats keep coming, and someone is following her. To Paula, the voice on the phone and the person in the car are the same, but the episode’s final moments prove her assumption to be incorrect.
Just when the viewer thinks they have a grasp on where Maximum Pleasure Guaranteed is headed, so many aspects of the series invert. The person on the phone is not Frank (Murray Bartlett), the man we know killed Trevor. The woman on the phone seems to have been working with Trevor in this blackmail scheme. She only appears in the episode’s final moments, so her larger role in Trevor’s criminal enterprise is still under wraps.
Apple TV+
For all of Frank’s mastermind sensibilities, he ends up following the wrong person. In pursuit of Paula, he stumbles upon Mallory (Jessy Hodges). She’s married to Paula’s ex-husband, Karl (Jake Johnson), and frequently acts as a driver for Karl and Paula’s daughter, Hazel (Nola Wallace). Unfortunately, that means it’s Mallory’s life that’s in danger and Frank has now seen what Hazel looks like. Potentially fortunately, though, Karl and Mallory are trying to get Paula to agree to move with them to Idaho for a job opportunity that would change Mallory’s life. Paula struggles to see how moving to Idaho could be good for Hazel. Regardless, the move doesn’t come to fruition soon enough, as Frank attacks Mallory while she’s on a bike ride. It looks as though he’s going to kill her, but he stops when he sees there’s no tattoo on her ankle. The one physical identifying feature Frank caught a glimpse of at Trevor’s house was a tattoo of a bird on the intruder’s (Paula) ankle. He spares Mallory, frustrated that he’s made this mess even bigger.
Apple TV+
The true shoe-dropping moment is when Detective Gonzalez (Dolly de Leon) runs the fingerprints found at the scene of Trevor’s murder and Paula’s prints are a match. Why would Paula be in the system? There are plenty of rational explanations for this, but it seems like there’s something sinister in Paula and Karl’s past. This is the second time in the series that someone has mentioned an event that occurred in Portland. The first instance was when Karl, in the premiere episode, was livid that Paula told Trevor about Portland. Now, Detective Gonzalez has some questions she needs answered by Paula.
“This wasn’t your first dead body, was it, Paula?” The recurring theme of Maximum Pleasure Guaranteed is that things will continue to go from bad to worse. It’s a series of compelling, spiraling, terrible decisions made by most of the characters in the show. Bad decisions make for good television and, three episodes in, Maximum Pleasure Guaranteed is proving that its tangled web is so very easy to be lured into.
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