Palm Royale Season 2 Episode 9 Review: Someone’s Gotta Die

Critic’s Rating: 3.5 / 5.0

3.5

There were so many opportunities to cut the chaff on Palm Royale Season 2 Episode 9, “Maxine Hears A Confession,” but we were left mostly disappointed.

I mean, Douglas really can’t do anything right, can he? I thought Maxine had gotten free of him at last when he fell over on “Maxine Hits the Slopes,” but no. Just a congenital heart defect and cardiac event. And Perry, maybe he’ll freeze to death out of macho obstinance? Nope.

We begin with a near plane crash and end with a gunshot. Once again, Palm Royale runs the gamut of soap opera tropes without pausing for a breath.

Palm Royale, “Maxine Hears a Confession”

Everything got better once the action returned to Palm Beach. That’s a sentence I never thought I’d write. But it’s true. As crazy as things got in and around the Palm Royale, they were never as bizarre as what transpired in Switzerland.

I’ll admit that it bothered me to see Maxine call it quits with Evelyn after yet another betrayal. Their partnership is one of my favorite pairings on this cast. (The other, of course, being Ann and Virginia.) Evelyn’s realism counters Maxine’s optimism. There’s great balance there.

So Maxine shooting Jed to save Evelyn had me sighing in relief. Not only because it saved Evelyn, but because (hopefully) it spares us any more shirtless/housecoat-clad Jed being slimy and gross. Giving Maxine the opportunity to avenge Mirabelle is fine, but Mary clocking him with the Davidsoul orb would’ve also have been acceptable.

The Marvelous Widow Davidsoul

Let’s take a moment to appreciate the glorious Julia Duffy. Her ability to roll with the writers’ invention for her character is so impressive. Dim-witted social hanger-on? Sure. Self-important charity chairperson? Gotcha. Radical convert? ‘Kay. Presidential assassin? Cool. And that was just Palm Royale Season 1.

Since living in the bootlegger tunnels, Mary Davidsoul’s blossomed a whole new set of skills and personality traits. Her highly accurate ability to commune with the dead has proven very useful, even if her need to believe the lie of her bootlegger left her vulnerable.

As a side note: For a wealthy widow in an affluent neighborhood, people get into her house and take up residence with disconcerting ease. First Norma, then Jed. You’d think a community like hers would have regular policing to keep track of the comings and goings of allegedly dead heiresses and sketchy gator sommeliers.

Mommy Mitzi

Part of me wishes that Norma/Agnes could have solved Mitzi and Robert’s problems by marrying them to each other and letting the baby’s trust gild the cage. In a heavy-handed way, Mitzi’s situation with Jed is a dark mirror to Maxine’s with Douglas.

Basic premise: Good-hearted, far-too-attractive woman falls for ne’er-do-well man. It’s a little unfair to put Douglas and Jed in the same category, I’ll admit, but it’s tragically unfair that neither Maxine nor Mitzi seems able to extricate themselves from their toxic relationships.

Douglas never weaponized Maxine for nefarious reasons, true, but he’s spent their entire marriage exploiting her skills and willingness to take care of him. And although he helped out at times, whatever happens to him when in proximity to Perry cancels out any good will I could feel.

I’m curious as to know how long Jed had had Douglas and the Dellacorte fortune in his sights. It would be in keeping with this season’s lean-in on the melodrama for Mitzi to have the baby in the finale. This puts the conception of the baby at before the Kimberly-Marcos Casino Night, where Mitzi allegedly began her affair with Douglas.

So which came first? The pregnancy or the con?

Fatherly Feelings

For a very smart wheeler-dealer, Norma’s misjudgments hit on an epic scale. If she was on murderous vendetta against Maxine — a premise they seem to be dismantling handily — she didn’t understand the Pollyanna glamor that cloaks her prey.

I wonder how much she knew of Mitzi’s actual circumstances. If Mitzi conned her, too, it would explain why she hadn’t had Jed dealt with while she was still in Palm Beach. Of course, this is assuming she’s still the serial killer we’ve come to expect her to be.

More recently, not knowing Robert has a child, she assumed he had no interest in raising Mitzi’s baby and crossed a line by asserting that gay men aren’t good parental candidates. And that sent him running in the other direction.

Considering her coup de grace — Robert and Mitzi’s marriage — all came to naught, she seemed very calm in the church, explaining to Penelope/Linda that she, Agnes/Norma, is her biological mother. Less calm flying down the mountainside in a sleigh driven by her biological mama, but needs must.

Final Notes

As we nose up to the finale, there’s a lot to consider and speculate on.

1. Who is the Russian mole? If Ann’s right to eliminate Norma, my money’s on Marjorie Merriweather Post. The clue? Her obsession with Russian Fabergé eggs. Also, huge money and influence as well as, until recently, the ear of President Nixon.
2. How will they access the Dellacorte trust? Easy. If Norma legitimately adopted Robert, that would make his son, Rafael, a Dellacorte child of the correct generation.
3. The whole congenital heart condition being the proof of Dellacorte-ness makes no sense. If Douglas’s condition precludes any offspring, should the line died off long ago? And if they’d adopted heirs, the adoptees wouldn’t have had the condition. Here’s hoping Maxine’s got a better way to prove Norma’s a fraud.
4. Where will Linda, Norma/Agnes, and Lotte pop up next? You got me. Now that those three have united, they may actually be unstoppable.

Like it or lump it, Palm Royale Season 2 has pulled out all the stops. If you’ve managed to take it in stride, well done. It’s not about solving a mystery or unravelling a conspiracy anymore. It’s about giving up on suspending one’s disbelief and letting it fly high over the Floogenurgen.

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