The penultimate episode in a miniseries is a quiet time for getting characters into finale position, generally by pushing them modestly around the board. Well, that is not what happens on Welcome To Chippendales! By the end of “Paper Is Paper,†each of the show’s core relationships will have been demolished to smithereens. Distractingly, the episode represents a tonal and occasionally even a visual shift in how the series tells its story. Since when do the cool blue Eighties get bathed in ambient yellow light a la Spike Jonze? Is that chamber music I hear? Are those fade transitions?
I don’t mean to overstate the change — the series remains true to its montage heritage, for example. Nick’s Chippendales East tour is a heady collage of zebra-striped banana hammocks, midwestern cities that Bradford would prefer to fly over, partner-swapping, coke-snorting, and Monopoly-playing hedonism. Don’t get me wrong, I love a montage: an exuberant shopping spree; a percussively-scored training sequence; the big dance number in The Breakfast Club. The problem here, I think, is that Chippendales is too often ditching the narrative when it really should be diving in. It happened in the last episode during the private-membership litigation that effectively bankrupted the club, and it does it again in “Paper Is Paper.â€
And perhaps no character has suffered more from the montage-ification of Welcome To Chippendales than Denise, a spark plug whose only speaking lines have been reduced to tour admin. She’s on the phone confirming the upcoming schedule when she learns that Steve has already booked one of the venues with a competing tour bearing the very same name. Steve has evolved into such a peculiar and pitiful character over the last few episodes — he gets more deplorable but never more interesting. Angry that Nick ripped off his idea and took 50 percent of the profit, Steve responds by ripping off Nick’s idea and taking 100 percent of the profit. Congratulations, dude. You make revenge look miserable.
Not to mention short-lived. The court-ordered injunction requested by Nick & Co. arrives before Chippendales West has even packed up their tour bus, which is a big problem for the Banerjees. After the calendar fiasco and lawsuit, money is tight. Irene is bitter. Cheryl’s attorney fees are too high, particularly when you consider that she lost the last case spectacularly. Tension is high. Steve, too, is high — popping pills and chasing them with a mid-morning whisky. Steve makes day drinking look miserable.
Money on TV is such a burden, but I swear I would be so good at having gobs of it. I would buy some stuff, but not too too much stuff. I would upgrade my life to a place where I could keep it going — a house with a pool, not a fountain. But Steve and Irene are pacing their McMansion in the middle of the night, quarreling about off-loading the place to save the strippy. What’s more is that Steve’s most distressed about his wife and accountant faithfully reporting the state of their finances: it’s Nick’s contributions via the New York club and the tour keeping them afloat. It’s like Steve didn’t hear her say they were going to lose their home!
All in all, Welcome to Chippendales has started to feel like a TV show co-written by a D.A.R.E. officer. Steve was once a total straight-edge. But one time — it only takes one time! — he did coke with his hot wife, and now he’s addicted. He needs more coke. And more coke makes him a bigger dick to his wife and more of a fire code-violating criminal. Steve hates laws and loves coke now. When the fire department eventually comes to shut down Chippendales, he darts to the back office to pack up his prize possession: the rest of his coke.
But you can’t outrun the law, and you can’t outspend the city of Los Angeles. Steve wants to fight the fire department, but Irene knows it’s over. Chippendales was a fever dream and a sensation before it became the albatross around Steve’s egomaniacal neck. Now, like all once dope hotspots, it’s but a piece of nightlife history. Was it greed that undid the magic? Was it Steve’s unchecked vanity? Or was it the COCAINE?
Given the complete and total collapse of Steve’s tiny empire, you might think it’s time for Chippendales East to declare victory. BUT THEY’VE BEEN SNORTING COCAINE, TOO! I saw Denise, in the hotel, with the fancy vial! So instead of gloating, they’re falling apart in jealousy. Brad wants Nick to ice out Denise and leave the tour so they can be together in NYC. When Nick does exactly that, she’s heartbroken: “We’re the couple.†It’s not just that Nick is choosing romance over friendship, but that their love story was one-sided. Honestly, I wasn’t prepared for the blow either; apparently, there’s more to the montage than meets the eye.
Still, it’s hard to begrudge Nick for his new boyfriend bliss. I wanted to, out of loyalty to Denise, but Nick and Bradford are kind of cute together, doing their little joke accents and dreaming their little dreams. Next up on their world domination strip tour: Europe. They’re so affectionate to each other, and the score grows so soft and the sunlight slants so warm that I guess I should have known it was time. And, of course, I did know it because I Googled the whole sordid true story after episode two, but I still didn’t know it know it.
The sloppy tip-off, really, is the show’s bizarre decision to follow Bradford when he excuses himself to use the bathroom — could no one think of a more narratively compelling errand for him to run? — instead of staying with Nick, one of its OG Four Geniuses. This means that even though we see Nick’s killer and his bullet-riddled corpse, we’re watching the boyfriend when a beloved character loses his life. Nick was alone when he died. His jilted bestie was on the other side of the country with a busful of dancers. His wicked boss was shutting up the west coast shop. And we, the audience, were in the restroom, watching a man we barely know and hardly trust wash his hands.
Irene sobs to learn of Nick’s violent death, but Steve is preoccupied with the chain of information. How does Irene know what she knows? Who is telling whom, and what are they saying? Irene has her suspicions about Steve, but who can bear to think the father of their children is dark-hearted and unhinged enough to hire out a murder? It’s only when Denise shows up at the palace gates in the wee hours of the morning to accuse Steve that even Irene can’t stop herself from connecting the dots. There’s $15,000 missing from petty cash; maybe Irene thinks all the way back to the suspicious fire at the Electric Tomato. She grabs her little girl, gets in the car, and hopefully drives very, very far away.
The episode ends with a strange interaction between an extremely tetchy Steve and Scott, an FBI agent with an ineffective bedside manner. To break the ice, he points out that Steve’s given name — Somen — feels apt for a man who made and lost a fortune “showing men.†Steve, however, is impervious to the charms of federal wordplay. And even though he himself abandoned the name his father gave him in favor of “Steve,†he objects to Scott making a joke of it. (I, however, was shocked that Scott, the lead investigator in Nick’s murder case, didn’t mispronounce it.)
Rather than take the opportunity to seem like a pleasant man who is genuinely upset to see his business partner dead, Steve goes for a pugnacious the-best-defense-is-offense approach. Nick wasn’t his partner; he was his employee. He insists he can’t possibly be of help to the FBI, but evades their most basic factual questions. Steve and Scott proceed to have a debate about race in America that I’m sure most lawyers would dissuade a suspect from having.
But in this poorly-timed moment, Steve comes closest to explaining his jaded perspective on the racism he’s participated in across the series. There are spoken rules in America, like the fire codes he’s broken, and unspoken ones, like the rule that says a brown man shouldn’t finish on top. This isn’t about the fire code, and it’s not about the whites-only cards he handed out; maybe Steve thinks it’s not even about Nick’s murder. It’s about keeping Steve down. It’s about getting him to fall in line. It’s not entirely uncompelling except for the fact that Steve really did have a person murdered out of professional jealousy. Scott accuses Steve of being contemptuous of authority, which is 100 percent the case, no matter the reasons.
But Scott only has his hunch that Steve’s guilty and not any actual evidence. Steve is free to go. He returns to his empty McMansion, where he takes out a gun, which he does not store in a safe despite having a small child at home. Actually, Steves hides it in a Chips Ahoy’s bag, which I think would be a Top 5 place not to put your gun, but I digress. It’s hard to imagine Steve killing himself at this moment because it’s hard to imagine that Steve feels he’s been beaten. Steve adapts. From Bombay to Los Angeles, from backgammon to strip club, he’s a survivor by whatever means necessary.
Even with a long face and a gun in hand, I’m less scared for Steve than I am for whoever next gets in his way.