‘Minx’ Season 2 Episode 5 Recap: The Battle of the Sexes

Doug Renetti is not one to forgive and forget. Even though he’s on a business trip to Las Vegas with Joyce where he’s about to drink and schmooze his way toward taking Minx international – which should be fun! – he’s just a big old grump about Joyce nixing his “dance troupe.” (Joyce’s choice to refer to Club Minx that way feels like an even deeper cut than her actually vetoing it in the first place.)

The two are headed to Sin City together to a convention where Joyce is a speaker and Doug is looking to sell the foreign rights to Minx. With those two bosses gone, “Good Time Tina” (Minx Season 2 Episode 5) decides to allow the rest of the Bottom Dollar office to watch the Battle of the Sexes tennis tournament between Billie Jean King and Bobby Riggs.

“I’m rooting for the plucky lesbian,” Richie says to Shelly as they sit down to watch, but Shelly’s quick to point out that Billie Jean is happily married to a hunky blond man. “Sorry, I’m new to women’s tennis,” Richie dryly responds. Shelly’s still married to Lenny and all, but this is the episode where it becomes abundantly clear that she doth protest too much about her own Sapphic desires. But beyond her possible lesbian leanings, Shelly is also just not shy about the power of women. When one of the models from the latest Minx centerfold, Dustin, declares that men are better athletes than women and he could return a woman’s tennis serve with his hands behind his back, Shelly challenges him: “Prove it.”

Thus begins one of the more ridiculous things you’ll see on TV all year: Dustin straps a tennis racket to his penis and he and Shelly head outside where Bambi has chalk-outlined a tennis court, and they attempt to volley, her with her hands and him with his penis. Dustin does return the serve, but the celebration is short-lived when he realizes that his penis has gotten suctioned to the racket somehow. While this is a problem for Dustin, obviously, it’s an even bigger problem for Richie, as he hasn’t finished shooting with Dustin and he has to figure out how to get around having one of his models strapped to a tennis racket. (The solution: attach a tennis racket to the other model, too.)

While they’re in Vegas, Joyce starts to realize that she hasn’t been giving Doug enough credit for his contributions to Minx, and she tells him that she would love for him to run Minx International and will throw her support behind him when appealing to Connie on the matter.

Shelly – now elated that Billie Jean won – spends the episode battling the opposite sex back home, while her sister Joyce has to do the same in Vegas. See, it turns out that the majority of speakers on the “Meet the New Woman” panel she’s on are actually men who have started copycat magazine to coast off of Minx’s success. The only other woman on the panel is Joyce’s old New York friend Maggie (Gillian Jacobs), who’s now the editor of Gal! (You’ll recall, things ended on a nasty note between the two women during season 1 episode 9 after Maggie threw a dinner party where most of the attendees disparaged Joyce’s “porn” magazine, so Joyce walked out on it. How curious it is that Maggie is now working for the very same type of magazine.)

The men on the panel find ways to pit the two women against each other and argue about things like diet pills and their circulation numbers, but when Joyce realizes that they’re being goaded into some kind of petty cat fight, she sticks up for Maggie.

“Is it bad to say that was fun?” Joyce asks Maggie after the two women spend the rest of the panel eviscerating the men for things like not hiring any women to write on their magazines. The pair agree to let what happened between then in New York stay in the past and it really seems like they’re ready to move forward with their friendship. “Seems” is the key word here.

After the panel, an angry Doug tells Joyce that all of that making nice onstage has made all the magazine investors more interested in Gal! than in Minx, and it’s all Joyce’s fault. “There’s room for more than one woman-led magazine,” Joyce retorts.

“Play the game,” Doug snaps, walking away.

And play it she does. Joyce knows that Maggie’s not a supportive woman here to help flood the market with great content for other women, she’s self-serving and attempting to take a bite out of the empire Joyce has built. So while Joyce distracts Maggie with a game of poker, Doug acquires Gal! for the sole purpose of putting it out of business. But it wasn’t Doug’s idea to make such a big move, it turns out, it was Joyce’s. “Buyin’ up Gal! just to put it out of business? That’s a big move, Joycie, I didn’t know you had it in you!” Doug tells her.

Joyce is conflicted that crushing her rival makes her evil, but Doug reassures her it makes her “the queen.” Connie, too, is thrilled at the deals they’re making in Vegas too. Maybe Doug really will get the chance to run Minx‘s global empire with all of the success they’ve had here.

Back at the office, Shelly is drunk as a skunk, so Tina calls Lenny in to retrieve her after the tennis match. When Lenny shows up, he finds the two models still strapped to their rackets, and Shelly offers Lenny’s help. “He’s a doctor! Kind of! He can save the penises! We’ve got a whole car full of drugs, we hand them out to our friends at the dinner parties!” she tells everyone.

The thing that finally gets the rackets off the models’ penises though, is when Tina dresses the two men down for being the idiots that they are. As their penises crawl back up from out of the hollows of their rackets, Connie walks in like she’s the sorcerer returning to find Mickey mouse no longer in control of his army of sentient broomsticks, and she asks for a word with Tina. She’s not actually upset at the chaos she’s walked in on though, she’s here to discuss the company’s future, and Tina’s role within it. Looks like everyone’s moving up in the world of Bottom Dollar. Everyone, that is, except Bambi.

Poor Bambi. The woman is clearly looking for a mentor, or even just a friend (and Shelly continues to push her away), so with Doug out of town, she latches onto Tina, but Tina’s not really interested. “Jumped off the Doug Bus and onto the Tina Train?… I don’t wanna be your role model!” Tina said, leaving Bambi dejected.

Richie, on the other hand, is trying to translate his success at shooting centerfolds into something more commercial, and he’s been using the Minx photo studio to create a portfolio of sexy cereal shots for General Mills. This, too, disheartens Bambi, who asks Richie, “Are we not enough for you?” but Richie realizes that Minx‘s best days might be behind them now that they’re going global, and he needs a backup plan. “But what about me?” Bambi asks. “You’ll be fine. Everyone loves you,” he tells her. Alas, she sure doesn’t feel that way.

As Joyce and Doug celebrate their win in Vegas, she suggests they enjoy the city, play the tables, spend another night in their comped rooms. But Doug, always one step ahead, explains, “Nothing in Vegas if free. Trust me. Let’s leave while we’re up.” It’s great that Minx is up, but the only problem is that, eventually, what goes up, must come down.

Liz Kocan is a pop culture writer living in Massachusetts. Her biggest claim to fame is the time she won on the game show Chain Reaction.