‘Minx’ Season 2 Episode 8 Recap: Stop The Presses

I watched Minx Season 2 twice from start to finish. The first time I binged it, I thought it was pretty good, perhaps not as even as the first season, though. The second time I watched it, I really fell in love. On second viewing, I realized just how tightly written show the show is: not only are the jokes and the dialogue pitch perfect, but every character’s nuanced backstory is fleshed out and compelling. (I’ve said it before, but I need the Bambi prequel based on all her life stories… but the same is true for nearly every character on the show). As the second season concludes with a truly satisfying finale, we’re left with Team Doug and Connie Vs. Team Joyce and Co. and it’s a testament to the show’s writers that Joyce, who was insufferable for so much of the season, has evolved back to the idealist we really want to root for more than ever. Let’s dig in.

Who exactly is Constance and how did she become such an influential businesswoman? If you recall, Joyce even studied her at Vassar in her Unsung Heroines of Capitalism class. Well, the finale opens with a good old flashback to Constance’s origins. It’s 1953 and her husband, Yorgos, has just died, leaving her as the head of the board of his shipping company. Her trusted advisor, Archie, has come to the funeral to console her, pastries in hand. Constance, however, knows something that Archie doesn’t: that she’s on to him. She leaves a trail of croissant crumbs in her koi pond and she points to a pool of dead fish when she says, “My trusted Archibald, you’ve been by my side since Yorgi made me his partner. Which makes it all the more heartbreaking that you were the one to betray me.” Connie is also an unsung hero of dodging an attempt on her life, I wonder if that made it into Joyce’s syllabus.

If you’ll recall from Season 2 Episode 1 (“The Perils Of Being A Wealthy Widow”), we learned never to say the word “pillage” in front of Connie’s Afghan hounds, and now we know why: she hollers the word, and the dogs rear up from out of nowhere to attack Connie’s once-trusted advisor. It’s a real “you gotta wait for it” kind of callback, but still much appreciated. This is how Connie got her start, dealing with men who underestimated her, and it taught her that even your closest allies can become adversaries or, worse, assassins.

Cut to… Joyce Prigger. At home in her bathrobe. Joyce spent the last weekend at Connie’s ranch searching for new Minx International editors and wasn’t there to approve Richie’s bath house photoshoot, so when she opens the door to a messenger, it contains the layout from the magazine centerfold featuring the men from the baths, with a note from Constance, “I thought we spoke about this. Please fix. CP.” With Connie in control of Minx, Joyce does have to bend to her, but this is not how she wanted to spend her day.

When Joyce arrives to the office, she encounters Doug giving away all of the contents of his office: he’s certain that a meeting Constance has called is about to lead to him getting fired. Joyce brushes past him to confront Richie, who is still traumatized from the police raid at the bath house, but also managed to get some incredible photos of it all. But he knows why Joce is really there, it’s not to check on his well-being, it’s to prevent the bath house photos from getting in the magazine. Connie stopped the presses and is demanding that different photos be used in the issue.

Despite the fact that the magazine is full of dick pics, Richie goads Joyce into admitting out loud the real problem here: “Minx isn’t supposed to be for gay men.” And so, as a last-minute answer to their problem, Joyce tells Richie they’ll do a one-year retrospective of photos instead, which is creative suicide in Richie’s eyes. He refuses and walks out on her. Joyce asks Bambi to bring the new layout, with the retrospective photos, to the printer, but Bambi, who has been observing the Minx transformation all season now with her keen eye, is not to be underestimated. She fully understands the creative implications of the retrospective, and the politics that play into it. She forces Joyce to give her overtime pay to bring the pages to the printer after reluctantly agreeing.

Doug arrives to Connie’s house for their meeting, and her home is bustling, as she’s hosting a party that night to announce the new editors of Minx. Doug, dressed in his finest velour tracksuit, doesn’t care about that because he’s sure he’s about to be cut loose from Bottom Dollar anyway. That’s not how the conversation goes, however. Connie reveals that she has underestimated Doug. Yes, she’s dissolving Bottom Dollar, she tells him, but she’s turning it into PRG: Papadopoulos Renetti Global. Joyce is out as the head, and both she and Tina will now report to him, just like in the old days.

Bambi’s existential crisis has been softly spun through every episode this season, though most of her closest confidantes don’t even see it. The one person who does acknowledge it though is Stan the printer. When she arrives to drop off the new pages of Minx, he can sense she’s unfulfilled and refers to his church, the People’s Temple. Pastor Jim, a.k.a. Jim Jones, has been working wonders for his congregation.

Over at Shelly and Lenny’s house, now that Shelly has come out to him, it’s time they reveal that they’re getting separated. No, no, not to their kids, to their swinger couple friends, who are dismayed, but when they learn Shelly has taken up with Doreen the Vassar professor, they’re downright upset. “Could we have been doing same-same this whole time?” one of the women wonders. It’s a solid scene that makes light of Shelly and Lenny’s situation, but further cements Lenny as a great man, supporting the woman he loves through a life transition that will leave him essentially as a single parent while Shelly explores her identity with Doreen in Tuscany.

Things start to come full circle at Connie’s party. Unbeknownst to Tina and Joyce, Doug is preparing for his role as their boss (again), and at the same time, Connie tells Joyce that they need to cut the new Bella LaRouche story, in which she comes out as a lesbian, from the magazine because it’s too controversial. “This is a story for women,” Joyce defends. “Yeah, but not women like us,” Connie says.

Joyce and Tina have bent to Connie’s will all season to make Minx more mainstream, but they don’t agree with this move, and it creates a nagging feeling of concern for Joyce. It also creates an issue for Tina who is told she has to run the new new version of the magazine to the printer. Tina thought she was getting a promotion but alas, she’s still expected to do the same old shit. Doug rubs salt into her fresh wound when he sees her on her way out and gloats that Connie made him the company president. “Good for you,” she tells him.

At Connie’s party, Joyce starts to spiral when she sees her new cadre of international editors, the overtly sexy covers of potential new editions of Minx, and her own “slutty dictator” Rolling Stone cover plastered everywhere. “I think we’re losing control here,” she tells Doug, it’s the very thing he warned her about, but now that he’s profiting from Connie’s changes, he assure her it’s all becoming something better than it was. “If you want purity, do this out of your house. Nobody gets this big without giving something up,” Doug tells Joyce. This doesn’t sit well with Joyce, so she turns to the one person who has always unconditionally been there for her, Shelly, and the two of them steal Doug’s unreliable Rolls Royce to stop the new new pages from being printed.

When Connie introduces Joyce at the party, Joyce has already fled the scene, so Doug fills the uncomfortable silence by reading the speech Joyce would have read there. As this is happening, Bambi and Richie are racing to the printer with a new new new version of Minx, one that won’t compromise their creative values, when they run out of gas. Lenny, always the hero, picks them up with his three rambunctious kids in tow. (“Please tell me you have a full tank of gas,” Richie says. “I’m a dad, I fill up the second the needle goes below half,” Lenny tells him.)

Bambi teaches the kids to meditate in the car (she was a Pranayama guru six lives ago), and Lenny is overwhelmed by the silence. She offers to help him care for the kids while Shelly is away with Doreen, and I wonder if Shelly’s family will end up being the family she’s been searching for. “I just heard about this amazing temple in Alvarado, maybe we can take them,” she tells Lenny. Keep that Kool-Aid away, Bambi!

Lenny pulls up to the printer with Bambi and Richie at the exact moment Joyce and Shelly arrive there, and they’re met by Tina who tells them, “I had a feeling you were going to try something stupid.” But it’s all good because Tina’s on their side! “The second Constance trotted out ‘women like us,’ I was done,” she says. “Me too,” Joyce tells her.

And for the last three minutes of the episode, the feel-good notes of Jackson Browne’s “Doctor, My Eyes” plays and the O.G. Team Minx sends their version of the magazine to the press, full of Bella LaRouche and bath house pics. Constance might be able to stop the magazine from being distrubuted, but Joyce explains, she plans to send copies to the media with a “scorching resignation letter.” “I can’t believe I’m about to go to war with my own magazine,” she says.

“No, we’re going to war,” Richie tells her. The future might be harsh and uncertain for each of them, but in the present, they toast. As for their once fearless leader Doug Renetti, well, money and power are the only things he wants to be in bed with. And Connie, too.

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.