Palm Royale recap: Things get farcical at a funeral

The shit has hit the fan in Palm Royale. People are getting arrested, generational wealth is getting past down, babies are being born in bathtubs…it’s a mess out here. Let’s get into it.

We open with another 1949 flashback. Maxine (Kristen Wiig) and Douglas (Josh Lucas) are having a good old fashioned shotgun wedding at the Little Love Knot Wedding Chapel in Vegas. In his vows, Douglas says that Max and their unborn baby, whom he has taken to calling Jack after his father, are giving him a fresh start. When the chaplain says Vegas is not an unusual place to have a shotgun wedding, Maxine insists, “No loaded gun here!” Wink wink.

Cut to Norma (Carol Burnett) loading the revolver she finally got down from the wall last week. She’s in the car while Maxine and Douglas squabble in the driveway. Everyone is headed to Skeet’s (Bruce Dern) funeral this week for a classic “all the characters join up in one location no matter how farfetched it seems” episode. Linda (Laura Dern) invited all of her Our Bodies Our Shelves feminists to come to the funeral? Sure, why not.

Perry (Jordan Bridges) is already in prison for his condo scandal, meaning Maxine and Douglas’s assets are frozen and their financial future is circling the drain. Dinah (Leslie Bibb) somehow blames the Dellacortes for Perry’s downfall and then shifts into husband hunting mode at Skeet’s funeral: “They’re teeming with eligible bachelors; I have my future to think of!” She sets her sights on an old man named Axel, and for the rest of the episode, she’s a running gag in the background, offering to find him some tapioca pudding.

Douglas admits he might not be immune from prosecution because he greased some palms, handing out checks to everyone from city councilmen to Pinky’s associates. But whoops, Maxine realizes she was the one who wrote all those checks, meaning she’s caught up in this too.

Everyone’s gathered at the Rollins mansion (their family cemetery is conveniently in the backyard) for not just Skeet’s funeral but his will reading. Linda tells her friends to start stealing things from the estate to help fund Sylvia’s husband’s escape over the Canadian border to dodge the Vietnam draft. Only Virigina (Amber Chardae Robinson) refuses, reminding Linda that if they’re caught, she wouldn’t merely get a slap on the wrist, something Linda obviously didn’t think about. This friendship has a lot of tension! Linda also doesn’t realize what Evelyn (Allison Janney)—and we as the audience—already suspect, which is that Skeet left her everything. More on that in a minute.

The episode is a mix of hijinks and bubbling drama that eventually bursts to the surface. As Ann (Mindy Cohn) says, “I would never miss a funeral—that’s where the real action is!”

The prince and Robert (Ricky Martin) are getting it on in his hotel room, but Robert has to dash off to the funeral for some reason. He admits in this episode that he isn’t paid to work for Norma (although he does live in the pool house rent-free, I assume), so why is his attendance mandatory? The prince insists he come, and he’ll bring Princess Stephanie to keep their thing on the down-low.

Although if that’s the plan, maybe don’t go hooking up in one of the many Rollins bedrooms. Just a suggestion. Norma tells Maxine she needs to use the bathroom, pulling her loaded gun from her purse as Maxine pushes her chair in search of the toilet, but they accidentally walk in on Robert and the prince. Norma’s plan (to shoot Maxine, maybe) is foiled and she is scandalized. Maxine suggests Robert take her home.

Meanwhile, I was about to lose my mind over the running storyline of Maxine not giving Mary (Julia Duffy) her $75,000 check for “the fibs”—just drop it already!—until it turned into the most deranged and campy scene of the episode. Once again, Mary corners Maxine and goes in on her about the check.

“Do you know how many people are diagnosed every year?”

“Two million?”

“Seventeen.”

Seventeen! Mary’s foundation has cured all but one, little “Shelbi with an I,” whom Mary conveniently has a picture of and tells Maxine to look at the picture and think of how guilty she’ll feel when little Shelbi dies for lack of $75,000. It is such a bizarre scene, and Duffy is so committed that it comes back around to being downright hilarious. The whole show could benefit from doubling down on farce like this.

Douglas gets drunker and drunker throughout the episode, bumping up against Raquel’s mobster husband Pinky (Roberto Sanchez), who is trying to goad and ego boost him into keeping his mouth shut and thinking of them as partners. (“You think I don’t have cajónes?” / “Of course you do; I can see them under your skirt.”) Douglas and Maxine squabble again over the best path forward and whose fault everything is, but it all comes to a halt when Sylvia goes into sudden and TV-fast-paced labor, having to give birth to her baby in the bathtub. Mary, who chaired the gala for the Palm Beach obstetrics wing, is only too happy to step in: “Lead me to her.”

Everyone is in awe when the baby is born, but Maxine can’t bring herself to cut the cord. She and Douglas share an emotional look when Sylvia says they want to name the baby Jack. And we finally get an answer to the question hanging over Maxine and Douglas’ marriage: What happened to her baby? Well, as she finally admits to him, she lost it a few days before their shotgun wedding, not after. She didn’t realize it would be so hard for them to get pregnant again. Douglas, shocked and hurt, walks away from Maxine to go pull up the car.

When he’s standing in the driveway, he gets an earful from Evelyn, who is not going to let Linda inherit everything without a fight. She’s trying to spin up the argument that Linda did actually murder her father and that it just took the bullet 20 years to kill him. I’m not sure that’s how bullets/murder work? She implores Douglas to come forward and back her side of the story: “The truth is when two people agree.” Unless she’s offering him money, why would he be inclined to side with her? Anyway, their conversation is cut short when the feds show up looking for Maxine, and he tells them to arrest him instead. Again, not sure it works that way.

The final two twists are really one and the same. The prince has convinced Robert to run away with him to his home in France (“You have no home. No job. What is keeping you here?”), and Robert and Maxine have a very sweet heart-to-heart where she wishes him a wonderful time spending the $250,000 check the prince weaseled out of Norma’s estate before the condos fell through. She takes all the Beach Ball checks that Norma has been getting as RSVPs to the bank to cash them in for Douglas’ bail, but while she’s there, she sees the prince’s face on a wanted poster. This clicks with Mitzi’s (Kaia Gerber) revelation that she saw her friend Stephanie (“Princess Stephanie?”) from modeling school on the arm of the prince at the moon launch party. These two are, as previously stated, obviously scammers!

Maxine rips the wanted poster down from the wall and takes it into the police as valuable information to trade for Douglas’ immunity. She reveals the prince’s location at the Breakers Hotel, Douglas gets to come home with her, and Robert is left waiting for his prince at the end of the driveway. The show frames this as a big betrayal—trading her happiness for Robert’s—but…isn’t she saving him? From someone who is obviously lying to him? Why doesn’t she just tell him, “I’m sorry, pal, your new beau is a scam artist, and you probably weren’t really headed for the south of France.” This doesn’t have to be a break in their friendship!

Stray observations

• A Rollins family tradition is to wear tartan kilts or sashes to the will reading. Douglas failed to mention this to Maxine, so she spends part of the episode desperately hunting for some tartan and settles on the very tiny beret off of Linda’s teddy bear.
• I couldn’t help but roll my eyes at the schmaltz of the scene between Robert, Linda, and Maxine when he tells them he met someone. “The world just hasn’t caught up to you yet,” Linda tells him. She wants Robert to be able to shout his love from the rooftops. “Maybe he doesn’t want to be a movement,” Maxine says. “I just want to be a person.” People didn’t talk like this in 1969! This is some 2024 perspective being applied retroactively! Everyone watch Mad Men!
• “I said no motherfuckin’ photos!”