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Let’s Talk About ‘Ben’:
- In a flashback, big brother Blake teaches little brother Ben how to play gin, beat their father at the game and earn his respect.
- Blake reveals to everyone that Ben killed their mother … or at least that’s his version of the story.
- Fallon and Liam’s surrogate is pregnant, and Fallon’s attempts at bonding go completely off the rails.
- Sam is so offended that he didn’t get an invite to Lance Bass’ Pride Party that he decides to throw one himself at the Sahara Club so people won’t forget he’s the most prominent gay in Atlanta.
- Ben demands an apology from Blake for accusing him of murder, but Blake won’t budge so Ben goes into action.
- Fallon resorts to very drastic measures in order to keep Stacey within her sight.
- Jeff needs to know who owns pieces of Colbyco that he wants to buy back, and Amanda needs to get dirt on Ben for Blake so the two work together.
- Dominique warns Ben to keep her out of his feud with Blake, but after he drops a truth bomb on her, she has second thoughts.
- Alexis and Dex must be enjoying their honeymoon because they are nowhere to be seen this week.
So a week has passed since Alexis’ wedding three weeks ago — The CW’s nonsensiccal pre-emption of the show almost made the Pride storyline out dated — and Blake is still picking up the pieces after his little brother Ben’s surprise appearance at the wedding. Meanwhile, Fallon and Liam get the wonderful news that their surrogate is definitely pregnant, and Sam is feeling snubbed after failing to get an invite to Lance Bass’ Pride Party, which he gets every year. Has Atlanta forgotten he’s on of the city’s most prominent gays? He resorts to some Lucy Ricardo shenanigans to remind them who Sam Jones is.
Blake & Ben
Blake is doing everything he can to avoid talking to his brother, going so far as to tell Cristal and Dominique to ignore his calls as well. Cristal reminds Blake she’s not his secretary and Dom reminds him that he does not make decisions for her … but she does march herself to Ben’s hotel to tell him to keep her out of the brotherly feud … and to never offer her hotel Chardonnay again. But he reveals to her that Blake has her mother fired from Carrington Atlantic so his mistress could have that job, igniting a fire under her. At breakfast, Amanda isn’t up to speed on the Carrington past so Blake goes over the whole story of why he hates his brother — Ben murdered their mother. Of course Blake is over-exaggerating a bit. While staying with Blake after an accident, the family took turns taking care of her and it was Ben’s night to be with her. But he went out and their mother drowned in the bathtub, and Blake made a public statement that Ben killed her. Ben is back in town now because he’s got a baby on the way, and he doesn’t want his son coming into a world that believes his father is a murderer (seriously, is the world even thinking about this?) so he asks Blake to make a public statement that it was just an accident. Blake refuses even after Ben tells him he left a note asking Blake to be with their mother that night, but Blake says there was no note. Seeing he’ll get nowhere, Ben has to fight fire with fire.
Blake has donated some artwork to a charity event, but one of the paintings is thought to be a forgery. Blake insists that the painting is from his collection and it is authentic, but Cristal advises him to have it verified as an act of good faith. Unfortunately, the painting is a very good forgery, so the buyer agrees to keep quiet in exchange for a refund at a 15% markup. But he ends up not keeping quiet and the press reports that at least four paintings from the Carringtons are forgeries, not a good look especially when the money is for a charity. Blake knows Ben is behind it because those paintings came from the vault at the compound (why does Ben still have the combination?), so the feud only escalates. Dominique confronts Blake about her mother, and he does admit that it was he who had her fired, and he can’t even remember the mistress’ name (to which Dom asks if he thinks that makes his look better), and if he’d known at the time that Dom was his half-sister he probably wouldn’t have fired her. Probably? Dom and Blake had been in a good place, and Blake says Ben is trying to turn her against him, but he just might have succeeded as she revisits his hotel — he has better wine — and decides she wants to be in on his scheme (by the way, the emotion Michael Michele poured into her performance with Grant Show in their scene together was some of the best acting she’s done on the show).
Blake gets blurry security footage from the compound that shows Ben — actually someone wearing a mask — removing the paintings from the vault so he can at least now prove that they were stolen and replaced with the forgeries, and the paper printed a retraction about Blake’s attempted fraud, thwarting Ben’s plan. Ben still insists that their mother’s death was an accident and Blake is not being fair, but Blake saus his lies won’t change the facts so go back to Paris (does he know his nephew Stephen is locked away there in a mental hospital?). The next day Blake is served with papers … Ben is suing for half of everything Blake has.
Fallon
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Fallon and Liam and thrilled their surrogate Stacey is pregnant, which sends Fallon into ‘Tiger Mom’ mode. Going beyond the traditional surrogacy agreement, Fallon decides she wants to bond with Stacey so she doesn’t miss any moment of the pregnancy. They do yoga together at the manor and Fallon suddenly decides to ask Stacey to move in. She thinks it’s a little soon to make that decision, but before she can agree she gets a job offer. Stacey works at a museum, but she has a chance to go on an archaeological dig in the Appalachians where a new dinosaur species may have been found. Knowing how much this means to Stacey, and even though it’s going to take her away from Atlanta for maybe two months, Fallon pretends that she’s fine with it. But Fallon is in a panic, made even more by spotting a rash on Stacey’s arm which she claims is just eczema. So Fallon does the unthinkable and asks Adam to casually pop by the manor to surreptitiously take a look at the rash. When Stacey rambles off a lot of medical mumbo jumbo about the cause of the rash, Adam is satisfied and tells her to have a good dig … which is not what Fallon wanted him to say.
But that gives her another idea — she and Adam will play Indiana Jones, ‘disguise’ themselves and go to the dig as volunteers. Adam agrees on the condition that they can have weekly dinner dates since he’s not the most popular Carrington and he wants to feel as if he’s part of the family. She agrees and off they go but by the time they get there the rash has cleared up. So all is well and they can return to Atlanta … except Fallon then sees all of the sharp tools laying around and decides the dig is a death trap and she has to get Stacey and her baby out of there. She has Adam plant some fossils in Stacey’s backpack, knowing she’d be fired for theft but the whole set-up is suspicious to Stacey and her boss. It turns out the fossil Adam put in the backpack that he thought was a tooth and Fallon thought was a rock was … a tooth, and a rare one at that. Who cares if it was in Stacey’s backpack, they need to bring this to the attention of the head of the dig. Thwarted again, Fallon and Adam return home but so does Stacey because some billionaire bought the dig site and shut the project down. Unfortunately, on the way into the manor Stacey spotted the hat Fallon was wearing at the dig and knew it was she who shut them down, causing Stacey to stick to the original surrogacy agreement. No yoga, no moving in, no bonding, they’ll only be in contact for doctor visits. While Fallon is at Sam’s Pride party, Adam shows up (looking like he runs a conversion therapy camp, according to Fallon) to let her off the hook for their dinners and tell her he’s sorry about how things turned out. He says he enjoyed that connection that had, to not leave him out of her next adventure, and that he doesn’t want to be left behind when the next generation of Carringtons comes along. That triggered something in Fallon and she got Stacey to come to the manor again to talk and apologize for losing her mind. Stacey actually understood her new mom fears and forgave her … and asked if the offer to move in was still on the table if there was a spare room. Fallon said she had fourteen.
Sam
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If Fallon’s storyline wasn’t ridiculous enough, Sam’s was even more so. Poor Sam is feeling left out of Atlanta’s gay scene because he didn’t get an invite to Lance Bass’ Pride event, Lance Bash. Boo hoo. What’s a gay entrepreneur to do when he gets snubbed from the hottest party in Hotlanta? Throw one of his own of course — in less than 24 hours — in the club you own. Of course you’ll also need the help of your friends, so Sam presses Culhane and Kirby into service. They find the task challenging but mostly pull it off minus the excessive amount of vodka Sam requested because the gays love their voddy. (Yes, thanks for stereotyping the entire LGBTQ+ community as a bunch of partying, provocative people into kink.) The only problem now is getting people to the Sahara Club on short notice. The original idea was to pass out flyers but Sam vetoed that in favor of some Lucy Ricardo hijinks — rerouting the Pride Parade so it passes by the club. Simple yet illegal … and the resulting traffic jam made it impossible for the liquor vendor to deliver more booze. And Sam takes it all out on Kirby and Culhane, saying he shouldn’t have trusted a straight man and a woman who is queer when it’s convenient to put a Gay Pride Party together. Feeling that the party is a bust, Sam takes things into his own hands and … gets into drag? Do impose himself upon his headliner, RuPaul’s Drag Race queen Angeria Paris VanMichaels. But this queen does not do duets, especially with someone who is doing drag in a breastplate that doesn’t match his skin tone. and for all the wrong reasons. But Miss Angeria talks some sense into Sam and he apologizes to Culhane and Kirby and they all enjoy the performance. And when Sam went to open a bottle of wine, Kirby told him to look at the label — it was the invite to Lance Bash. Oopsy.
For some reason, instead of being with Kirby someone decided it would make more sense to have a drunken Amanda running around the club, chasing a stripper and offering advice to Fallon about her surrogacy contract. Earlier Kirby had gotten Amanda to help Jeff in exchange for Jeff helping Amanda. She needed help hacking into a computer for Blake to get dirt on Ben, and Jeff needed to find out who owned pieces of Colbyco he was trying to buy so he could put the company back together. Jeff helped Amanda, but when she learned who owned those pieces of Colbyco — Blake — she was torn on whether to tell him or not. And she chose not to tell Jeff, saying that she basically hit a dead end. That’s not going to blow up in her face, is it?
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