‘Pose’ Season 2 Episode 9 Recap: Life’s a Beach

This season of Pose is nearly at an end folks! And in this episode, we get something we’ve been needing a long while now: a nearly full hour of everyone being happy. Well, mostly anyway. Like many television shows before it, this episode takes a deviation from the main storyline in favor of going on a summer trip to the beach (and yes, it works quite nicely). Let’s begin:

We actually start the episode off on a down note. Blanca’s nail salon has been burnt to the ground. Without insurance, Blanca’s back to square one with no savings and no salon. Federica shows up and makes it fairly clear she was not only behind the arson, but she even bought insurance ahead of time just to make sure she could file the claim. Let’s hope she gets her before the season ends, yeah?

While Blanca’s feeling rotten, everyone else is melting in an awful summer heatwave. Fortunately, Elektra has a plan: one of her client’s has a beach house, and she’s confiscating it for the weekend. It’s all on the up and up — he’s yet another Wall Street big shot looking for a woman like Elektra to put him in his place. His kink? To be left in isolation and “forgotten” (so long as it’s still safe). Elektra convinces the gals to go on a road trip with her to his fancy digs by the Long Island shores. There are a few nods to the old body rotting in Elektra’s closet (which is beginning to turn ripe in the heat), but for the most part, the episode remains light.

Blanca, Elektra, Lulu, and Angel make their way to the beach the following day, and while there’s always a sense that the girls worry about their safety as trans women out and about, nothing truly awful ever happens. Yes, Blanca has a near-drowning experience, but then an extraordinarily handsome lifeguard comes to her rescue. Even better, he finds her later at a restaurant and asks to take her out on the beach. Watching Blanca get wooed by a handsome man who understands she’s a certain kind of girl is the serious highlight of this whole episode.

The only other major highlight takes place at the same restaurant Blanca and the lifeguard run into each other. The girls are enjoying dinner and drinks when some basic Becky comes up to let them know they’re being “too loud” for her. Well, Elektra’s not going to take that sitting down, y’all know. She reads her up and down until she’s nearly cowering insider her polo shirt. It was especially refreshing to see the management not harassing Elektra and the girls, or asking them to leave, but rather treating them like all the other paying customers.

By the end of the episode, everyone’s singing and smiling on the drive home. And someone else makes a brief appearance: Candy. Or rather, Candy’s ghost. We’re haunted by her memory throughout the episode, especially when Blanca goes off with the lifeguard for a few hours, causing the girls to worry. But it’s clear from the final scene that they’re meant not to forget Candy, but rather to continue living as best as they can, despite all the tragedies, and in honor of those who were taken too soon.

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