Everyone’s pushing their agendas on this week’s UnREAL and it made for another entertaining hour of contradictory strategies, a Chet and Jeremy team-up, and someone’s plan backfiring.
Jay has some words of caution for Rachel at the top of the hour as she finds her control on the show continuing to slip throughout their first night of filming the show, as he cautions her, “don’t out-Quinn Quinn. Because she’s back.”
When he’s not offering Rachel some perspective (that may have incidentally driven her to the one thing she didn’t want to happen), Jay’s finds his winning girl in Ruby. Though she was on board with the idea of working on furthering her cause, she seems less than willing to play the game their way, if her (understandable) anger at Beth-Anne’s Confederate flag bathing suit is any indication. While that may have been a terrible sign when she meets Darius for the first time, he seems to be taken by her honesty and her “I can’t breathe” shirt.
Rachel’s working under Quinn again after she’s ensured that it’s only for one night. But there’s already some underlying resentment building between her and her mentor as a result of this demotion. Of course, she still gets things done and spends the hour trying to figure out how to secure her spot as the showrunner, which we later find out involves some very Quinn-like maneuvers and a surprising result.
Meanwhile, the unholy partnership that Chet and Jeremy formed this week has ratcheted up their collective level of terrible, exponentially. Chet attempts to poach Quinn and Rachel’s girls, starting with Tiffany, the daughter of a football team owner, who may be carrying some underlying familial issues. It takes one conversation with Rachel, though, for her to realize exactly what she’s been manipulated into doing and while she may be getting played by Rachel and Quinn, it somehow feels less awful than Chet’s plans for her.
Darius’ first meeting with Beth-Anne went surprisingly okay considering every producer on either side was waiting with bated breath on some sort of blow out, either by Beth-Anne herself or by Ruby, who was standing nearby.
All the while, Yael (a.k.a. Hot Rachel) takes her chance at actually getting to have Darius notice her and “falls” into the pool, struggling to swim up. After a heroic rescue by Darius, we find out that she’s actually a medal-winning swimmer and is intent on making Madison her best friend to help her win. Let’s see how that strategy works out for her.
Rachel seems to be going through some things as Quinn continuously insists on moving Rachel back into her producer position. Quinn’s ruthlessness shines through in her production room conversation with Rachel and felt like her one big moment of manipulation against someone who she has called a friend. It takes this conversation (and the events of the entire hour, really) for Rachel to decide she wants to play hard and heads to Gary. It was clear that her intention of going to him and not-so-subtly attempt to destabilize both Quinn and Chet, was to get her showrunner spot that Quinn promised her. Unfortunately for her, that play doesn’t get her far as Gary decides to bring a new producer for the show, Coleman (Michael Rady from GREEK).
The racial politics is fascinating to watch in terms of seeing what the networks wanted and how the production team attempt to play with their expectations. UnREAL’s unwillingness to hold back continues to entertain and with a new producer who unfortunately shares some of Chet’s sensibilities, it will be fun to see where that goes.
Don’t miss the next new episode of UnREAL on June 20 at 10:00 p.m. ET/PT on Lifetime.