Good Girls Review: Strong Sales Strong Hearts / Put It All On Two (Season 4 Episodes 10 and 11)
The girls are back for the summer! Good Girls Season 4 Episode 10, “Strong Sales Strong Heart” and Good Girls Season 4 Episode 11, “Put it All On Two,” set the girls out on a new adventure as they start printing Canadian money.
These episodes premiered less than 24 hours before the cancellation was announced, and to be honest, it does feel like it’s time.
The summer premiere is entertaining to watch, and that’s about it. It’s hard to get invested in any of the character’s stories at this point given how much the show has backtracked over every chance to advance the plot.
No fundamental change has happened on the show since early Season 3, and that’s because they don’t know what to do without potentially breaking up the trio at the center of it.
The trio is the beating heart of the show. Their bond is essential, but they have such good chemistry that it’s starting to feel flat.
In searching for the words to talk about this episode, I keep falling on the note that this show is starting to lose any substantial stakes. We always know that Ruby, Beth, and Annie are going to be okay. They will always find a way out and make it back home.
This can only happen so many times before the shock value of having your characters get shot, or put in a pressure-cooker type situation, works and the audience actually worries about the characters. When they are put into a tense situation, and my first thought it, “They’re definitely gonna be home by dinner,” it gets a lot less interesting to watch.
There used to be that kind of tension, and I want there to be that kind of tension again.
I want to feel like one of these women or someone they care about could die or get arrested at any moment. Good Girls proved that this is works when they killed off Lucy in Season 3. However, every attempt that the show makes to set up drama feels like a letdown in recent episodes leading the girls to end up right back where they started.
“Strong Sales Strony Hearts” and “Put it All on Two” is a good start in making those fundamental shifts, but it may be too late. I also don’t have much hope that the arc will actually last and have consequences.
The idea that Dean is now “waking up” and is willing to throw Beth under the bus is an interesting one. It’s poetic since Dean is one of the reasons Ruby, Beth, and Annie have gone down this path.
Dean is a complicated character. He’s easy to hate at the start of the series and is on a constant redemption arc throughout. The fact that he is now willing to turn Beth in is a shift that puts him back on the villain side of the spectrum.
Yes, he does help Beth on this episode, but until now he hasn’t been involved in her enterprise. When he comments on how he’s never made her smile like she does when she’s printing cash, it feels invalid.
As much as we see Beth and Dean together, he never seems to express interest in her life until he thinks he is going to lose her.
A relationship takes two people, and Beth needs to want to change too, but she seems to be thinking of their future at the moment. She tells him that this job will get them out and they can flee. There’s nothing holding Beth to Michigan outside of her family or Ruby and Annie so we should believe that she’s ready to flee.
Dean should too. I would argue that in any other situation he would have if not for The System.
It’s not easy to hear his friends at The System tell him that he isn’t at fault for cheating on his wife. It is sickening to hear them vilify Beth given all we know. If the show goes through with this, it’s going to fundamentally change their relationship.
I don’t think there is any coming back from this given how “Put It All On Two” ends.
The more I think an appropriate ending for this show, it’s likely going to involve an arrest or death of some kind. Good Girls feels like it wants to be The Americans, where we know that they’re not angels, and as much as we enjoy watching them, we want them to pay.
These characters can’t end in the same place they began. It’s a betrayal to the series so far and the journey that they’ve been on. Their strongest bond has been each other for four seasons, and the most effective ending is for that to break or for them to all take the fall together.
“Strong Sale Strong Hearts” and “Put it All On Two” is a strong start to the second half of the season, but that’s all it is: a start with no real consequence to be heard of. Yet.
Stray Thoughts
- Stan, I love you, but please stop policing your wife’s friends.
- Go figure the only time you’d actually make a killing at Craps is when you’re trying to lose at craps. It’s the kind of irony that only works in film and television.
- Classic joke about not being able to move the press because it wouldn’t fit. After watching the documentary Pressing On: The Letterpress Film I had an idea of how big it was but also how delicate. I assumed that movers would say “too big.”
- Annie deserves some happiness and I am glad she’s enjoying spending time with Kevin.
What did you think of this episode of Good Girls? Share your thoughts in the comments below!
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Good Girls airs Thursdays at 10/9c on NBC.
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Lauren Busser
Lauren Busser is an Associate Editor at Tell-Tale TV. She is a writer of fiction and nonfiction whose work has appeared in Bitch Media, Popshot Quarterly, Brain Mill Press Voices, and The Hartford Courant.