UnREAL Shows Why It Might Be Okay To Let A Damaged Person Do Damage Control

If you're a reality-show producer who feels responsible for the suicide -- not just in the middle of production but in the middle of the set -- of one of your stars, there are a couple of ways to handle it. You can try to do what would be the right thing in the context of the actual world where decent people live. Or you can do the rightest possible thing, knowing that's still pretty wrong, for what are mostly defensibly right reasons...but also kind of scummy wrong ones. Guess which option Rachel chooses?!

In the aftermath of Mary's suicide, both Rachel and Shia are pretty certain they're to blame. Rachel's reasoning is plain to everyone on set: she's the one who brought Kirk to the set, in order to cause a confrontation between Kirk and Mary that Adam could break up -- all of which did occur, proving Rachel's good-TV instincts right once again. Rachel told herself then -- and tells others now -- her rationale was that, whatever emotions got stirred back up for Mary and Kirk, the set is a closed environment equipped with security professionals, and thus offered a secure space for this meeting to take place. And while Rachel doesn't know the content of Mary and Kirk's off-camera conversation after he punched Adam, her correct assumption is that it was upsetting for Mary, and thus she attributes Mary's emotional disintegration to it.

But wait: as we know, there's more! And Shia's guilt can no longer allow her to keep secret her part in Mary's suicide, switching Mary's actual medication for sugar pills. And once she unburdens herself to Rachel, and the two of them inform Quinn, it immediately becomes clear who's prepared to manage a crisis and who needs to be removed from the set before any cops try to talk to her. Jay is pressed into service to put Shia under house arrest in a hotel room that's apparently been equipped with a cell blocker before she got there, where he politely asks her not to tell him anything about what she did or did not do to or with Mary in the days before her death. Back at the manse, Rachel makes some noise about telling the authorities the whole truth about the possible causes of one lost life, buuuuuuut.... "I am talking about more than one life," Quinn tells Rachel, reminding her of how many people are employed by the production -- and anyway, they're not psychiatrists! "The truth is, we are never going to know why she took her life -- the pills? Kirk? The voices in her head? You just want to clear your conscience to make yourself feel better, but that comes at a very high price."

Of course Quinn manipulates Rachel onto her side: if she didn't know Rachel would be receptive to her arguments, Quinn would have sent Rachel to the gulag. But where Shia's weak, Rachel's wily. And before long, Rachel's not just getting on board with Quinn's spin -- she's extending it in new directions. Kirk's going to have his lawyer call a press conference where he threatens to sue the show and regain custody of his daughter? Nope, Rachel's going to interview the remaining cast members about how Mary characterized Kirk in conversation with them, and then leak the footage to Jezebel: "If we're not going to tell the truth about Mary, let's at least do one good thing here." If Adam doesn't feel like contributing to her narrative -- "You mean when you brought Kirk here and ambushed him with his wife and daughter" -- then he doesn't have to be part of the package. And if the network president sees through the tactic and seizes all the video drives, then it's pretty lucky that Rachel happens to stop into Mary's former room and find a note addressed to Mary's daughter. When Mary's sister Louise reads it, she immediately insists that she be the one to read it to Everlasting's cameras, accompanied by tender b-roll of Mary's reunion with her daughter just hours earlier.

As Mary neatly exonerates Everlasting from responsibility for her death -- she invited Kirk; she chose to go off her meds (which is why the toxicology report on her body shows no evidence that she'd been taking them) -- everyone who's ever spent more than five minutes with Rachel knows for an absolute fact that Rachel wrote this note -- and yes, that includes Louise, who tells her, "Nice job on the note. I almost believed it was real." Adam has one of his rare attacks of conscience, asking Louise if she's really okay with what she's just done, but given what she's been through and what's at risk -- specifically, her niece's custody, and the injustice of the network showering Kirk with the windfall of a guilty payoff -- Louise DGAF: "It was smart. It had to be done....Whatever it takes to keep Lily Belle away from that monster."

Quinn's protégée was always going to do whatever it takes -- whatever it takes to get the cops to rule Mary's death officially a suicide; whatever it takes to get Shia off the show and sufficiently compromised not to be a whistleblower; whatever it takes to stop the network from shutting down the production of Everlasting and making the season a write-off. Challenged earlier in the episode by a network lawyer as to the wisdom of having hired back Rachel, a staffer who'd crashed a Ferrari just months before, Quinn confidently replies, "She's worth five crashed Ferraris." And boy, that seems to be true.