'Pam and Tommy' Episode 7 Recap "Destroyer of Worlds"
'Barb Wire' opens and Rand gets his own kind of karma.
After a few episodes away from Rand Guthier (Seth Rogan), we find him living with his ex-wife and searching for his business partner. Rand has been dealing with bootlegged tapes and making no money in return. That means he’ll only be able to stay at Erica’s (Taylor Schilling) for so long, while the gangster Butchie Peraino (Andrew Dice Clay) is looking for a return on his investment.
Rand needs to find Miltie (Nick Offerman), but Miltie has fled the country and he’s not coming back.
Meanwhile, Pamela is five months pregnant and promoting her new motion picture, Barb Wire. During a press junket, she wonders whether or not she’ll be asked about the tape. It turns out to be a question of not if, but when. Even though public opinion believes that she wanted the tape to be out there to gain publicity, she vehemently explains at every opportunity that the tape was stolen and distributed without her permission.
Peraino ends up inviting forcing Rand to come for a visit. He gives Rand an ultimatum he can’t possibly uphold — get the money or expect some pain. Out of options, Rand contacts the only rich person he knows for the money, Tommy Lee.
Before the men meet up, Pamela has an interview with Jay Leno to promote her movie.
Jay Leno is a performer himself. He’s there to get a rise out of the audience and move the interviews along. Thus, when the opportunity arises to ask about the tape, he doesn’t waste his chance. Like I mentioned in an earlier recap, Jay Leno is a bit of a jerk and that’s putting it lightly. He’s probably looking for Pamela to laugh it off and play it up for the audience, but Pamela isn’t going to do that. She’s going to explain to him what she’s lost by the tape going public and what it has done to her. She’s not here to laugh about it.
As for whether this actually happened on the Jay Leno show, it’s actually a combination of a few different appearances. According to an article on Yahoo! News, Pam’s attire during the interview is modeled after an appearance while promoting the movie. In another appearance seen here, she actually comes with a clip of all the times Jay Leno made a joke about the sex tape. She actually tells him “it’s not funny” even if she’s trying hard to smile through it. This is probably one of the few times the public gets to see how this was hurting Pamela Anderson, and it was only there for those who could read her reactions during these segments.
After the interview in Pam and Tommy, Tommy losses control and wants to attack Jay Leno right then and there. But Pamela reminds him that her movie is launching and he has to keep things quiet. So instead of fighting Leno, Tommy heads off to meet with Rand in a park. One of the few smart things Rand does in the series is that he meets Tommy while he’s behind a fence. Otherwise, I don’t think this would’ve ended up well for Rand. Even still Tommy was never going to give Rand that money and Tommy burns the money right in front of him.
Some other big moments for Rand in this packed episode:
Rand needs to collect money from other people that owe Peranio. Guess that’s one way to pay off a debt.
Rand tells Erica that he stole and distributed the tape. That doesn’t make her very pleased since she knows that you need releases in the porn industry and what Rand has done is wrong. Erica kicks him out.
Rand discovers that Miltie has just been playing him the entire time.
Ultimately the biggest moment of the episode comes from the premier of Barb Wire. Pamela is hoping that the movie will launch a lucrative film career for her with sequels in the future, but the initial buzz she hears from the audience is all negative. Even one choice review she hears was “that was the second-worst movie she’d appeared in that year,” alluding that her sex tape was preferable. Tommy can’t read between the lines and he’s just excited that Pam’s movie is finally out there and he convinces her to sneak into a public screening of the movie. There they finally realize that the audience finds the movie unintentionally funny and that it’s not going to be the success that Pamela is looking for. On top of all this, the court ruled in Penthouse’s favor and they’ll be able to use the First Amendment to post stills from the tape in their magazine.
No one is coming out of this nightmare on the plus side.
Stay tuned for the Pam and Tommy finale next week!
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