Flack recap: 3 important moments in Season 1, Episode 5
By Mads Lennon
2. Robyn makes a game plan.
The client-of-the-week, Calvin Cooper, is a misogynistic pig. He tries to solicit oral sex from a fan, although he passes it off as a joke, and makes repeated disparaging marks towards the current climate of women getting justice against their abusers. Worst of all, he has a laptop full of incriminating photos – of what variety? the show never says explicitly. The implication is of underage girls or something even worse.
His laptop may have fallen into the hands of the police, which means Robyn has to figure out a way to save Calvin’s career, and fast. This is what she trains for! She is able to pull together a script-writer and an author willing to lie for Calvin (with some PR style persuasion tactics) and say the photos were there because he was researching for the acting role of a 50 year old lech. Calvin may still need a lawyer but if they can convey the story he was only trying to get into the mindset of a pervert, they may be able to fix this.
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Knowing his career might be over, Bradley Whitford gets to deliver an excellent monologue about the battle he faces within. He claims he feels like two people, one who is a normal guy and the other who is a goblin. The goblin is constantly doing awful things the “good guy” has to clean up. “Maybe it’s him, not the goblin, that’s the real bad guy. Maybe he’s the one that has to be stopped.”
Even though Calvin is talking about himself, his words double as an indictment of Robyn’s career. She facilitates men like Calvin to keep doing what they’re doing by hiding his indiscretions away from the public eye. Is she really any better for allowing awful things to continue when she could stop them?