Main cast: Britt Baron (Valentine Fawkes), Anna Lore (Trezzure), Benedict Samuel (Royal Briggins), Anna Akana (Julie Voccola), Ally Maki (Allison), and Sachin Bhatt (Eddie)
Director: Maggie Levin
Blue-haired pop tart Valentine Fawkes (don’t compare her looks to Poppy and Mars Argo, please) is slowly making her return to music via the smaller club circuit after a very ugly break-up with her ex and former manager Royal Briggins. Unfortunately, this puts her in front of the line of fire of the fans of Trezzure, fans that can put K-pop stans to shame from all appearances, because Royal has fashioned Trezzure exactly to Val’s image and even lets her sing the songs Val wrote but never got to release.
All this comes to an ugly head one evening after a night performing at a club, when Val has to confront not only three crazy fans from the “Trezzury”, the most popular forum for you know who; Royal and later Trezzure show up as well.
Oh boy, where do I start? My Valentine has a few good ideas and plenty of opportunities to bring them to life, only to squander every opportunity. It tries to satirize toxic online fan culture, only to drop that momentarily for some awkward dating humor, and then it pushes that too to showcase how women can be used and abused by predatory men.
Now that last one, well, the episode almost gets it right by at first presenting Royal as this handsome, suave smooth-talker that can generate intense chemistry with everyone in the cast. It’s not Benedict Samuel’s fault, as he plays Royal perfectly as per what the script calls for. The episode also hits hard a few times when it has Trezzure use common “reasoning” weaponized in real life to undermine Val’s efforts to tell her what a predatory bastard Royal is, such as why the victim can’t see what a nutjob she hooked up with and her victimhood is mostly self-inflicted because she was clearly dumb enough to stay in such an abusive relationship for so long.
Unfortunately, as the episode progresses, Royal becomes more and more obviously psychotic that it actually justifies Trezzure’s initially unfair condemnations of Val. Seriously, Val and Trezzure both come off as thick as lead for staying so long with this over the top psycho; it’s like the girlfriends of Adolf Hitler later whining that they have no idea that he was that “bad”. By turning Royal into a ranting, raving, homicidal lunatic, this episode completely goes unhinged and undoes everything it is trying to say. It would have done the job far more effectively if Royal had been allowed to remain a believable amoral, gaslighting, predatory villain.
The show also jumps unnecessarily to flashbacks to show me the very things Val has been going on and on at lengths, something that only succeeds in padding the runtime without adding anything else to the episode. Wait, let me rephrase that. If only they added nothing, really. Such flashbacks only accentuate Royal’s cartoon villain nature, so they actually made the episode worse.
Also making things worse is the awkward humor. The script came off like it had been written by a corporate bot based on algorithms devised from MCU movies—every heavy moment must be punctuated by an ill-timed wisecrack, even if it made no sense to be included or that its inclusion will ruin any gravity generated in the scene. I’m actually glad when Anna Akana’s character gets shoved out of the episode, because my god, her character exists only for punchlines that murder all serious thought-provoking moments the episode is aiming for.
Because of the muddled execution and its effort to try to be too many things at once (comedy, satire, expose on what monsters some men can be), this episode ends up being a chaotic mess that takes itself far more seriously than it pretends not to be.
On the bright side, I love the colors and set pieces like I normally do with the episodes of this show, and the music by Dresage is good. The Knife is my favorite, and I spend far more time comparing the versions “performed” by Val and Trezzure to figure out which one I like better, than I do on this episode itself. (For the record, I decide I prefer Val’s.) I also find myself wondering: would this episode be more fun if the whole thing had been a musical? I don’t know, but at least that would be some more interesting than what this baby ends up being.
Anyway, think of this episode as one long excuse to show off Dresage’s music—admire the colors and fashion, bop to the music, and fast forward through everything else.
