The One with Lucca Becoming a Meme
Maia has been arrested for possession of drugs that Blum planted in her car. Liz joins Diane in the resistance group. Marissa helps Julius with his campaign, but the other conservatives don't think he should use Eli Gold's daughter for that. Lucca goes to the park with her son and is mistaken for a nanny, then for a kidnapper. After that is cleared up, people start sending her harassing emails and phone calls regarding the video the racist woman in the park uploaded.
Marissa helps Maia cheat on her drug test. Jay drives Lucca home because of the death threats, and ends up talking about the racial issues at the firm in spite of himself. Diane and Liz are asked by the Resistance to recruit pop singer Sabrina Wynne to make a statement against the alt-righters who have decided she's an Aryan goddess, since she's highly popular in the states that made Trump's electoral college victory in the last election.
Jay goes public with the salary disparity. It ends with Maia getting fired to avoid the perception she's being given special treatment over a black associate named Alan North who was fired for drug possession and use last month. Diane sorrowfully breaks the hard news to her.
Tropes
- Call-Back: Marissa mentions how her dad, Eli Gold, made politics more about winning than making lives better, so she has no compunctions helping conservative Julius despite being liberal herself.
- Conflicting Loyalty: Marissa is consulting for Julius, a conservative friend who is under consideration for a judgeship. Eli has the DNC send a guy to chew her out for it. Julius is touched that she stood up for him to the DNC guy in what she thought was a sound-proof room, and wants to keep her on despite his party wanting him to cut her loose. He makes a principled stand, quotes a Biblical passage about loyalty, and tells them that if she goes, he goes, expecting them to be impressed with his moral fibre. Since the Republican Party is deeply hypocritical about believing in the Bible, it fails and he's out of consideration.
- Mistaken for Racist:
- Marissa and Diane both feel bad when Lucca points out that only the black people in the meeting room remember the names of black police shooting victims while the white people remember the name of a white murder victim.
- Subverted with the salary disparity between white and black associates. Adrian admits that they pay the white employees more so that they won't look for better-paying jobs elsewhere.
- While the black associates and Jay discuss how the white associates use Marissa more than him, Maia comes in and asks if they know where Marissa is. They say, "No, but Jay is here," but Maia chooses to keep looking for Marissa. In this case, it may have been about the drug test that Marissa was helping her cheat on, but the point stands.
- Pragmatic Hero: Liz and Diane both decide to stick with the Resistance group despite the group's underhanded, horrible tactic of stirring up alt-righters on 4chan against Sabrina Wynne's transgender sister so that Sabrina will finally make a political statement and get young people in the Midwest to vote against far-right candidates, because it worked.
- Sarcasm Mode: When the racist white mother next to her thinks Lucca is a nanny because she thinks Joseph looks white while she looks black, Lucca sarcastically says that she abducted the baby from a Whole Foods store and she's going to sell him on Ebay. Unfortunately, the other woman is foolish enough to take it at face value.
