The Deuce 3.5: Lori and Candy

The Deuce 3.5 showed us just about everyone going down in one way or another.  Among the highlights (or low lights):

• Frankie's definitely dead.  
• Vince ignores various advice and kill's Frankie's killer.  Since said killer's father is a made man, this means Frankie's own life is now in mortal danger
• AIDS is taking its toll, in heart-rending ways
• Lori is so besieged, so desperate to protect herself and body from real intrusions, that she's now imagining them.

Let's look a little more carefully at the last.  Lori should be doing better, much better.  She escaped prostitution in New York to become a porn star in Hollywood.  But she found the impositions on her body in the acting annoying and unacceptable.  So she tried singing.  She sounded alright to me, but apparently not to the audience on her side of the screen.  So, she left that and is working as a stripper.  The audience loves her in that.  But she finds that love threatening, and hallucinates an assailant.  What does that say about Lori?  That she can't handle success?  Well, at least not in the kind of work she's doing,

Candy, after a rough couple of weeks, is the only one in striking distance of a happy ending.  She finally rekindles a professional alliance with Harvey.  In many ways, their relationship has always been the best in this series - the best in that both benefit professionally, and neither one is really damaged when discord arises, as it always does in all walks of life.

And, since The Deuce is about porn and its evolution, this befits the series.  See you next week.

See also The Deuce 3.1: 1985 ... The Deuce 3.2: The First Amendment! ... The Deuce 3.3: Love and Money, Pimps and Agents ... The Deuce 3.4: Major Changes

And see also The Deuce Is Back - Still Without Cellphones, and that's a Good Thing ... The Deuce 2.2: Fairytales Can Come True ... The Deuce 2.3: The Price ... The Deuce 2.4: The Ad-Lib ... The Deuce 2.6: "Bad Bad Larry Brown" ... The Deuce 2.9: Armand, Southern Accents, and an Ending ... The Deuce Season 2 Finale: The Video Revolution

And see also The Deuce: NYC 1971 By Way of The Wire and "Working with Marshall McLuhan" ... Marilyn Monroe on the Deuce 1.7 ... The Deuce Season 1 Finale: Hitchcock and Truffaut 

  
It all starts in the hot summer of 1960, when Marilyn walks off the set
of The Misfits and begins to hear a haunting song in her head,
"Goodbye Norma Jean" ...