Pose Season 2 Ep. 4 Recap: 'Never Knew Love Like This Before'

Photo: FX

Wow...that was...a lot. After exploring the subject of death in "Butterfly/Cocoon," tragedy hits much closer to home in "Never Knew Love Like This Before."

The title, taken from the classic Stephanie Mills song, seems to be used with equal parts sincerity and irony when it applied to Candy Ferocity. The daughter turned co-house mother was a lot of things, but well liked was not one of them. While she's been allowed moments of vulnerability--last year's "The Fever" comes to mind--she's largely been used as comic relief, the punchline for Pray Tell's withering stare and most vicious ballroom reads. "Never Knew Love Like This Before" finds them clashing again, this time over whether lip synching should be added as a ballroom category. "What is real about flapping your jaw to a cassette tape?" he quips to his fellow ballroom emcees. Candy, who's crashed their brunch meeting, can see the future coin in the category, but her words fall on deaf ears and side eyes. "Why don't you take me seriously?" she screams at Pray, the look in her eyes making it clear she's talking about something beyond ballroom trophies and shade. She's asking why she isn't being taken seriously as a person.

Tragically, he'll never be able to give her an answer. "Never Knew Love Like This Before," doesn't keep us guessing about Candy's fate for long. After Lulu tells Blanca she hasn't come home in two days and has been taking tricks to a hotel in a dangerous part of town, it's all hands on deck to find her. But their search doesn't even begin before a phone call from the motel manager delivers the brutal truth: Candy is dead, her bloody body left in a closet. "The NYPD doesn't care about a dead transsexual," Elektra says matter-of-factly.

Candy could say no one in the ballroom scene cared all that much for her either. Pray Tell, always one to keep it 100, acknowledges he and Miss Caaaandy didn't exactly see eye to eye. "She was a pain in my goddamn black ass," he cracks during the eulogy, breaking the tension. But he also acknowledges she, like everyone else in attendance, was his family, and they are all charged with protecting the lives of transwomen from men too afraid to be open about their desires. Pray Tell remarks death means the deceased can no longer give speak their truth; however, Candy does get in the last word. Lots of them.

"I forgive you," she tells Pray Tell, before asking why he was such an asshole to her. He answers what she was--black, femme, loud and unapologetic--was all the things he hides from the outside world. Candy responds she had no choice but to be herself, and while the conversation is between two people about their combative relationship, it can also be taken as a commentary on the policing of behavior marginalized groups often do amongst ourselves. Sometimes it comes out of a need to simply survive, sometimes out of a misguided need to appear respectable to the majority. Her conversations with Lulu--child, the kids will be sipping on the tea of her ripping accessories off Candy's body for years to come--Angel and her parents are tearful, honest ones about the complicated dynamics of family, friendships and the struggle to believe in yourself.

What's beautiful but frustrating about the episode is how it allows Candy--or at least her spirit--to take center stage in a way the character rarely if ever got the chance to in life. Watching how she moves from sarcastic to sensitive, coldly blunt to forgiving and introspective, Angelica Ross certainly has the dramatic chops necessary to give more depth to Candy. And she does. But why did the character have to die for us to see this side of her? Pose has consistently made the point that life is precious but is only capable of "giving Candy her flowers" after killing her off.  Complaints aside, a definite highlight was watching Candy get one last stroll on the runway, lip-synching for her afterlife to "Never Knew Love Like This Before," basking in the love from the crowd and 10's across the board. Sashay on girl. Sashay on.

Candy's death also knocks some sense into Pray Tell, who has refused to start taking AZT despite the fact Blanca's T Cell count has improved. But the episode's final scene sees him trading out his "holistic" approach of a daily pound of butter for a bottle of AZT.

"To life," he and Blanca toast. To life.

Other Thoughts/The Shade of It All

• If you've watched Paris Is Burning, Candy's tragic end couldn't help but bring to mind Venus Xtravaganza, who was found dead in a hotel during the documentary's filming. Also, Angel's rant about 11 girls already dying in 1990 was likely a comment on transgender murders in 2019. Eleven transgender women, most of them black, have been murdered this year.  

• Considering Madonna's Blond Ambition tour kicked off in April 1990, and "Vogue" hit number one in May, Miss Candy pulled together a cone bra and pinstriped suit with the quickness, especially given this was the pre-Internet era. But some divas aren't given their due until it's too late. 

• Leave it to Elektra to be mistress of funeral protocol, shushing Judy and Blanca then trying to shoo folks away from the food. In another life, she'd be a church mother named Beulah or Evelyn who handed out peppermints and butterscotch candies.

• "White folks just want a smile and a show."

• "Everybody knows this is where you bottoms brunch."

• "My patience is as thin as your wallet."

• "I can't let her go in the ground lookin' like my Aunt Carol."

• "I assume she's a Scorpio." Now Pray, you cut a little too close to the bone with that read. Too close bitch.