Per usual, Quinn has managed to bury the worst of the aftermath of the police violence, sequestering Romeo and Darius in a hospital and hiding video evidence. As a reward, Gary has put her back in charge of Everlasting — and that means that Coleman has to live out his remaining contract as a lame duck, totally stripped of his show-runner responsibilities.
But Coleman is about to stumble on another breaking story: After discovering Yael rifling through his laptop one morning, he learns that she's a reporter — and that she's working on a TV piece that would expose all the Everlasting secrets. She blackmails him into staying silent, but he also seems interested in being complicit in her plan because it would help resurrect his own career. More on that in a bit.
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Quinn is happy to be back at the helm, but it also means that she's sacrificing her relationship with John Booth, and they still haven't finished that conversation about wanting kiddos. She's got a lot on her plate though, and the cherry on top is that Darius has disappeared from the hospital without a trace, which poses a big problem for the show and what to do with the contestants in the meantime.
Turns out, Darius left the hospital to track down Ruby because he wants to be with her. But she's like, "Um, no, you humiliated me on national television and now you only want me because I'm a last resort," so that's not going to work out at this point. Jay traces Darius to the coffeeshop where he met up with Ruby and gives him a real talk about his next moves: He basically thinks Darius should stay on the show, marry Tiffany, reap the benefits, and use it as a launchpad to become a sports announcer and even a team owner now that he can't play the game anymore. Yep, that's right. Darius had the surgery after the shooting and it didn't work. Football is a no-go for him from now on.
Back at the mansion, Quinn is doing some fast thinking and concocts an episode where the girls will have a chance to vote each other off the series, which could pose a major problem since Yael, Jameson, and Chantal are all on team bye Tiffany. So Chet and Quinn are scheming about how to keep the girls from voting Tiffany off... and that winds up turning into Chet making out with her, which we're supposed to believe is possible because she has self-described "daddy issues." Um. Okay. Moving on.
Somewhere not so far away, Rachel is still being held in the hospital, all drugged up, and Coleman goes to visit her. When Rachel wakes up, he tells her that her mom has been keeping him from her, and that he's been trying to see her all week and wants to get her out of there. Coleman tells her that he loves her; Rachel agrees that she wants to go. Her mom is not happy, and frankly more frightening than usual. But instead of taking Rachel home, Coleman takes Rachel straight to the Everlasting set to get her to confess on camera what really happened with the police; but Rachel, in her foggy state, spills on everything that happened last season with Mary, and a bunch of other awful shit she's been involved with on the show. At this point, it dawns on Coleman that he's struck an information gold mine — but that he'll have to essentially ruin Rachel's life in order to restart his own TV production career.
Rachel's mom follows them to the set with another doctor who is trying to assess whether or not Rachel is capable of taking care of herself and has her wits about her. But when the doc pushes on Rachel to tell him more about what's going on, Rachel's mom freaks out, afraid that Rachel is going to spill a secret from their family past. And this is the moment we've all been waiting for, when we finally figure out what the hell is going on between Rachel and her mom.
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Rachel confesses to Coleman that when she was 12, one of her mom's psychiatric patients raped her at home. Her mom never told the police because she was afraid that it would ruin her private practice, so she's been "treating" Rachel herself all these years. And by treating, she means drugging her into a stupor so that she can't talk about what happened with anyone else, and telling Rachel that if any guy ever found out what happened with the rape that they would think it was her fault and that no one would ever love her. Rachel tests that assertion by telling Coleman everything — and he responds by telling her how sorry he is that happened to her, and that he loves her.
Quinn catches wind of all of this, though it's unclear if she knows about the rape itself, and reminds Coleman that if he wants to protect Rachel, that means staying silent about the buried tape and all the Everlasting drama. But in the end, when Rachel is sleeping in his office, Coleman sneaks off to meet Yael. At first it seems like he's going to tell her that he can't participate in any of this exposé plotting. But then he says that there's a lot more to this story and he's going to help her tell it. So he's either leading her off the trail to protect Rachel or going full rogue.
Tiffany, by the way, does get voted off. But then Darius shows up — totally unplanned — at the last moment, and saves her, cutting Jameson instead. As he walks off the set he runs into Quinn and tells her that she can only speak to him through Jay — and that he never, ever wants to see Rachel again. Darius and Tiffany wind up in this little lit up pagoda, making out, both of them clearly a little confused about what they want but knowing that ending up together could be the best possible thing for them both.
At the end of the night, that leaves Quinn on her own. She calls John Booth, who shows up on the driveway in his fancy pants car, and asks her if she has given any more thought to the whole having babies thing. She has, and she wants them, with John. Turns out even Quinn has a ceiling for drama, and perhaps this time she's hit it.