“Lariat Takedown” is the show at its most merciless — and its most honest
We need a moment. Just a moment. Because “Lariat Takedown,” the seventh episode of Margo’s Got Money Troubles, is the kind of television that sits on your chest long after the credits roll. We knew things were going to get ugly when Mark filed for full custody of Bodhi. We knew it. We braced for it. And it still knocked the wind clean out of us.
This is the episode where everything that’s been quietly building — the relapse warnings, the legal landmines, the slow-motion collapse of every safety net Margo has managed to stitch together — finally detonates. All at once. In the worst possible order. And the show doesn’t flinch for a single second.
Let’s start with the custody situation, because the audacity of Mark Gable continues to be truly breathtaking. Here is a man who wanted nothing to do with Bodhi, who had Margo sign an NDA to protect his own reputation, who was cheating on his wife with a student, now dragging Margo through a California custody battle on the grounds that her OnlyFans makes her an unfit mother. His resources are unlimited. His conscience, apparently, is not a factor. Margo’s options? Surrender or mediation. Because that’s what the system offers a struggling single mother whose income comes from sex work and whose housemate is her estranged, recovering-addict father. The deck isn’t just stacked. It’s been shuffled, rigged, and dealt by people who never wanted her to win.
And then Jinx relapses. Because of course he does. Not because the show is being cruel for cruelty’s sake, but because it’s being honest. The signs were always there. The Vegas trip. The back injury. The painkillers that, in hindsight, were doing a little more work than anyone wanted to acknowledge. When Margo and Susie find him locked in the bathroom with a needle in his arm, it’s harrowing in the specific, un-glamorized way that only real storytelling can pull off. He falls into a full bathtub on top of Margo. She nearly drowns. She saves his life with a naloxone syringe she’d quietly kept in the apartment just in case.
Just in case. Margo had naloxone on hand because she has always known, somewhere in the back of her mind, that this day might come. That’s not a plot detail. That’s a portrait of what it means to love an addict.
Nick Offerman is doing the best work of his career in this show, and Episode 7 is his masterclass. Jinx’s remorse is total and immediate, which somehow makes it worse. He knows what he’s cost her. He knows that every single consequence, from the CPS visit, the mediation, to the anonymous tip that is absolutely from Mark, is worse because of his relapse. And he moves out anyway, because he has to, shuffling off to Shyanne’s place with nowhere else to go, leaving Margo to face government agents snooping through her apartment, watching her change Bodhi, and interrogating Susie about her OnlyFans. Degrading doesn’t begin to cover it.
Speaking of Shyanne, she shows up for her daughter by socking Mark’s mother Elizabeth square in the jaw and shattering it, which is objectively satisfying for about four seconds before you remember what it’s going to do to the mediation. The Gable family should really look into their bone density. Just a suggestion.
And can we talk about Kenny for a second? Two episodes in a row, this man has shown up with more emotional intelligence than everyone else in the room combined. He’s not what anyone expected, and he just keeps being exactly what Shyanne, and honestly, all of us, needed.
Here’s what “Lariat Takedown” does that lesser shows wouldn’t dare: it refuses to promise that doing the right thing is enough. Margo is a good mother. A creative, resourceful, fiercely loving mother. And none of that may matter when she’s being measured against a wealthy man’s lawyers and a society that decided long ago how it feels about women like her.
There’s one episode left. We’re not ready.Margo’s Got Money Troubles streams on Apple TV+.
