Whew. We’ve been through it with Margo over the last seven episodes. Margo knocked up – and knocked down this season, and the season finale shows her finally getting a win.
The truth is, this show is so much more than just entertaining. Sure, it’s enjoyable to watch this episode deliver the payoff that’s been building all season. But beyond being an incredible piece of television, this episode is also the closing argument in what has been, quietly and consistently, the most honest portrayal of OnlyFans and the women who it to survive that we’ve seen. (Ahem, looking at you, Euphoria.)
What Margo’s Got Money Troubles understood from day one is what most television shows get completely wrong: OnlyFans isn’t a punchline, and it isn’t a tragedy.
For many women, especially new mothers and those without safety nets, it’s simply a business and a means of survival. It requires creative vision, audience management, consistent content production, branding instincts, and a kind of entrepreneurial hustle that any startup founder would envy. From the beginning, that’s exactly how Margo treats it. And revealing that she turned the extra bedroom in the apartment into a spaceship set for content at the end? Perfection. This isn’t a woman to be pitied: this is a woman building an empire.
But let’s back up.
Margo can’t focus on that spaceship set until things are resolved with Bodhi and her baby daddy, Mark, as well as with CPS, which is actively investigating Margo after an anonymous tip. After being forced to take a drug test, Margo’s attorney encourages her to play ball with Mark and his attorney, since being investigated by CPS isn’t exactly a good look going to a custody dispute.
But Margo’s family can’t really let things be. Her mother, Shyanne, shattered Mark’s mother’s jaw in a previous episode, and this episode features Margo throwing herself at Mark after he said he refused to allow his son to be “raised by a pervert”. Considering Mark is the one actively sleeping with students, he should really look in a mirror. However, physical violence doesn’t really work well with mediation, and now everyone ends up in a courtroom with a judge ready to decide where Bodhi should stay.
This is where things really pick up, with the judge reading everyone in the room to filth. After all, everyone is supposed to be putting Bodhi’s needs first. Instead, they’re all just fighting amongst themselves. The judge, who seems to fancy himself a Solomon type, instructs the cast of characters to pass Bodhi around. One by one, the baby gets handed through her village. From Susie, the roommate, to Shyanne, the grandmother, to Margo’s friend, and to Margo. Then, he’s passed to his father. The man who had never held him before.
Of course, Bodhi bursts into tears. But so does Mark.
The judge had seen exactly what he needed to and ruled that Bodhi will remain in Margo’s primary custody – though Mark will have two weekends a month. Elle Fanning (who should get some Emmy praise for this show) has her “I am his mother” moment and everyone walks away relieved.
That is, until Mark drops the bombshell that will lead us to season two: he was not the anonymous caller to CPS. Kenny, Shyanne’s new husband, was.
How that impacts our key characters remains to be seen, but for now we get to see Margo end up exactly where she wants to be: covered in turquoise body paint, dressed like an alien, and about ot open her legs to a camera that belongs to her, on a platform she built, for an audience she cultivated from scratch.
That image matters. Because for every think piece that has ever treated OnlyFans as either exploitation or moral failure, this show spent eight episodes making a quieter, more complicated, more truthful case. There are real women who looked at a system designed to underpay and undervalue them and decided to do things their own way. Those choices don’t make them unfit mothers. Their bodies are their own business, both figuratively and literally.
The real scandal was never what they were doing on camera.
It was everyone else’s reaction to it.
Get your bag, Margo. We’ll see you next season.