Recap of Episode 7 of ‘Dying for Sex’: Facing Challenges

The early morning sun filters through the window, casting a golden glow on the dust particles floating in the air. Molly is lying in a hospital bed, cradled by her neighbor. They had shared a night of intense passion, culminating in Molly experiencing her first orgasm with another person. Despite the upcoming spinal tap scheduled in an hour, her neighbor offers to stay by her side or return later, but Molly politely declines the offer.

“I don’t wanna die with you,” she tells him. “I wanna get a dog with you.”

“So you just used me to get off, and now you’re done with me?” he deapans.

“Yeah,” she replies, and while this is technically true it’s facetious in spirit. 

Then she follows up: “This is gonna be a blip for you.”

“No,” he replies with the gentle confidence of a man who knows he’s telling the truth. “No.”

He stays until she falls asleep, and then he’s gone, presumably forever. This night was their last gift to one another.

Molly’s journey to this moment has been arduous. Her collapse on the street led to a hospitalization due to a collapsed lung, requiring her to be intubated. After the tube is removed, she struggles to breathe on her own, with her friend Nikki, acting as her medical proxy, facing the difficult decision-making process in case of a life-threatening situation. With a Do Not Resuscitate order in place, any cessation of breathing could mean the end of medical intervention.

Recovery will necessitate an extended hospital stay, which complicates her pursuit of sexual fulfillment. In addition to the imminent spinal tap to investigate her leg’s loss of sensation, a possible sign of cancer spreading to her spine, her doctor warns that further treatment might not be beneficial. Amidst all this, Nikki encounters a series of mishaps, including her car being towed with all of Molly’s medical records, sex toys, and lubricants inside, just as she rushes Molly’s neighbor to the hospital for their urgent meeting. To add to the chaos, an obstructive nurse named Ernie poses a challenge to Molly and her neighbor’s plans for intimate activities in the hospital room, though they manage to navigate the situation.

(A brief note: I refuse to call Molly’s neighbor “Neighbor Guy” for the duration of this review. It was never that funny a bit to begin with, and hearing Nikki call the guy “your neighbor” instead of his name, which she’d obviously know, is too cutesy for me to play along with, sorry. This is serious business.)

Anyway, Rob Delaney is for sure gonna break some hearts as the neighbor in this episode, and not on account of being sweet or sad either. The neighbor’s body is showcased in all its tactile, hirsute glory; the episode often feels like sponcon for chest hair. After however many years of smooth-chested Marvel hunks, it does a fuzzy fellow’s heart good to see this kind of masculine beauty — “so beautiful” is what Molly calls him in so many words, returning his compliment to her — celebrated on screen.

The couple’s steamy evening doesn’t breakdown along the usual dom/sub lines either, except in an initial ironic way, as Molly castigates the novelty socks he purchased her as a gift. He plays right along, and soon the two are engaged in an elaborate kayfabe denial of arousal and desire. They keep insisting they’re not going to make each other cum, they’re not turned on, they don’t feel good. When he’s got her feeling so good one eye is twitching shut involuntarily, and when he (without knowing it) successfully helps her banish her intrusive thoughts of the man who abused her, he cuts things off, saying “I forgot to play Wordle today.” And when Ernie the evil nurse interrupts him just before he’s about to make her cum with his mouth, he cuts things completely off, to the point where they fall asleep.

The joke the whole time is that she’s far, far too weak to have an orgasm, oh heavens no. It’s lighthearted, yeah, but not in the tension-deflating way the show has too often employed comedy — it feels like it emerges from the specifics of their circumstances, and that they’re turning it back around into something teasingly sexy. I honestly didn’t think the show had this in it.

Similarly, I’m sorry if this makes me a grinch, but I can’t help but be happy that Nikki and Noah, whom Nikki asks for help in rounding up replacement sex supplies following the car-towing incident, don’t wind up getting back together. I for sure assumed they would, that this was fundamentally too twee a show to keep itself from letting its characters have their cake — sacrificing everything for their dying friend — and eating it too — getting everything back anyway. So when good, kind, decent Noah nevertheless discloses that he’s seeing someone, knocking the wind right out of Nikki’s sails, I was glad. Obviously, Dying for Sex is not headed for a happy ending. As such, I think the tradeoffs people make to carve out what happiness they can — in Nikki’s case, the soul-deep satisfaction of being there for her best friend, in exchange for the end of her most promising romantic relationship — are worth honoring. 

Sean T. Collins (@theseantcollins) writes about TV for Rolling Stone, Vulture, The New York Times, and anyplace that will have him, really. He and his family live on Long Island.