Queenie – Season 1 Episode 2 Recap & Review

Clean Break, Queenie 

Episode 2 of Queenie starts with Queenie moving out of her shared apartment with Tommy. She puts some of her stuff in her grandparent’s house and gets help from Jessica and Frank to move into her new apartment. Tommy has been ghosting her, but Queenie is not getting the message. 

Queenie’s new apartment is far from perfect, a fact that even her friends Jessica and Frank can’t deny. Jessica, in an attempt to lighten the mood, shares a comical story about a disastrous date. The three friends, despite the less-than-ideal circumstances, manage to find some laughter. However, it’s Frank’s subtle actions towards Queenie that hint at a deeper connection, possibly a secret admiration. 

Later, Queenie gets a message from a casual friend that se is invited to an engagement party. Another friend, Cassandra, invites Queenie to Yoga classes to lift her spirit. However, there is only so much inhaling and exhaling Queenie can handle. She is still feeling blue about Tommy and believes the break is temporary. 

At the party, Queenie gets drunk as people keep asking her about Tommy. On the other hand, she takes a seductive photo and sends it to Tommy. He texts her back, asking for a clean break. This triggers Queenie to drink more, and after venting to a random stranger about her relationship woes, the stranger signs her up on a dating app. She also texts the random married guy, Adil, asking to meet. Queenie gets too drunk and ends up sleeping in the bathroom and missing Adil’s calls. 

The next day, Queenie pitches another story to her boss but is turned down. Her boss insists that Queenie should focus more on her actual job, which disappoints her because she really wanted to work on the story. She is also still trying to understand what Tommy meant by clean break. Darcy suggests that it means no communication and allowing each other space. To get her mind off the heartbreak, she calls Jessica, and they go to a party later that night.

Things at the party get heated when someone touches Queenie inappropriately. The club bouncers kick out Jessica, Queenie and Frank even though they were the victims. They grab some fried food while Jessica flirts with a random upcoming rapper she met at the party. They decide to call it a night and head home. However, Queenie calls Adil to pick her up. They end up having awkward sex in his car.

The Episode Review

Our girl Queenie is tripping! Why is she having sex with a married man? I get that the dating app does not work for her, but a married man is off-limits no matter what quarter-life crisis she is going through. This won’t end well for her. She needs to decide how she can heal her heartbreak without breaking homes. Also, Adil is wrong to accept these advances. If anything, he carries the bigger blame because he is the one who took a vow to remain faithful to his wife.

The show is subtly showing the racial profiling that happens in the daily lives of Black people abroad. The club bouncers took the perpetrator’s side because she was White. Queenie’s boss doesn’t want her to write about racial issues and keeps turning down her ideas. The men on the dating app only want to sleep with Queenie to live out their fetish of being with a Black woman.