Welcome to Chippendales – Episode 7 “Paper is Paper” Recap & Review

Paper is Paper

In Welcome to Chippendales Episode 7, an 80s-style montage details NIck’s, Denise’s, and Bradford’s success with the tour. 

Steve launches a competing Chippendales tour, angering Nick. But holding the rights to the tour, Nick plans to contact his lawyer and see about shutting Steve’s tour down. Sure enough, the court prevents Steve from moving forward.

Irene stays up late crunching numbers and finds they will have to sell the house. Steve feels she’s telling him he’s incapable and insists she needs to trust him to save their financial state. But his anxiety continues to spike, as does his dependency on drugs. To top things off, the club’s fire permit gets revoked, and Chippendales must close its doors. 

Meanwhile, Bradford tells Nick he has to draw a line with Denise. Tired of feeling like he’s also in a relationship with Denise, he wants Nick to choose between the two of them. Nick breaks the news to Denise, deeply hurting her that he’d choose Bradford over her.

Nick and Bradford then make their relationship exclusive. While Bradford briefly excuses himself to the restroom, a man slips into the office, where Nick waits. A gunshot sounds, alerting Bradford. The hitman leaves the building unnoticed, and Bradford returns to the office to find Nick dead. 

Irene shares the news of Nick’s murder with Steve. He asks Irene if there were any witnesses. He’s so quick to excuse the shooting as a robbery, nearly tipping Irene off to the fact that he was involved.

A drunk Denise comes to Steve’s house to yell at him that he’s a murderer and she wants to see him in jail. When Steve prevents Irene from calling the police on Denise, she realizes why he doesn’t want cops involved. She tells Steve she noticed $15,000 was missing from the safe. “What did you do with the money?”

Before he responds, she runs away from him. She grabs their daughter and exits the house, leaving Steve alone to grapple with what he’s done.

The FBI later calls in Steve for questioning. An agent asks if it bothered him that Nick controlled the tour. He asks other questions that bother Steve, who eventually tells him he just wanted a successful business. It’s not his fault that people like him make it difficult for people like Steve. With the odds stacked against him, he rose to the top–and he doesn’t regret anything. The FBI agents know Steve is guilty, but they also don’t have any hard evidence and have to let him go.

So, Steve goes home to sit at his desk. He puts a gun down on the desk and stares grimly ahead.

The Episode Review

It’s amazing to think that, after stretching so little content across so many episodes, Welcome to Chippendales can’t be bothered to devote more than a few minutes to the execution of Nick’s murder. Tension is hardly allowed to build for the audience before everything is already over. Nick is dead–and I hardly felt the impact.

Irene is the saving grace of this episode, left to wrestle with the implications of being married to a murderer. Annaleigh Ashford, along with Juliette Lewis as Denise, give stunning performances in reaction to the rushed events, but even those over too quickly. In the end, we’re left again with Steve–a once-compelling character flattened by such a stale motivation as his pride.