‘Pam And Tommy’ Episode 8 Recap: “Seattle”

For the Pam And Tommy series finale, we rejoin Pam and Tommy on the other side of the Barb Wire press blitz, as they attempt to get back to work. Tommy joins the rest of the Crüe at Tower Records to sign copies of the band’s new album, Generation Swine, and looks exhilarated to be bringing the band’s music to a crowd again.

Then he notices a knot of grunge fans looking amused and remembers that the cool young people of the late mid-’90s think he and the band are bullshit.

Pam is still trying to get into movies, despite Barb Wire‘s flop: she’s auditioning to play Lynn Bracken in L.A. Confidential. And look, an artist’s reach should always exceed her grasp, but doesn’t it seem a little mean to set Pam up for failure by sending her out for this? Get her one of Julia Roberts’s castoff rom-coms, for God’s sake! The Mike Myers James Bond spoof Pam’s up for seems like it would fall more comfortably within her skill set…but by now, the Penthouse Pam and Tommy sued over has come out. Pam morosely muses about all the people in the magazine’s readership of 2.7 million are looking at her: perverts, casting directors, friends. “At least it can’t get any worse,” Tommy tells her. Turns out it can: Pam loses L.A. Confidential to Kim Basinger and Austin Powers to Elizabeth Hurley (Tommy: “Who the fuck is Elizabeth Hurley?” Pam: “That’s what I said”), and Mötley Crüe refuses to play when they find out they’ve been bumped from the VMA broadcast to the pre-show.

Elsewhere, Rand brings Butchie a small wad of cash from one of his deadbeats, and then begs to resign from enforcer duty: “It’s destroying my soul.” Butchie takes pity: if Rand can bring him $10,000, they’ll be square. Rand’s already run through all the people he knows who have money — one of them has apparently snorted their tape proceeds in Amsterdam, and the other set cash on fire in order to keep it from Rand — so he may have to stay in the baseball bat business a little longer.

But then something happens that will entwine these three lives once again: Tommy gets a call in the middle of the night from his bandmate Nikki, and sets up his computer — possibly for the first time ever — to see what’s up.

The tape is streaming on the web. A montage shows us several “perverts” watching on their computer monitors, until Rand busts in on his latest collection call and sees that guy watching it, confused as to how it’s even possible.

Cut to Sandy the lawyer, explaining this very thing to Pam and Tommy: Seth, the cam guy in Seattle, is playing the tape for free, to drum up publicity for his actual business. Tommy knows how the last lawsuit made Pam feel, but surely she’ll agree that they need to sue this guy, right?!

Cut to Seattle, where Seth rejoices about Pam and Tommy’s latest lawsuit. Was Pam grimly resigned to this next step? Was there a fight? Did she press her point again? We don’t know, because it all happened offscreen. And it doesn’t work anyway: their injunction is denied on the basis that if Seth’s not charging for the stream, it can be considered “commentary.”

While this is going on, Rand can’t start his car. By chance (or fate?), he is parked across the street from a psychic’s storefront, and hurries in to find out why karma is against him. The psychic reveals that the wheel of fortune is turning in the wrong direction: “The Star. You’ve hurt this person.” The tarot card depicts a naked woman next to a stream, which Rand interprets as Pam. So when Pam and Tommy are headed out for their next meeting at Sandy’s office, Rand is in the scrum of paparazzi, getting close enough to scream apologies to Pam through her window. Tommy, recognizing Rand, peels out and sends Rand rolling into the street.

Remember “At least it can’t get any worse”? At Sandy’s office, Seth is waiting.

Seth may be the biggest pig in this entire cast, which includes indicted felon Anthony Pellicano; Butchie, a Mobbed-up loan shark; and Bob Guccione. Seth opens by smarmily thanking Pam and Tommy for suing him, since now he knows it’s legal to stream the tape. He’d like to buy the rights to it, so he can stream it for profit. If they don’t agree, bootlegs are going to spread all over the internet, and millions more people will see it; but paywalling it will probably reduce its reach by 95%. Tommy tells Seth to go fuck himself, but when he has left, Sandy opines that they should consider it, and Pam agrees that Seth’s rationale made sense — besides which, as we know, she wants this over and has been wanting it to be over for a while. But she won’t even look at the offer Seth has brought, telling Sandy to give Seth the rights for free: “He doesn’t get to buy me.” Tommy refuses on principle; Pam asks if she can grant the rights without his co-operation, but they both need to sign the paperwork. Oh good, so Pam gets to battle her husband along with the rest of the world!

Tommy who returns from day-drinking with Nikki (and kudos on Tommy’s “fucking firehose” from a random bar patron) to find Pam packing for a trip out of L.A. He talks her out of going home to Ladysmith to road-trip with him to Lake Mead instead. At first, Tommy is almost manically giddy, trying to recapture the energy of the earlier trip we already watched in “Pamela In Wonderland”; once that fades, Pam notices that he’s falling asleep at the wheel and insists that they pull over for the night. This brings them to a Las Vegas hotel, and the real beginning of the end? Strangers start swarming them, and when Tommy roughly shoves Pam into an elevator, she tells him he hurt her arm. A bellman delivering a complimentary bottle of champagne gets chewed out by Tommy for ignoring the Do Not Disturb hanger on the door, but when Tommy tries to get Pam to agree with him that the guy was out of line, she complains about how loud he is and implores him to give her just three drama-free minutes. But he, apparently, can’t, as she discovers when she wakes up overheated in bed and locates him in a hotel bar, laughing with strangers about going into porn if his music career falls through. When Tommy follows Pam back to the room, he finds it empty, and a valet confirms that she took the car.

Pam is watching their wedding video again when Tommy returns and apologizes some more, receiving an icy reception. In response, she hands him Seth’s contract and orders him to sign it. Tommy flips from contrite to enraged in a matter of seconds, throwing furniture and smashing knickknacks around a cowering Pam. But after his tantrum, he signs: “That good? You happy?” “It’s over,” Pam breathes. “What’s over?” he asks. HMMMM.

The episode’s not over just yet: Rand has just finished soulfully apologizing to a C.J. Parker impersonator outside Mann’s Chinese Theater when he finds Seth sitting in his apartment with an offer to buy the original tape. Still on his redemption kick, Rand heatedly refuses until Seth offers the magic number of $10,000, whereupon Rand returns to his old apartment and retrieves it from the drop ceiling. Thus ends Rand’s journey…

…sweeping us into the very last montage of the series. Pam gives birth at home in an inflatable pool. Rand leaves the ten grand for Erica, along with the signed divorce papers. A Tower Records clerk moves copies of Generation Swine to the clearance bin, while DVDs of Pam and Tommy’s tape are sold at the cash register. Pam goes to a tattoo studio to have the “TOMMY” on her left ring finger changed to “MOMMY.”

And then we’re at the black screens of epilogue: Pam filed for divorce from Tommy in February 1998, shortly after an assault on her in their home. Seth sold the rights to the tape to adult film company Vivid Entertainment — the first of many companies to refuse to buy it from Rand and Miltie since they lacked releases. (Speaking of Miltie: hope you enjoyed the few scenes of him high out of his mind in the last episode, because we don’t see him again and never find out what happened to him.) Rand moved north to farm marijuana. In 2008, Pam and Tommy briefly reunited; it didn’t work, but they have each called the other the love of their lives.

Not included in this epilogue: Pamela Anderson will soon appear in a Netflix documentary about her life. That might not have been something that drew my interest pre-Pam & Tommy, but given how often this miniseries made me feel queasy about its treatment of its subject, I look forward to seeing her tell her own story.

VHS Rewinder

• In our timeline, Generation Swine didn’t come out until June 1997, but…never mind? It’s also notable for (a) bringing back lead singer Vince Neil, who had left after Decade Of Decadence in 1991; and (b) being Tommy’s last hurrah with the band until Saints Of Los Angeles in 2008, but: obviously the show doesn’t really have time to get into all those details.
• As someone who has spent a lot of time complaining about Melrose Place‘s Billy Campbell (Andrew Shue)…

  …I appreciated that Erica and Danielle don’t know why Alison (Courtney Thorne-Smith) puts up with his crap either.

• I imagine someone was very proud of having Rand tell Erica, “Man, I feel terrible for women. You gotta deal with us,” but as both a moment in the episode and the thesis statement for the series, it really landed with a clunk for me.
• When he departs the hotel in Las Vegas, Tommy asks to “borrow” a motorcycle from a stranger at the valet stand. How…is that guy getting it back?
• Kudos for the continuity on the hole Rand punched in the wall of his original apartment, which we see a handyman patching when Rand returns to retrieve the tape. That hole got almost as much screen time as Maxwell Caulfield!
• While it is factually accurate that Pam gave birth at home, I kind of doubt they set up the inflatable pool on the carpeted floor of the master bedroom? I guess I’ll have to wait for the doc to find out whether that’s how it went down or if they couldn’t afford to build another set.

Television Without Pity, Fametracker, and Previously.TV co-founder Tara Ariano has had bylines in The New York Times Magazine, Vanity Fair, Vulture, Slate, Salon, Mel Magazine, Collider, and The Awl, among others. She co-hosts the podcasts Extra Hot Great, Again With This (a compulsively detailed episode-by-episode breakdown of Beverly Hills, 90210 and Melrose Place), Listen To Sassy, and The Sweet Smell Of Succession. She’s also the co-author, with Sarah D. Bunting, of A Very Special 90210 Book: 93 Absolutely Essential Episodes From TV’s Most Notorious Zip Code (Abrams 2020). She lives in Austin.