‘Dying for Sex’ Episode 7 Recap: “You’re Killing Me, Ernie”

Dust motes float in the golden light of dawn. Molly lies in a hospital bed in the arms of her neighbor, who after a long night of passion and deliberate denial has finally brought her to orgasm, her first time with another person. Her spinal tap is scheduled for an hour from now. The neighbor offers to stay, or to come back afterwards, but she demurs.

“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.

It took some doing to get there, that’s for sure. Following her collapse on the street, which was brought on by a collapsed lung, Molly is intubated at the hospital. She nearly suffocates as her body relearns how to breathe once the tube is removed, a touch-and-go situation during which Nikki, her medical proxy, has to face making a decision that could potentially result in her best friend’s death. (Molly has a Do Not Resuscitate order, so if she stops breathing there’s nothing the hospital staff can do.) 

The recovery from all this will require her to stay in the hospital, which her doctor, of all people, notes may interfere with her sex quest. She has a spinal tap scheduled to investigate potential causes of a loss of feeling in her legs, which could indicate that her cancer has spread to her spine, at which point further treatment is probably not worth it. Finally, Nikki’s car gets towed, along with all Molly’s medical information and sex toys and lube, before Nikki can drive Molly’s neighbor to the hospital for their emergency hospital-room sex appointment. And once he finally arrives, he and Molly have to contend with an “evil nurse” named Ernie (a scene-stealing André Ward), who will not let cunnilingus stay him from the swift completion of his appointed rounds. He doesn’t stop the cunnilingus from happening, at least. 

(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.