There was a whole lot of pretending going on when we arrived in Nantucket for The Five Star Weekend.
Hollis was pretending she was okay. Brooke was pretending everything was fine at home. Gigi was pretending she hadn’t been sleeping with Hollis’s dead husband. Tatum and Dru-Ann were pretending they could stand being in the same room together.
So naturally, the best thing to do is throw everybody into pajamas, pour some drinks and play Never Have I Ever.
What could possibly go wrong?
The Five Star Weekend S1E2, “Friday Night: Pajama Dance Party,” slows things down from S1E1: “Friday — Arrivals,” sometimes a little more than I’d like. But I’m still hooked because this show is giving these women room to become actual people instead of treating all those secrets like a checklist of future twists.
And I’m becoming increasingly convinced Hollis knows a hell of a lot more than she’s letting on.
Hollis Has a Schedule for Not Falling Apart
Hollis is still doing Hollis things.
She’s cooking. She’s baking another blackberry tart after burning the last one. She has drinks planned. Games planned. A pajama dance party planned. Probably the fucking oxygen scheduled if anybody asks.
That’s how she’s holding herself together.
When Tatum asks if she’s okay, Hollis suddenly remembers the whipped cream. Brooke immediately recognizes what just happened: Hollis doesn’t want to talk about Matthew.
And you know what? That’s okay.
Everyone processes grief differently. Hollis invited these women to Nantucket because she wanted to get her mind off Matthew. Her friends have apparently decided the real purpose of the weekend is to get her to talk about him.
Every time Hollis leaves the room, they’re practically holding a committee meeting about how to fix her.
Meanwhile, every single one of them has her own shit falling apart.
That’s what I’m liking about this show. Hollis may be the reason everyone came to Nantucket, but she’s not the only woman hiding behind a happy face.
Never Have I Ever Completely Destroyed a Pajama Party?
The silliness works because it lets us see these women together without constantly shoving the plot forward.
Never Have I Ever starts innocently enough when Hollis announces she’s never broken a bone. Dru-Ann’s reaction was basically mine: Boring.
She wants something salacious, and eventually that’s exactly what she gets. College stories come out. Hollis loosens up. Brooke reveals she’s apparently never even peed on the side of the road.
Really, Brooke? You’ve never been driving home from a concert, realized you weren’t making it another ten miles and had to pull over? Maybe that’s just me.
More importantly, the game exposes the weird little hierarchy within this group. Tatum watches Hollis and Dru-Ann getting all snuggy-buggy together and you can practically see her getting more irritated by the minute.
Tatum has known Hollis the longest. Dru-Ann has the college memories Tatum wasn’t part of. And whatever happened between Tatum and Dru-Ann goes way beyond two women who simply rub each other the wrong way.
Dru-Ann takes a shot at Tatum whenever she gets the chance.
Tatum finally takes a shot at the entire f*cking room.
Her contribution to Never Have I Ever?
She’s never lost her husband in a car accident, thrown a 30-day party and pretended it never happened.
HOLY HELL, TATUM.
Subtlety has left Nantucket. But here’s the thing: I think Tatum is right.
Tatum May Be the Best Friend Hollis Has
Tatum isn’t trying to ruin Hollis’s weekend. She’s refusing to participate in the fantasy that Hollis is okay simply because Hollis has baked enough food and scheduled enough activities.
And Hollis is absolutely not okay.
Her entire happy facade collapses the second Tatum forces the issue. Everything comes spilling out until Hollis shuts it down and wants to go back to the games.
That tells us more about Hollis than another half hour of crying would have.
Structure is her life raft.
If she can get through the blackberry tart, the drinks, Never Have I Ever, the dance party and whatever else she’s put on the schedule, she doesn’t have to sit still long enough to deal with Matthew being gone.
Tatum understands that because she knows the Hollis underneath all the Nantucket polish.
There’s a disconnect between them now. Hollis left the island and became wealthy and famous while Tatum stayed behind, raised a family and runs the dry-cleaning business she inherited. But I don’t read Tatum as jealous.
She’s looking at Hollis and thinking: Who the hell is this?
That’s also why Hollis seems capable of being more honest with Tatum than almost anyone else. And when Tatum finally shares that she may have a lump and is waiting on medical answers, that friendship suddenly stops feeling like something the show dragged out of Hollis’s past for the weekend.
These two still know how to find each other underneath everything that’s changed.
Everybody at This Party Is Hiding Something
Brooke may be the clearest parallel to Hollis.
Remember all those Amazon packages in “Arrivals”? She keeps buying stuff she doesn’t need, filling some hole with boxes showing up at the door.
Now we learn her marriage may be falling apart, too.
Her husband has been accused by a woman at work of touching her inappropriately. Brooke believes him. Dru-Ann is immediately bothered that Brooke doesn’t believe the woman.
That reaction stuck with me.
So does Dru-Ann’s behavior later when Jack shows up and she immediately starts worrying about his “intentions” toward a vulnerable Hollis.
Put that alongside the problems Dru-Ann is having at work and the aggressive messages from her boss, and I have to wonder if there’s something personal underneath all of this. Was Dru-Ann taken advantage of? Is she dealing with something similar right now?
I don’t know yet.
But it would fit the giant ball of secrets, grief and silent suffering sitting in the middle of this Five Star Weekend.
Even Caroline gets pulled into it.
Her flirtation at the bar turns into another secret when she discovers the guy she’s had a crush on forever is Aubrey’s boyfriend and the father of her baby.
Think about that for a second. Caroline is now holding information involving another woman’s partner while her mother is sharing a house with the woman who was sleeping with Caroline’s father.
There’s an adultery thread running through this whole damn weekend.
Gigi Is Walking Through a Minefield
Gigi remains the most interesting piece of this puzzle for me. Every time Matthew or Hollis’s marriage comes up, watch her face.
Of course Matthew’s death would be difficult for her. She was having an affair with him. She’s grieving too, except she has to do it while sitting beside his widow and pretending she was nothing more than some random Instagram fan who became Hollis’s friend.
We finally get more of Gigi and Matthew’s relationship when she slips away to his room to “hide”.
Their connection apparently started by accident, and there’s something interesting about what drew them together. He’s a surgeon. She’s a commercial airline pilot. Both understand jobs where mistakes can have enormous consequences.
And Gigi is very much not Hollis.
But how long were they together? What did Matthew tell Gigi about his marriage? What did he tell her about Hollis? What did he tell her about these other women?
Tatum already seems suspicious of Gigi.
I’m starting to wonder whether Hollis is suspicious at all. Because I think she may already know.
Does Hollis Know About Gigi and Matthew?
This possibility kept getting louder for me throughout the episode.
Gigi starts telling Hollis about how she once had a “Jack” of her own, and for a second I thought she was about to start talking about Matthew without saying his name.
Instead she talks about her mother’s death, except the timeline doesn’t match what she originally told Hollis.
Hollis catches it immediately, and her entire demeanor changes.
That sent me straight back to how Hollis and Gigi became friends in the first place. Gigi reached out through Instagram after Matthew died. Hollis responded while she was in an incredibly vulnerable state.
But how do we know Hollis didn’t already know who Gigi was?
Maybe answering Gigi wasn’t the beginning of Hollis learning about her. Maybe Hollis already knew about the affair and wanted to understand the woman Matthew had been seeing.
Suddenly inviting this “random fan” to Nantucket doesn’t seem quite so random.
There are other little things.
Jack acts as though he never met Matthew, and Hollis almost says, “I thought Matthew said…”
Said what?
Was Jack somebody Matthew claimed to be with when he was actually spending time with Gigi?
And by the end, when Gigi says she doesn’t have a fancy dress for Hollis’s fancy dinner, Hollis tells her:
“What’s mine is yours.”
On the surface, she’s talking about clothes. Gigi’s face knows there’s another meaning.
Hollis isn’t dumb. Jennifer Garner isn’t playing her like she’s dumb, either. That’s why I’m leaning harder toward the possibility that this entire weekend isn’t simply about Hollis distracting herself from Matthew’s death.
Maybe she’s trying to sort through everything he left behind. Including Gigi.
Jack Knocks the Hollis Facade Right Off
Jack is another reason I’m suspicious there’s more going on underneath Hollis’s carefully organized weekend.
Tatum absolutely had a hand in getting him back into Hollis’s orbit. I’m convinced of that.
And good call, Tatum because Hollis becomes a completely different person around that guy.
There’s already enough heat between Jennifer Garner and Timothy Olyphant that Dru-Ann notices it immediately and goes into protector mode. Hollis can spend an entire evening forcing herself to have fun, but put her alone with Jack and suddenly some of that effort disappears.
The breaker-box trip isn’t exactly subtle. Neither are they.
But what interests me more than whether Hollis and Jack eventually hook up is what Jack represents. He’s from the Hollis-before-Matthew part of her life. Tatum is too.
Maybe that’s why Hollis doesn’t have to work quite so hard around either of them.
This Weekend Still Has Its Hooks in Me
“Friday Night: Pajama Dance Party” does move slowly in places.
There are stretches where I could feel the episode circling the same emotional territory: Hollis doesn’t want to talk, everyone else thinks she should, everybody drinks, somebody reveals a little more, repeat.
But we’re not in River of Molasses territory. The slower pace is buying us something.
Brooke’s shopping means more now. Tatum’s bluntness means more. Dru-Ann’s reactions are starting to form a pattern. Caroline isn’t sitting off in some disconnected daughter subplot. Jack is opening another part of Hollis. And Gigi’s affair isn’t just a grenade waiting for somebody to pull the pin.
All these threads are starting to wrap around each other. That’s why I’m still hooked.
I don’t need The Five Star Weekend to start firing off giant twists every ten minutes. These are characters I actually want to know, and right now I’m having almost as much fun trying to figure out what Hollis knows as I am waiting for everyone else to discover what Gigi did.
And no, I didn’t read the book.
So if Hollis really has been ten steps ahead of everybody this entire time, don’t tell me a damn thing.
🔥 Our Verdict: WATCHABLE
The Five Star Weekend S1E2 slows down, but it doesn’t stall. The pajama-party silliness gives all that grief and resentment somewhere to hide while the cracks keep getting bigger.
More importantly, I’m no longer watching just to find out when Gigi’s affair blows up.
I want to know what happened between Tatum and Dru-Ann. I want to know what’s really going on with Dru-Ann at work. I want to know what Matthew told Gigi. I want to know what Tatum’s doctor says. I want more Jack and Hollis.
And now I really want to know whether Hollis invited Gigi to Nantucket because she needed a new friend—or because she knew exactly who the hell she was inviting.
Yeah. I’m still in.
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