Episode 7 opens with an uncharacteristically nervous Bash smoking a cigarette and grilling Sam Sylvia on outstanding expenses, including Sam’s video camera that has turned up missing. Sylvia is taken aback at his producer’s newfound frugality (this is a far cry from the guy with the drug-dispensing robot and the private chopper we saw a few episodes back).
As it turns out, Bash has had the purse strings snipped by his mother after sinking $600,000 into GLOW so far. Now Bash is trying to make the show a reality on a shoestring budget that he’s trying to play off as a DIY aesthetic.
Debbie is unimpressed with Cherry’s training and decides she needs more advanced training if Liberty Belle is going to be GLOW’s star attraction. She, Ruth, and Carmen take a field trip to Carmen’s family home to ask Carmen’s pro wrestling brothers (played by Tyrus and Carlito, who we see holding an apple when the girls arrive).
The brothers grudgingly agree to show the girls a few moves in a ring set up in the backyard. Debbie wants to learn how to fly to make the audience “shit their pants,” but gets a case of acrophobia when she gets to the top rope, settling on a cross-body block from the second turnbuckle as her finisher.
In a practice run for the TV taping, GLOW holds its first live event, drawing a crowd of about 20 disinterested onlookers and “a homeless guy.” The show gets off to a terrible start as Carmen (as Machu Picchu) is overcome by a panic attack and flees the guy without ever entering the ring. Humiliated, she is consoled by Bash, who privately reveals his financial woes. Both are terrified of letting down their families.
A lackluster wrestling exhibition gets heated when Cherry convinces The Beatdown Biddies to wear Ku Klux Klan robes and hoods instead of the gimmick Sylvia handed them as bickering old ladies. The Biddies are conflicted. “What if Bill Cosby bets mad at us?” one asks. “It’s not racist if the black girls came up with the idea, right?”
The KKK team gets super heat from the crowd, and Cherry (as Junkchain) and Kia Stevens (Welfare Queen) become huge babyfaces against their racist opponents. Junkchain goes off-script again, pulling the robe and hood off one of her opponents, leaving her standing in the ring in her granny panties before scurrying to the back.
With the crowd finally engaged, the main event between Liberty Belle and Zoya The Destroya starts off hot, with the women exchanging holds they learned from Carmen’s brothers. But when Debbie mounts the buckles for her finisher, she sees her estranged husband, Mark, in the crowd. Stunned, she flees the ring, leaving Ruth, the referee, and the crowd befuddled. Rhonda comes to the rescue, jumping into the ring and performing a catchy rap routine she had developed, and eventually the rest of the GLOW girls (minus Debbie, Carmen, and She-Wolf) join in as the audience applauds.
Backstage, Mark serves Debbie with divorce papers. We also learn that Justine, apparently jealous of Sam’s romantic relationship with Rhonda, stashed the stole video camera in Rhonda’s locker, looking to frame her for the theft.
The first show is in the books and it’s not quite a disaster, but tensions are nearing a breaking point.
