'P-Valley' Episode 8 Ending Explained: Will Montavius's off-screen death and Hailey's boss move affect Season 2?
Spoiler alert for Episode 8 of 'P-Valley'
Season 1 is over and what a ride it has been. Episode 8 could easily have had another song to its soundtrack repurposing that Wizard of Oz song and have Autumn "Hailey" Night singing "Ding, dong! Montavius is dead!". Given the amount of blood that seeped from underneath that door, it certainly seems like he is dead. But 'P-Valley' is being very clever, keeping its cards close to its chest. Not once do any of the characters say he is dead. The closest anyone comes to referring to it is when a traumatized Mercedes asks Uncle Clifford, "is it taken care of?". Uncle Clifford answers in the affirmative. There is a very slim possibility that Montavius is not dead, just heavily injured, and will be back in Season 2 to exact his revenge. But, given that Hailey is so free with his money and is actually setting down roots in Chucallisa by buying the Pynk land, she must be feeling pretty safe. Again, even if Montavius is dead, we will still have to see what his "Delta" brothers do to exact revenge.
The fact that Mercedes went crawling back to her mother asking about second and third chances, there is a high likelihood that she was the one who fired the killing shot. This is why she is so broken up and traumatized, having shot a man in cold blood, and needs to be absolved of her sin by her "Pastor" Patrice Woodbine. Again, if she did murder Montavious, with Diamond and Big L getting rid of the body, it can bring up its own complications in the next season. But regardless, she and Hailey now have a bond of sisterhood having rescued each other in a life and death situation. How will Uncle Clifford react to them ganging up against her [all in good fun of course] in Season 2 is anyone's guess now that Hailey is "management" and owns Pynk outright.
Two ships crashed and burned in the season's finale — heartbreakingly, there will be no tentative courting between Diamond and Keyshawn anymore and the grand romance between Lil' Murda and Uncle Clifford is over. In two separate defining moments, both Keyshawn and Lil' Murda do the unthinkable and push their chances of happiness away. Keyshawn points a gun at Diamond to protect Derrick and Diamond's shock has him trembling with disbelief at Keyshawn's betrayal.
Again, Season 2 will hopefully dive into why Keyshawn chooses to be trapped in that unhealthy relationship when all healthy survival instincts would tell her to run away as fast as her legs can carry her. It might be linked to her inherent inferiority complex and how she sees fairer-skinned men and White boys as superior romantic prospects — a way to move up in the world. Keyshawn is an ambitious girl but the shape that ambition takes can be warped at times.
Lil' Murda's act of betrayal is a bit more understandable but no less cowardly. He has been hustling for a long time to break into the music industry. Rome, the slick music exec, tells him that he wants something "authentic" if he wants success and warns him that the image Lil' Murda puts out needs to be genuine. This is when Uncle Clifford flush with defending Lil' Murda against the girls throwing themselves at him, walks into their corner, puts a possessive hand on Lil' Murda's shoulder, and acts as familiarly as a girlfriend would.
Rome's grimace and Woddy's awkwardness informs Lil' Murda's knee jerk reaction as he brushes off Uncle Clifford's advances. Uncle Clifford, with a whole lifetime of dealing with this crap, reads the room and exits left to the office where she pours herself a stiff one with trembling hands. Lil' Murda follows her soon after but the damage is done. Uncle Clifford thanks him for the privilege of getting to know "La Marcus", Lil' Murda's real name. But she also says she should have trusted the face he showed her first — his "Lil' Murda persona" (his stage name), hungry for success and fame — so hungry that he is willing to let go of love to pursue his ambitions.
Lil' Murda asks for a little more time to figure it all out but Uncle Clifford tells him that until he does, he knows where the door is. After being shown the stars, Uncle Clifford is not okay with "f***ing and sucking in the dark" anymore. Rome's interactions with Woddy show that it is not Lil' Murda he is really interested in but Keyshawn — but he'll take Lil' Murda if that is the package deal. So Lil' Murda might be giving up something real and true that he has with Uncle Clifford for a fake shot at glory since Rome seems all talk and no action.
Season 2 will possibly flesh out this tension between career and love for Lil' Murda. Katori Hall, in a live-streamed interview at the NewFest, said that we would get a little of Lil' Murda's back story in Season 2. We will also see Uncle Clifford's life outside the Pynk and not just with her "grandmuva" Miss Ernestine, but rather how she is with her non-strip club friends like drag performers and others within the queer subculture in Chucalissa. We had a taste of that when Uncle Clifford had a surprise meet and greet with one of them in the jail cell when she came to find Mercedes.
Katori Hall also talked about keeping the show in tune with the times by exploring "how the strip club culture can survive this moment of quarantine and pandemic". She remarked, "They have been very resilient. As a matter of fact, as live performance spaces, they have figured out a way before Broadway really has." In another interview, Hall has said that "there's a story to tell about how black folks are affected by this disease". In the same interview, Hall teased that things could get a lot more raunchy in Season 2, pushing more envelopes, so to speak. She said that though strippers are lumped in the "sex work" category, and strippers and sex workers, as categories, might overlap but they are not the same. This is why she is interested in taking on, in subsequent storylines of Season 2, actual sex work, which wasn't portrayed at all in Season 1.
'P-Valley' finale aired on Sunday, September 6, 2020, and Season 2 will be back in late 2021.