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Though this finale wraps a bow on the sex tape plot, it doesn’t present quite as clean a portrait of the last legs of Pam and Tommy’s relationship. After Tommy aggressively screams at Pamela during a fight about the rights to the tape, the pair decide to plan a getaway. The trip to Las Vegas starts off with a flash of the goofy, loving energy we saw from the pair early in the series, with Tommy laughingly pretending to catch Pam on a fishing hook while “Alright” by Supergrass underscores their giddiness. The trip soon takes a turn, though, as small but significant moments begin to pile up and push the couple apart. Tommy roughly grabs Pam’s arm in the elevator, then goes on a tirade when the hotel sends a bottle of champagne up despite the Do Not Disturb sign.
When heavily pregnant Pam goes to bed, Tommy ends up down at the bar, joking with some strangers about his bright future in porn. We know this is his attempt to get over the impact the tape had on him — “There’s worse things than the whole world knowing you got a monster hog,” his bandmate hilariously advised earlier in the episode. Still, Pam doesn’t know this, and she’s hurt when she catches him joking. She takes their car and drives home without telling him.
The last months of the couple’s relationship play out via montage during the show’s closing moments. The most bittersweet is the birth of one of the couple’s children, which Tommy captures on video. He asks Pam to smile at the camera, and she does despite everything she’s been through. The show seems convinced that the couple almost could have made it all work, but its ending is a pretty clear contradiction to its own romantic ideal. After Pam gets the “Tommy” tattoo on her finger redone to say “Mommy,” we’re given the final headline: the couple split in February 1998, two months after he was arrested for felony spousal battery.
This really happened. The Associated Press reported at the time that “Lee pleaded no-contest last month to charges that he kicked wife Pamela Anderson several times while she held their baby son.” The show doesn’t get into these details, instead ending on a frustratingly romantic note that highlights the couple’s brief reunion in 2008 and the times they’ve called each other the loves of one another’s lives. This seems to be true, too: Pam said it about Tommy in 2015, in a People Magazine interview where she also called him a supportive co-parent.
The end of “Pam & Tommy” is a tragedy, but even after spending eight hours with the show, it’s hard to tell how clearly its creators understand their own story. Signs of Lee’s abuse were few and far between until this final episode, which makes me wonder if Anderson’s own documentary retelling will have little in common with the domestic scenes we’ve seen. “We’re so good together, Pamela,” Tommy insists in this episode. “It’s the world that’s f***ed.” This may be true, but the whole world wasn’t arrested for hurting Pamela Anderson. The battery charge hangs over the show’s ending like a dark cloud, and as “I Will Always Love You” plays out the series, it’s hard to make this whole messy, painful, private yet public story make sense.
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