We Need To Talk About Beth & Rio’s Good Girls Hookup

Spoilers ahead for Good Girls Season 2, Episode 4. Since the premiere of Good Girls, fans have been waiting for Beth and Rio to hook up. Actually not just waiting, but outright begging. “If #NBC cancels #GoodGirls, before I get to see Beth and Rio hook up, im never watching TV again. Ever. Never. Ever. EVER!!!!” tweeted one particularly impassioned viewer. In Season 2, Episode 4, “Pick Your Poison,” those dreams finally come to fruition.

Beth starts the episode by being the "boss bitch" Rio told her to be. In order to clean the fake money Rio left for her in the storage locker, she decides to use her husband's car dealership as a front. The only problem? Dean sucks at business. So Beth has to take matters into her own hands and start selling the cars herself. She's incredibly successful at it, but Dean still doesn't seem to respect or value her in any way. So is it any wonder that when Beth spots Rio at the bar she's at with Dean, she decides to have sex with him in the bathroom? The show started with Dean cheating on Beth and losing all of their money; sleeping with Rio is obviously impulsive, but it’s also a form of payback. For the first time in their marriage, Beth is thinking about herself first.

“She’s being completely reckless. These decisions that she’s making and the adrenaline rush that she’s on from all of this is turning her on. She doesn’t know if it’s Rio, or if it’s the crime, but she’s just completely letting loose and going against everything that’s expected of her,” star Christina Hendricks, who plays Beth, told Collider of the episode.

We don’t yet know if Beth will ever tell Dean — or if he’ll find out in some other way — but the repercussions for her actions are swift. Just as soon as Rio gave Beth the "keys to the kingdom," he takes them away, breaking into the dealership, destroying a Lamborghini, and decreasing her cut of the money. When she goes to the storage locker to burn the rest of the remaining money, she discovers that Rio has taken it back. It's unclear if he's acting out of jealousy or because he felt their having sex shifted the power too much toward Beth, but either way, their dynamic has irreversibly changed.

“There’s a real cat-and-mouse thing going on. I don’t think Rio is particularly interested in Beth. He thinks it’s amusing,” Hendricks told Collider. “But I think that he’s definitely pulling the strings more. She’s not used to doing something like this, so her natural inclination is to be like, ‘But do you like me? Are you my boyfriend?’ Even though it’s ludicrous, it’s all that she’s ever known. She married her high school sweetheart, so if you have sex with someone, then you’re in a relationship with them, to a certain degree. She’s smart enough to know that’s not really what’s happening, but she’s teetering back and forth, trying to read his body language and understand and over-analyzing every word he says.”

Rio has always had the upper hand in their relationship. Over time, Beth has asserted her independence and proven her natural prowess as a criminal mastermind, which seems to have softened Rio to her — or at least made him look at her differently. But it also positions her as a threat; if Rio loses the power, Beth will no longer need him. That his response to their hookup is to take back any authority he’s given Beth makes where he stands pretty clear.