The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel Season 5 Episode 6 Review!

By Rahul Gupta On May 9, 2023

With only three episodes left in its final season, The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel finally finds a way to deal with the jarring flashforwards it uses to tie up all of its loose ends.

The first five episodes of Season 5 didn’t find a good way to use the future to move the story forward, but Episode 6 shows that it is possible to switch between the future and the near future to see where Midge (Rachel Brosnahan) and Susie (Alex Borstien) end up.

Even though “The Testi-Roastial” is much better in terms of organization, the truth is that their future is terrible.

As Sean Gunn’s Roastmaster says at the beginning of the episode, Prime Video has told us not to talk about the fight between Susie and the person “whose name we shall not speak,” as well as many other important details that the Testi-Rostial reveals about that bleak future.

So let’s figure out what we can do about Susie’s rise to fame as a manager and why The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel is still too focused on Joel (Michael Zegen).

The episode shows that Midge left her would-be-groom at the altar in 1973 because she quickly realized she still cared about Joel. This makes as much sense as the rest of Season 5 so far.

In Season 4, The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel made a terrible mistake that was both a gift and a curse. Paying off four seasons of chemistry between Midge and Lenny Bruce (Luke Kirby) came at a price, and it seems that price is that Midge just can’t get over her cheating ex-husband.

The show has shown over and over that Joel is kind of a jerk, but they still try to make him look like a white knight, even though his heroics are just male pride dressed up as care.

Joel may explain his actions by saying that Midge is still the mother of his children, but it looks like he still wants to control her and this is the only way he can keep some control over her future.

Since the show doesn’t seem to want to go back to Midge and Lenny’s short-lived romance and use it to show how bad Midge’s future will be as a multiple-time divorcee, they should have just left it out.

Why do something that takes four seasons to build up if you’re just going to keep sending the lead back to her lame ex? At this point, the toothpaste is out of the tube, but this story doesn’t care.

It’s not really surprising that Midge and Susie’s relationship will end, and not just because it’s been hinted at in the first three episodes of Season 5. Midge has shown that she is not a good person by how badly she handled what she did to Shy Baldwin and by being a terrible mother.

Amy Sherman-Palladino has become known for writing unlikable female leads, thanks to the personalities of most of the Gilmore Girls characters, but The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel has gone too far by destroying everything that made Midge likable in its last season.

Is success worth it if you have to burn every bridge to get there? Show business requires a certain amount of vanity, mostly as a way to protect yourself, but every flashback has shown Midge in a terrible way.

Even though Susie isn’t shown to be a “good” person, she is at least a little easier to like because she didn’t try to be kind. Susie was born to be a tough manager who would do anything for her clients and, in the end, for herself. “The Testi-Rostial” shows that her peers may not like her, but they value her.

Episode 6 and most of Season 5 should get a much lower score, but Borstein’s acting skills save them. In the past, The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel has always given her at least one episode where she is the main focus, like “Everything is Bellmore” from last season.

“The Testi-Roastial” is last season’s episode. Most of the show is about how she responds to the strange and funny things that are said to and about her, but the show also uses flashbacks and flashforwards to really get into some of the key moments that made Susie who she is now.

Borstein shows the cracks in the relationship in a way that is both subtle and honest, even though the writing isn’t very good.