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Ramy Recap: Seduced by the Devil

Season 3 Episode 5 Editor’s Rating5 stars *****

Photo: Jon Pack/ HULU

Episode five opens with Maysa staring intently at the camera. Then, we switch to some random, younger Arab man looking back, but his eye contact is less intense, as the camera goes back and forth between the two of them. Eventually, Maysa says, “Even better than the photos online.”

“Do you mind if I touch?” Maysa asks, at which point I was fully confused about what was going on.

The camera pans out, and the two are sitting across from one another, extremely close with their legs touching. Maysa is feeling the man’s biceps and complimenting his muscles, then apologizing for her bad breath and saying she’s trying to quit smoking. Though it’s not explained right away, it’s not hard to figure out that Maysa is auditioning this man as a potential suitor for Dena. After all, both Farouk and Maysa keep saying Dena needs to get married already.

Dena and Maysa, not Ramy, are the focus of this episode that is all about the value of women and the notion that a woman’s worth lies in her youth. Maysa is old now, and she’s beginning to see how society views her. Meanwhile, Dena is still young, and Maysa wants her daughter to understand that her youth won’t last forever. In Maysa’s mind, Dena only has a short amount of time before she, too, is tossed to the side by society. At the same time, Maysa is jealous of Dena and jealous of her youth. Both Hiam Abbass and May Calamawy shine in this episode, as they always do. Abbass especially is phenomenal at playing a mother who wants the best for her daughter, while also feeling frustrated and competitive with her — two conflicting feelings perfectly evoked.

While Maysa is at home making intense eye contact, Dena is in an office listening to an undocumented woman tell her immigration story, mentioning that a man she worked for who took advantage of her. Dena confidently tells her that the firm will take her case and prosecute him. She wants this woman to be her first client once she passes the bar, and she promises to get the woman everything she deserves. Does Dena even have the authority to be making these promises? She certainly shouldn’t be giving false hope.

Back home, Maysa and the man, whose name is Tarek, are sitting side by side on the couch. He asks when her daughter will be back, to which Maysa says, “Who knows?” This is interesting given that in season one, Maysa and Farouk always had to know where Dena was going and with whom, and she could never be out late. It seems as though things in the Hassan house have gotten a little more lax.

It turns out, Tarek came from a Muslim dating app, which Maysa manages because, according to her, Dena is “very busy being a lawyer.” When Dena arrives home, she’s confused. She didn’t know anything about the dating profile her mom made for her, and she says in front of everyone that she’s not trying to meet some “random dude” right now, but Maysa tells her she’s aging, introducing the idea that as a woman ages, she’s no longer able to attract a man, and therefore has lost her worth. In Maysa’s eyes, for a woman, getting married is the ultimate form of success.

In the next scene, we get another perspective on the value of women, as Ramy is on the phone with Zainab’s friend saying he deserves to see her since he’s doing so well he’s paid off the $100,000 dowry. Zainab’s friend replies that Zainab must be a prostitute if Ramy paid the dowry and now deserves to see her. Ramy, dumbfounded, says that’s not what he means, to which the man on the phone responds, “It’s what you believe, though. I can hear the entitlement in your voice. You’ve got some very interesting beliefs about women, brother. Has it occurred to you that Zainab doesn’t want to see you and that this payment doesn’t change that fact?”

I loved that whole conversation because someone was finally calling Ramy out on his entitlement. Even though he’s not as bad this season as he was in the past, he still has a lot to learn. For Ramy, women have been objects that serve some specific purpose to him and his life. He can make amends all he wants, but it doesn’t change what he did. When Ramy hangs up the phone, we also learn that he has his own place now, and it’s pretty nice. Maysa is there, but Ramy has to leave suddenly, and he asks his mom to feed the dog, walk her, and “pick up the shit.” But Maysa just wanted to visit and spend time with her son. Once again, he’s treating a woman not like a person, but like something that serves him and his needs. For Ramy, the value of women lies in what they can do for him.

Back at Dena’s job, the lawyer she works for scolds her for making promises to the potential client and wasting her time. Dena isn’t even licensed to give legal advice. Defeated, Dena leaves the office and gets drunk with her friends, and we see a very different Dena than the one we got to know in past seasons. For starters, she’s drinking, something we’ve never seen her do before, and something even Ramy won’t do, despite all his other haram behavior. Dena’s friends tell her to slow down because they don’t want her to be hungover for the bar exam.

At home, Maysa calls Tarek to ask if Dena has contacted him yet. She opens up to Tarek about her own marriage and how even though she loves Dena, she’s competitive and jealous with her. She wonders if all moms are like that, or if she’s a bad mom. She hates that nowadays, she can only attract a man with a picture of her daughter. Maysa’s monologue is heartbreaking, as she continues to wonder about her self worth as she ages, and it quickly gets sadder after she asks Tarek what he’s doing that night, only for him to get a call from Dena instead. Dena wants to hang out, he tells Maysa.

When Dena shows up drunk at Tarek’s door, she starts kissing him and pushes him inside. Again, this is so different from Dena the naive virgin in season, and part of me loves it, while another part of me wishes we could have seen that change. But I guess the show is called Ramy, not Dena. Maybe I just want a spinoff about Dena (and not just because we share the same name). As Dena and Tarek keep hooking up, Tarek asks her to slow down, but Dena talks him into sex and says that in America, “sex just has a different flow.” And, didn’t he come to America to try new things?

Dena wakes up a few hours before the bar to find Tarek praying alone. He wants to talk about what happened and asks if they’re going to get married now. He was a virgin before this, and he’s been praying that, if they get married, maybe it won’t be so bad in the eyes of Allah. Dena just tells him she had a really bad day.

“I allowed myself to be seduced by the devil,” he says.

The scene was a little shocking, honestly. The new toxic, messy, haram Dena is certainly entertaining and adds a little spice to the episode, but she’s gotten herself into Ramy territory here. Sure, she’s not as bad. She didn’t marry the guy and cheat on him with her cousin. But she talked Tarek into having sex when he’d never done it before and then bounced. And then we see that Dena is really unraveling. She gets to the building where she’s supposed to take the Bar, and she never goes in.

For Dena, her feelings of self-worth lie partially in her success as a law student and eventually a lawyer, but her own mother is more concerned with Dena getting married and having kids. She’s understandably confused and questioning what she really wants and who she’s become.

At the end of the episode, Dena is on the floor cleaning houses with the client she couldn’t help. Maybe this is her way of giving back — of making amends for her mistakes.

Sons and Daughters

• Maysa asks Ramy how much his apartment is, and he tells her she’s not allowed to ask people that. She responds, “What do you mean? You’re not people. You’re my son. You’re my Ramy.” For Egyptian families, there’s no such thing as boundaries.

• Dena is out all night, and Maysa and Farouk don’t even ask where she is. It’s so interesting that they give her much more freedom than they used to, and I would have loved to see how that came to be. Maybe that’s a question for the Dena spinoff I’m dreaming up.

• Farouk assumes Dena took the Bar, and he tells her he always wished for a son, then says, “Dena, you are my son. You are the real son.”

• “Dena, you’re aging,” says Maysa. “What, you want to pay $20,000 to freeze your eggs, or you want a free man?” Maysa reminds me of the women in my own family. When I turned 30, my aunt wrote in a birthday card, “Time to get married. The clock is ticking …” Another aunt even offered to make me a Muslim dating-app profile, and I reacted the same way Dena does.

• “This isn’t gonna happen,” Dena says to Tarek. “I don’t do Muslim dating apps, and I don’t care about your haram-halal ratio.” I LOL’d because as so many Muslim millennials know, you can’t really be yourself around another Muslim until you figure out how haram or halal they live their life.

• “You have to take the chances while you’re young, before your uterus becomes an egg graveyard,” Maysa says. She adds, “Graveyard of eggs, ya Dena.” Honestly, I’m excited to be walking around with a graveyard of eggs inside me. Very hardcore.

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