You have to wonder what Maura was tinkin’. Not as she systematically voted out everyone Rob wanted her to vote out. We know what she was tinkin’ there: she’d snared not only a new flirting partner, but a golden shot at over a hundred thousand dollars. That tinkin’ was clear. The tinkin’ I’m tinkin’ about is what happened after, when Rob—in his dress overalls, eyes glittering in the glow of Alan’s twink oil-fueled fire—told Maura not only that he was a traitor, but that he’d duped her harder than any girl has been duped since season two of the UK version. It were a grand dupin’, and that seemed to hit Maura like a sack of potatoes. So I wonder what she was tinkin’ as she walked out of the castle, past the production staff and the lights and all the stuff of the show and out into the real inky dark of her temporary Scottish home. 

I wonder if she gazed out across the landscape, pointing south west, toward her true home, toward Ireland, and if in that moment she was tinkin’ of all the other men who’d done her dirty in the past. 

Did she tink of Seamus, he of the crooked smile and alluring sadness barely concealed under a strut and a track suit, him just a teenager then, both of them kids, and how he told her things that sounded bigger than the world but, in the end, she caught him fooling around with Aisling O’Doherty behind the Supermac’s. 

Did she tink of Ahmed, who sauntered up to her in Abu Dhabi when she was a Monster girl at the F1 races. Ahmed who showed her the desert and his sleek apartment and instilled in her a dream she’d never known to dream before: a new life on the Persian Gulf, all dry wind and sunny idleness, adventure reached for from the comfort of a first class seat. Ahmed who broke it off with her fuzzy on the phone line from Switzerland, who left Maura to pack up alone and retreat to all that she knew before. 

Maybe Maura had a tink about the Love Island boys, about Curtis the dancer, Curtis who had secrets, or really maybe one big secret, lodged inside him dense as a black hole, a secret that could not help but betray Maura, for that was the secret’s very nature. Did Maura tink of the men after, the men met in the sudden clutch of fame, the flash of it, all the sweaty men at clubs, voices slick with bottle service liquor, heavy watches gleaming on tanned wrists, Maura never quite hearing what they were saying, never quite knowing them, because the music was too loud. 

Maura told us in this episode that every man she’s ever been with has cheated on her, and you’d have to assume, you’d have to tink, that she did some tinkin’ about all of them as she stood there in the stiff highland breeze, feeling flush with shame, dizzy with amazement. It happened again. Oh lord, ye Father in them great heavens above, it happened again.