I Love LA season 1 episode 6 ending explained: Why does Maia start to act out?

The chaos of I Love LA season 1 has always come from its blend of hyper-specific LA satire and painfully relatable 20-something meltdowns, but Episode 6 pushes that mix into new territory. The HBO comedy, created by Rachel Sennott, follows a group of friends juggling ambition, insecurity, and accidental self-sabotage while trying to build their careers in the city. Each character hits a breaking point this season, but Episode 6 shifts the focus squarely to Maia, whose unraveling comes fast and hits hard.

The episode sets up a clear contrast between Tallulah’s rising profile, Charlie’s emotional reckoning, and Maia’s growing fear that she is losing control of her personal and professional life. What begins as a productive week quickly cracks open when Maia receives a message from her ex-boss, a man whose influence, and manipulation, still has a hold on her. By the time game night arrives, the damage is already done.

Why Maia’s spiral begins after hearing from her ex-boss

Maia’s downward slide begins long before she steps into Dylan’s living room in I Love LA season 1 episode 6. The moment she receives a handwritten invite from her former boss Ben, her behavior shifts. Their meeting is casual at first, but the familiar dynamic takes over quickly: power imbalance, subtle negging, and an intensity Maia can’t seem to resist. They drink, flirt, and slip back into unhealthy patterns that Maia convinced herself she’d left behind in New York.

Instead of grounding her, the meeting scrambles her sense of identity. Ben frames their shared ambition as something superior to the people around them. It’s manipulative but effective, and Maia carries that energy with her straight into the evening.

By the time she reaches Dylan’s game night, drunk, unfiltered, and insecure, she is no longer responding to the room she’s in. She’s reacting to the emotional hangover Ben triggered. A harmless coworker named Clare becomes a threat, a simple gathering becomes a challenge to her relevance, and Dylan’s kindness becomes something she tests rather than trusts.

Her eruption tracks with what Josh Hutcherson said about Dylan’s emotional state this episode. Speaking to Esquire, he explained:

“At this point in the series, Dylan's f*cking had enough of Tallulah and Maia's bullsh*t. He's starting to feel that Maia doesn't f*cking care about his world or his people or what his interests are.”

Maia pushes every boundary during the game night: interrupting conversations, demanding attention, interrogating Clare, and dismissing Dylan’s friendships as boring. It’s jealousy mixed with panic. She can’t handle the idea that Dylan might be valued in a space where she has no control. When asked what were Dylan's feeling by the end of the episode, Hutcherson further explained:

"I think Dylan's perspective is that she's making everything about her yet again. She's putting on a show. She's drunk. She's being super inappropriate around his work friends. She has almost a dominating thing of needing to be the center of attention. And Dylan can hang with that to a point. But she takes it too far—and he explodes."

When Dylan finally loses patience and sends everyone home, she escalates the night again, insisting he’s attracted to Clare, provoking him until he snaps, then turning that tension into sex. The moment isn’t intimate. It’s a power grab. And the shot of Maia briefly imagining Ben’s face instead of Dylan’s shows how far she has slipped into old patterns.

Dylan, meanwhile, is left shaken. He gives Maia space to be chaotic, but this is the moment he realizes he isn’t in a partnership anymore. He’s part of her spiral, and not by choice.

Recap of I Love LA Season 1 Episode 6

I love LA season 1 episode 6, titled Game Night, opens with a photoshoot for a Ritz campaign Tallulah books, one that goes south once a studio exec decides to lean into her queerness as a branding tool. Tallulah hates the corporate framing, but with help from Tessa, she finds a way to reclaim the situation, leading them to paint over the ad in the middle of the night.

Charlie gets his own emotional subplot. At Landry’s funeral, he runs into Andrew, the man who once broke his heart. That encounter sends him hunting for an old sex tape with Alani’s help. When he watches it, the humor fades, and the real grief hits: he misses Lukas deeply, and he texts a number he knows will never answer. It’s one of the most grounded moments of the episode.

Meanwhile, Maia moves through a string of escalating pressure points. She supports Alyssa at a Forbes shoot, receives the note from Ben, meets him for wine and ambiguous compliments, and leaves with her confidence rattled. When she arrives home at Dylan’s game night, the tension boils over quickly. She fixates on Clare, derails the gathering, and embarrasses Dylan in front of his coworkers.

After everyone leaves, her confrontation with Dylan leads to the episode’s most disturbing moment. Their argument turns physical, not violent, but charged, and they end up having sex for all the wrong reasons. She sees Ben. Dylan sees the reality of their dynamic. Her final line, “That was great,” followed by immediately texting Tallulah, leaves him speechless.

This is the first time Dylan realizes she might hurt him without noticing or caring. It sets the stage for a reckoning between them as the season moves forward.

I Love LA season 1 is now streaming on HBO Max.