This title. This fucking title. If you’re gonna drop an F bomb in your title, have the conviction to actually do it. Otherwise, you’ve got to find an alternative. Like phonetically spelling out “effing,” that’d be pretty funny. Like this: this episode was an effing snooze. After the last one set the family in a clear pressure cooker of a situation, this one let all the momentum squeak out like a deflating balloon. Sure, there were a couple achingly slow plot beats, but this one was a lot of wheel spinning. Let’s begin.
1. Hot Dodge Season
Well, let’s start with the one big development this episode: Dodge is really Lucas, the best friend of Rendell and the childhood boyfriend of Ellie Whedon. He’s got a key that changes his… gender? Sex? The show doesn’t really have a clear mission statement as far as this is considered, so until proven otherwise I’m gonna call it the Boy/Girl Key.
And wow, boy Dodge is hot. Spot on casting, Felix Mallard really does look like the doppelganger of Laysla De Oliveira. And I don’t know where this fits into the equation but Mallard sounds EXACTLY like Adam Driver. Same low mumbly drawl, same weird cadence. When you hear him talk imagine him saying, “Forget the past, ill it if you have to.” Or “He knows to know that I fought for him!” Or “Cauliflower!” Man, Adam Driver is a really good actor, huh?
Dodge though, they have all the keys now, or at least a whole mess of them. This means entering Erin Voss’ mind for the location of the Omega Key, which will open the Black Door, which would be bad.
Kinsey arrives on the scene just as Dodge is leaving to question Erin, who up until this point has been non-vocal. But she manages to croak out, “Dooooooodge,” which inspires to Kinsey to show her the photograph of her dad and his childhood group of friends. She points at each of them in turn, until Erin moans, “Doooooodge,” with some urgency when Kinsey points at Lucas, proving to her that the lady who has been menacing her family is her dad’s ageless childhood best friend. There is no mention of how similar the two of them look, Kinsey just interprets Erin’s warning perfectly and believes it utterly. Either she’s a genius or the writing on this show is very lazy.
2. Folks gotta eat
“Is it weird that when you die- almost die- people bring you food?” Tyler asks Kinsey. Doesn’t seem weird to me. I just thought this was faux-deep teen talk. Awkward writing, but something to say. But no, this is a major theme of the whole episode. Everyone comes over with their get well soon dishes and apologizes for how strange Matheson is that people bring you food after a traumatic event when you probably don’t want to worry about menial tasks like cooking and would appreciate some company. What a quirky little town.
Detective Daniel Matuku rolls by to flirt with nina awkwardly. They don’t have chemistry per se, but it’s kind of cute. Pretty middle aged people being kind to each other is a mood.
This sequence feels like it lasts the whole episode. Not just the Detective Matuku, though that’s a highlight. All the supporting characters having boring conversations with the main characters, mostly made up of the Locke family apologizing for this or that. Except for Kinsey, who lives her life with no apologies. And frankly, she’s the most tolerable one. Probably goes to show.
Like, why the hell is Jackie here? Her connection to these people is Tyler who badly hit on her, promised to volunteer with her charity project, ditched her to get drunk in the middle of the day, and tried to hook up with a hot murderer girl. It’s almost like they’re the main characters and Jackie has no life outside of them.
3. Obtuse love triangle
And then we’ve got Kinsey’s problems. Mainly, Gabe. Ew, Gabe. Gabe has no game. Gabe has no chill. Gabe. Is. The. Worst.
I feel like in my first couple of reviews, I was sort of hard on Scot, and I apologize. There’s a dude who is making this material work for him. Petrice Jones has the most charisma of anyone in this cast. Team Scot. I cannot believe that there’s a love triangle here. Kinsey us choosing between Scot with the cute accent and the stammer, who has interests, and a fashion sense, and values. And on the other hand there’s Gabe. The most I can say about Gabe is that allegedly it’d like, really suck for him if Kinsey got into an program and he didn’t see her all summer. That’s the level Gabe is operating act. This show is making me root for the death of kids. Again.
Continued below4. What Whedons?
So, Lucas has been pretending to be the nephew of his high school girlfriend Ellie, and this raises a lot of questions for me. First off, how old is Rufus supposed to be? In the comics he’s probably about Kinsey’s age, babysits for Bode, and they form a cute friendship. Here, it seems like he’s supposed to be in his 20s? He’s got a job as a groundskeeper. I don’t know how I feel about all of that, I think it unnecessarily makes him more childish than he has to be.
Speaking of jobs, does uh, Ellie have one? All season she’s been there to be supportive at Nina (except for when Nina is rightly accusing her of murder) and bake things. In this day she seems to wake up, make a soup, go to Keyhouse, send Rufus and Bode back to her house, go home, make cookies, and get menaced by Lucas/Dodge. Does she have any personality besides supportive baked goods? TV show Ellie sucks, and that’s a bummer.
5. Alcohol is magic
The other development in this episode is Nina’s weird behavior. It’s actually hard to gauge for two reasons. One is that the characters are so weirdly written, it’s kind of hard to have a baseline. Eventually it became clear to me that Nina was supposed to be acting manic, but she’s always been kind of manic. Which brings me to my second point, which is that she’s been through some shit. Her husband died what, a month ago? Her kids are a mess, she got choked out by a home invader just last night. And that’s before we get into all the magical tomfoolery. If she’s a little off, that means that she’s been drinking? I mean, she has, but I don’t see it.
As in the comics, drunkenness is one way adults can skirt the Riffel Rule and see the magic around them. Nina uses this to discover the Mending Key, which she uses to repair a bunch of broken junk. Then she has the very childish/drunken idea to put her husband’s urn in the mending cupboard. And when it doesn’t work, she smashes the urn. OK yeah, maybe she’s not doing great after all. Her kids are very chill about this though, and offer to clean it up. That’s when they find the Omega Key inside of Rendell’s ashes! A twist!
