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shallownessThe Better Sister - 1.3 Incoming Widow
The next day and Ethan was facing a hearing, so his lawyer was trying to get answers from him to build up his defence case. Like his stepmother/aunt and mother, he was having the flashbacks, which showed that there were tensions in his relationship with his father and offered some more context to the misdemeanours that the prosecution would be picking on. (Not much, though.)
The sisters were still getting on each other’s nerves although seemingly united in their concern for Ethan. Nikky was still having visions of their father, who had favoured Chloe when they were kids. I didn’t quite follow why she reverted to factory settings on the ‘burner’ phone Chloe had found – was it because she saw that it was Ethan’s and could be used as evidence against him? Also weird that she didn’t mention the penknife she’d found in the car, just cleaned it of its blood stains, which she had to know were not of the rabbit in the flashback, but of more recent origin.
We were somewhat following the police officers – the male one was investigating other possibilities than Ethan with a bit more diligence, although as his colleague said, it wasn’t really pointing them anywhere else. But there were things that remained mysterious. Adam’s lawyer boss was privately exercised over his dealings with Gentry, and by the end of the episode, we learned that Chloe had been having an affair with Adam’s colleague – he was the one she’d been secretly texting the night Adam was killed. He was catching up on the whole Chloe marrying her sister’s ex thing.
The lawyer pointed out some salient facts about the broken window and the alarm that might help the sisters prove that Ethan hadn’t done it. Some nice flips between who was the calmest when – Nikky knew more about how law enforcement worked, Chloe more about the media.
Countdown - 1.2 Dead Lots of Times (don't get that one, sorry)
(Surely all the British viewers are giving this an impromptu rendition of the quiz show of the same name’s theme music.)
Two throughlines, one in the past in Moldova (or wait, was it Belaruss?) 2008, where Borys just wants to repair his toaster when his failboat brother turns up, beaten up, mumbling about ‘the American.’ Anton was supposed to be supplying information to the American spy, but failed to work out that the intel he really wanted was from Borys, who worked in the defence department. Borys sneakily got him his e-mails (old enough viewers got a nostalgic kick from the tech used), but Anton’s guilt for putting his brother in this position made him kill himself – Borys walked in on his body. He handed the spy the e-mail, but he'd already left a toaster in his apartment. And it blew up – in the episode timeline, this was followed by another bomb, revealing that Borys the Toaster Repairman is involved in what our taskforce are investigating.
Mainly, the way they did this was for Oliveras to have to work undercover with Meacham to try to get an old contact who might know who’d been smuggling what through the port of LA to trust them. This involved bringing in a test run of drugs over the border, with four of them on the road, the rest watching remotely, trying not to make it too obvious they were cops. Things went wrong, but they had a plan for that – look at them all working together, and two people noticing Meacham had a lot of headaches.
One of the hitches was that an ambitious (and smarmy, so smarmy) LA DA (or maybe I didn’t get the right acronym, as there were so many they were making meta jokes about it) wanted in, and realised some of what the taskforce was doing. We’re also meant to wonder whether Oliveras is actually addicted to drugs. Over the episode, Meacham had at least dialled down his obnoxiousness towards her to the kind he showed his male colleagues.
Turns out bombing someone’s property, colleague and injuring them is likely to make them want to share your name in revenge.
The next day and Ethan was facing a hearing, so his lawyer was trying to get answers from him to build up his defence case. Like his stepmother/aunt and mother, he was having the flashbacks, which showed that there were tensions in his relationship with his father and offered some more context to the misdemeanours that the prosecution would be picking on. (Not much, though.)
The sisters were still getting on each other’s nerves although seemingly united in their concern for Ethan. Nikky was still having visions of their father, who had favoured Chloe when they were kids. I didn’t quite follow why she reverted to factory settings on the ‘burner’ phone Chloe had found – was it because she saw that it was Ethan’s and could be used as evidence against him? Also weird that she didn’t mention the penknife she’d found in the car, just cleaned it of its blood stains, which she had to know were not of the rabbit in the flashback, but of more recent origin.
We were somewhat following the police officers – the male one was investigating other possibilities than Ethan with a bit more diligence, although as his colleague said, it wasn’t really pointing them anywhere else. But there were things that remained mysterious. Adam’s lawyer boss was privately exercised over his dealings with Gentry, and by the end of the episode, we learned that Chloe had been having an affair with Adam’s colleague – he was the one she’d been secretly texting the night Adam was killed. He was catching up on the whole Chloe marrying her sister’s ex thing.
The lawyer pointed out some salient facts about the broken window and the alarm that might help the sisters prove that Ethan hadn’t done it. Some nice flips between who was the calmest when – Nikky knew more about how law enforcement worked, Chloe more about the media.
Countdown - 1.2 Dead Lots of Times (don't get that one, sorry)
(Surely all the British viewers are giving this an impromptu rendition of the quiz show of the same name’s theme music.)
Two throughlines, one in the past in Moldova (or wait, was it Belaruss?) 2008, where Borys just wants to repair his toaster when his failboat brother turns up, beaten up, mumbling about ‘the American.’ Anton was supposed to be supplying information to the American spy, but failed to work out that the intel he really wanted was from Borys, who worked in the defence department. Borys sneakily got him his e-mails (old enough viewers got a nostalgic kick from the tech used), but Anton’s guilt for putting his brother in this position made him kill himself – Borys walked in on his body. He handed the spy the e-mail, but he'd already left a toaster in his apartment. And it blew up – in the episode timeline, this was followed by another bomb, revealing that Borys the Toaster Repairman is involved in what our taskforce are investigating.
Mainly, the way they did this was for Oliveras to have to work undercover with Meacham to try to get an old contact who might know who’d been smuggling what through the port of LA to trust them. This involved bringing in a test run of drugs over the border, with four of them on the road, the rest watching remotely, trying not to make it too obvious they were cops. Things went wrong, but they had a plan for that – look at them all working together, and two people noticing Meacham had a lot of headaches.
One of the hitches was that an ambitious (and smarmy, so smarmy) LA DA (or maybe I didn’t get the right acronym, as there were so many they were making meta jokes about it) wanted in, and realised some of what the taskforce was doing. We’re also meant to wonder whether Oliveras is actually addicted to drugs. Over the episode, Meacham had at least dialled down his obnoxiousness towards her to the kind he showed his male colleagues.
Turns out bombing someone’s property, colleague and injuring them is likely to make them want to share your name in revenge.
