Bad Sisters S2E3: Missing

After two episodes exploring guilt and loss and secrecy without giving us a clear focus, we now know what this season’s central mystery is. At the end of last episode, Grace whispers good-night to her daughter Blanaid, leaves the house with a wad of cash in one hand and the pills her sister Ursula gave her in the other, and drives off into the night. She makes a brief phone call to Eva, saying she’s sorry and that she needs Eva’s help. She gets distracted, swerves to avoid an oncoming car, and crashes.

It’s not a fake-out, it’s not an ambiguous disappearance like Ian’s. Grace is dead.

So this episode is even more about guilt and loss and secrecy. The sisters are understandably gutted by loss, but also have to deal with the ongoing investigation into John Paul’s murder. Detectives Loftus and Houlihan are very much on the case, and tactless enough to show up at the funeral to question the sisters and the widower.

Yes, Ian is back, with very little fanfare. After his fight with Grace, he went to stay with a friend for a few days, and came back when he learned of her death. (How he learned isn’t clear, since no one could reach him.) But to all outward appearances, Ian’s still a warm, thoughtful guy who loved Grace and cares about Blanaid. 

Which is all swell, but if his disappearance was largely innocent, it doesn’t illuminate the central mystery that’s now hanging over the sisters, the police, and the viewer: what was Grace thinking?

She bafflingly told the police John Paul’s death was a suicide, after carefully staging it to look like an accident. She flipped out on Angelica, knowing full well Angelica knew about JP’s murder and could ruin Grace and her sisters. And then she ran out on her daughter, having withdrawn a large sum of money. (€20,000, according to a bank receipt the sisters find)

But as much plot and mystery we get in this episode, it’s largely focused on grief, and how the remaining sisters process it. They’re alternately angry, numb, and unable to stop making dark jokes. As is the show; the priest who presides over Grace’s funeral recently had a stroke, so he mumbles unintelligibly through the service. Bibi can’t help but laugh at the absurdity of it. The priest only speaks clearly when he puts the sisters on the spot to say a few words. Each of them is at a loss, and Roger saves them by standing up and singing a song for Grace. It’s sweet, and awkward, and you can feel both the relief and embarrassment from the sisters.

That’s how grief is. It overwhelms you, but it doesn’t displace any of your other feelings. It can’t. The world keeps going when you lose someone. You still have to make breakfast, you still have to sit through a stilted afternoon in church, and if you’re the Garvey sisters, you still have to worry about your role in covering up a murder.

Ursula in particular is even more shattered than the rest, as she gave Grace pills, pilfered from the hospital she works at, to help calm her down, and now isn’t sure whether those pills caused the car accident. She’s so distraught, in fact, that she confides in the worst possible person: Angelica.

That this is at all believable is a credit to Fiona Shaw’s nuanced performance as the malicious busybody. She genuinely consoles Ursula — she was close to Grace, closer than Grace would have liked, mind, but she’s also in mourning. And while she does try to make the funeral about herself (she tries sitting with the family before being shooed away), she’s warm and sympathetic talking to Ursula afterwards. She has the same question the sisters do — why was Grace so rattled in the days leading up to her death, in a way she never was with her abusive husband? Or even in the aftermath of his death?

It’s a worthwhile question, and Angelica’s worry over Grace and sorrow over her death is real. So it’s almost understandable that Ursula, shattered with grief and guilt, lets slip that she’s worried she’s responsible. Angelica is nothing but reassuring and sympathetic when Urs mentions the pills, but of course there’s no way she can resist weaponizing that information. 

Sure enough, next time Urs sees her, Angelica casually mentions there’s a broken window at the shelter where she works, and the noise from outside gets in. Sadly, they can’t afford to fix it, and isn’t that a shame? 

Cut to Ursula slipping an envelope of cash through the mail slot, labeled, tellingly, “for quiet.”

Angelica’s not the monster John Paul was. She’s an entirely different kind of monster—one whose neediness has curdled and turned her into an expert manipulator. But is she enough of a villain that she was somehow behind Grace’s death? Or someone the sisters will eventually want dead? That fact that her role in things still isn’t clear, and that it still isn’t entirely clear what this season’s central mystery even is, is a credit to the show. Whatever they’re doing, they’re not simply repeating the formula.

Stray thoughts
• It’s also hard to know how Blanaid fits into the story. She’s still angry at Grace for driving Ian away, and her generally erratic behavior. She may or may not know Grace killed her father. For now, she’s still very much in door-slamming teenager mode, with Eva stepping into Grace’s role as exasperated mother, and she and Ian trying to navigate how to co-parent a child neither of them have a clear-cut claim to.

• Bibi and Nora have a fight last week, provoked by Angelica’s gossip. They sit together at the funeral and their issues aren’t revisited. In fairness, there was a lot more going on in both the episode and Bibi’s life, so maybe we’ll get back to them next week. Given this week’s blackmail attempt, we wonder if we’re going to see Angelica wrong each of the sisters in turn just as John Paul did.

• Houlihan casually mentions her mother ran off when she was 12. (She came back eventually.) Loftus is characteristically unsympathetic. 

• Matt Claffin puts in an appearance at the funeral. Loftus had tried unsuccessfully to track down the Claffin brothers to ask about the insurance claim on John Paul, and Houlihan quickly puts together that Matt and Becka had dated. One more small piece of the puzzle for the garda.

• After two bright, sunny episodes, we finally get some Irish weather this week.