Bad Sisters S2E4: Person of Interest
As the youngest, Becka often gets short shrift, both in the story and the writer’s room; as the elder sisters tend to take charge, she’s relegated to making cutting remarks. But “Person of Interest” is fully Becka’s episode, and she packs a lot into it.
For starters, Matt Claffin is back in her life. After showing up at the funeral (after presumably not seeing Becka since the events of season 1), she ends up going to see his band and trying not to look too conspicuous. But she still manages to catch the eye of another face in the crowd — Detective Houlihan, whose interest in the gig isn’t purely musical. She confronts Becka and has her dead to rights — she knows the sisters covered up the murder, she just doesn’t have proof. But she’s confident enough that Becka’s rattled. Her only misstep is assuming that Becka hooked up with Matt to stop his investigation (instead of despite it).
Matt himself ends up being less than delighted to see Becka in the company of the police, and after Houlihan leaves, the exes bicker, with Matt saying he can’t cover for her this time. An insurance company investigation is one thing; a police inquiry is another.
But that’s not the only thing Becka has to worry about. She stops on the way home to buy pregnancy tests. She gets into bed with Joe, clutching a positive test in her hand. Half-asleep, Joe says he loves her, but she’s not quite ready to break the news.
She also doesn’t tell the sisters when she meets them at the beach the next morning, where Angelica is picking up trash. The sisters move to confront her about the money Grace withdrew before fleeing, and whether it was a blackmail attempt. Ursula comes right out and says Angelica is the reason their sister is dead. But the Garveys overplay their hand, and Angelica puts up a wall. “Shame drove Grace to her death, not me.”
The sisters retreat to a beach-side sauna (a fine idea in chilly Ireland), and Bibi (ever the instigator) floats the idea of breaking into her house to look for the money. They very quickly go from “we can’t break into that woman’s house” to “we’re breaking into that woman’s house.”
Bibi and Becka end up attempting the break-in while Angelica is at church, and it goes about as well as you would expect. While it turns up some oddness — above all, Angelica is a very odd woman — it all just raises more questions. Last season’s episodes all firmly hammered home the same message — John Paul is a bastard, he has wronged these women, and they are correct for wanting him dead. This season is playing things far closer to the vest. Is Angelica malicious or a needy busybody? Does the season end with the sisters killing her? And could they justify that to themselves if they did?
Nothing is clear at this point, but as always, the noose gets ever tighter both inside and outside of the murder investigation. Houlihan and Loftus are more or less correct about the Garveys’ guilt and just need proof (or for one of the sisters to crack). Angelica’s too practiced a manipulator to let the Garveys get ahead of her, and at every turn, she ends up learning another of their secrets. Becka is still torn between her current boyfriend (and father of her child) and her ex, the one person apart from her sisters she can talk to about all of this.
Last season was structured like an episode of Columbo (or Poker Face), in that we knew from the start that the sisters murdered John Paul, but seeing how and why it all came together was still compelling. This season is smart to take a different approach. Halfway through the second season, we still have no idea where this is going, but we’re eager to find out.
Stray thoughts:
• Last episode ended with a stinger of Angelica with Blanaid, and she’s here giving her a new helmet before her camogie (women’s hurling) match. Irish crime writer Ken Bruen describes hurling as “a cross between field hockey and murder” and Bla’s quite good at it. That’s until another girl says “which family member’s going to die next?”, and a brawl breaks out. Urs’ daughter Molly bears the brunt of it, getting a few teeth knocked loose. Just like their parents, the younger Garveys end up on the wrong end of each other’s unintended consequences.
• Roger’s moved on quickly from his crush on Grace, now he’s hitting on Ursula.
• Also Roger: “I love a bit of incense. I imagine it’s how Jesus smelled.”
• A few more details on Angelica: she has an ex-husband, who left her for another woman. And she looks strangely smug on hearing the news that John Paul had raped Eva.
• Two episodes later, we never revisited Bibi’s fight with her wife over whether to have a kid, and while this was primarily Becka’s episode, it seems like they could have made a connection; the sisters’ varied experiences with motherhood have been a theme from the start.
