
Bad Sisters S2E7: How to Pick a Prick
As we’ve previously observed, season 1 of Bad Sisters started with John Paul’s death, so the central mystery was who killed him and how. Whereas the second season’s mystery is… what is the actual mystery? Grace’s death was accidental, at least on the surface, but was she driven to it? The police are investigating John Paul’s father’s death, but will that lead them back to Grace killing John Paul now that she herself is dead? Who’s even the villain this season? The characters, and the Garveys’ family dynamic has been compelling enough to keep us watching, but answers haven’t been forthcoming.
Until now, when the penultimate episode finally lays its cards on the table. Last week, warm, soulful, supportive Ian slept with Eva, and the two of them set up a bank account to put aside money for Blanaid’s future as her co-guardians. And this episode opens with Eva getting a notification from the bank: the account has been cleaned out.
She rushes to Grace’s house to confront Ian, and his stuff has gone. All of it — his marriage to Grace, his sticking around to be a stepfather to Blanaid, his seduction of Eva — seems to have been a long con. To make things worse, he left the thumb drive from last week with Detective Houlihan. That’s the thumb drive with video of the sisters boarding a boat with Angelica and leaving the same boat without her.
Eva’s next step is the police station, telling the guard at the desk, “all of my sisters have been arrested.” Ursula, Bibi, and Becka are playing dumb as to Angelica’s whereabouts, but just as Houlihan puts the screws to them, Detective Loftus interrupts with news: Angelica’s alive. He berates Houlihan for chasing phantoms again, and the sisters are free to go.
That doesn’t mean they’re out of trouble. Who knows what Angelica will say about what happened on the boat. And who knows if there’s any way to get the money back from Ian, or even find him. As Bibi pointed out last week when she confronted him, he came out of nowhere. And has now gone back there. Houlihan and Eva are both on the case, but there’s enough well-earned mutual distrust that it’s unlikely they’re going to put their heads together. It’s also not clear there’s any way to get Ian to return the money. He has a lot of information he can hold over the sisters, and he doesn’t seem to have broken any laws in stealing it. We have to assume the final episode doesn’t end in misery for the Garveys, but we’re back to the original questions of who and how.
Stray thoughts:
• Because Eva authorized Ian as joint owner of the bank account, the bank can’t make him return the money.
• Loftus finally gets his retirement party. He confesses to Houlihan that he stole Grace’s money to fund his custody battle, and then thought better of it. Disgusted by him, Houlihan gets ready to call him out at the party, but sees him with his daughter and relents.
• Becka and Matt have a nice moment, where they still very clearly have feelings for each other, but agree that their relationship is best left in the past, and Becka’s better of reconciling with the father of her baby.
• There’s still no clue as to who are what is in the trunk of the car in the season’s cold open, when the four surviving sisters prepare to throw something — or someone — off the edge of a cliff.