It’s not easy to get away with murder, and it might be even harder to get away with insurance fraud. Successful criminals need to have discipline, a plan, patience, and cunning. Eve and Nick have exactly zero of these qualities. For the most part, they’re cruel idiots. Eve thinks that the world should bend to her will just because she’s convinced herself that she’s special and deserves special things, even if those things come at the expense of others’ happiness and safety, and Nick thinks the world should bend to his will because he somehow lucked into finding a smoke show of a wife to look after.
The fourth episode of Bad Monkey chronicles Eve and Nick’s relationship from love at first sight to double insurance fraud and multiple murder sprees. In the span of an hour, the duo goes from a vapid-and-vaguely-icky couple to total Dexter bait. Not counting Nick’s arm, their body count is up to three — three and a quarter if you include the arm — and Eve seems convinced that they can just kill their way to the top.
Eve and Nick are incredibly interesting characters because in many narratives such as this one — an unwitting couple tries to scam or steal or finagle a better life with rapidly escalating moral quandaries tied to the consequences — the story takes dark and thorny turns. (See Fargo, A Simple Plan, etc.) Not so with Eve and Nick. Sure, Nick ponders the weight of his actions and wants to be a good dad to his daughter, but at the end of the day, he’s just an asshole who thinks the world owes him a pass. We do have a bit of sympathy for Nick here — he’s generally likable because Rob Delaney plays him, and Rob Delaney is hilarious and seems like he would be a super-cuddly dude — but he’s actually a piece of shit. He stops short of following Eve’s plan to kill his daughter, Caitlin, after she finds out that he’s still alive, but the way he callously treats the people of Andros is proof that he’s totally terrible.
Eve, on the other hand, might just be a full-on sociopath. The flashback that starts the episode frames her as a wannabe actress with minimal talent who may have possibly made it if she hadn’t had such a temper and a propensity for laziness. Even though the director clearly dislikes her, she has the lead role in the Ghost play! But as soon as he levels a criticism against her for not being able to cry during the famous “Ditto” scene, she freaks out and then (checks notes) … frames him for pedophilia. That seems like a big reaction!
Meredith Hagner is doing wonderfully unhinged work as Eve as she vacillates between vaguely threatening, furious rage, and overjoyed at her own fortunes. She’s actually not too far away from Yancy’s method of quickly endearing strangers to her as she relies on compliments and friendly banter to draw people in. She acts the friendly ditz when she’s really a wolf in a sarong, ready to pounce the second someone shows a moment of weakness. The scene where Eve murders Heather with the weather in cold blood is absolutely chilling as Eve keeps a terrified Heather rooted to the spot when a cheery story about her and Nick being actors takes a hairpin turn into fawning over meeting her favorite TV personality. Heather is scared, but she surely never suspects this wisp of a fangirl to pull a gun out of her purse and shoot her dead. After Eve does the deed, she has no reaction to what she’s just done except to reel on Nick and tell him that they’re even. Then, she unleashes a bubbly torrent of cackles when her tiny dog trots around in Heather’s blood. Her emotions are fully inappropriate for the moment, and the chaos she creates is just an absolute pleasure to watch.
To be completely fair, Nick should have seen all of this coming. From the early moments of their truly bonkers relationship, Eve has always had his balls in a vice. When Eve and Nick meet, Nick is a single dad to Caitlin — we never find out what happened to her mom, but it feels like he might have gotten burned in the past — and he’s just looking for some companionship as his baby bird starts to leave the nest. When he spots Eve at a party he’s escorting his underage daughter to, he finds his mate, promising her that she’ll have a beautiful life. Eve, who has always just wanted someone to take care of her, is fully smitten. She’s hot, he’s doting and rich, and it’s a match made in Florida heaven. Honestly, the age difference isn’t even that crazy for Florida. But Eve keeps upping the ante in terms of what a good provider will provide for her. When Nick mentions possibly buying a sweet little bungalow on the beach while they’re on a vacation in Andros, Eve suddenly gets the idea to build an entire resort. We get the sense that this woman has never thought about owning or operating a resort ever in her entire life, but suddenly she just wants to see if this man who has promised her everything can deliver on even her most capricious and exorbitant whims.
Nick is game, thinking that he can just goose the prescriptions at Midwestern Mobile Medical to raise more capital. But soon after, Nick and Izzy’s Super Rollie scam gets uncovered by the Feds, and Nick realizes that he might have to bolt with minimal cash. This is wholly unacceptable to Eve, who has gotten used to living a life of luxury. So Nick comes up with the idea to fake his own death. At first, he says he’s going to cut off two of his fingers to make it look real. All it takes is one side-eye from his wifey for him to up the ante. He’ll take off his arm instead. And, of course, his good friend Izzy will be the one to do it.
It’s unclear what Izzy is getting out of this part of the scam. Even if Nick is declared dead, wouldn’t Izzy still be responsible for the thousands of false scooter prescriptions he signed? Or maybe he’s just being a good friend. The scene with the arm is predictably gruesome, and even more so when Izzy hauls the limb to the shower to do some doctoring so that it looks like a boating accident and not a voluntary back-alley amputation. (Okay, it wasn’t a back alley; it was a heavily tarped area of Eve and Nick’s McMansion that looked eerily like a Dexter kill room. The Dexter vibes are so strong, guys. I’m just itching for a crossover where Dexter kills these fools. Maybe I’ll write a fanfic. Stay tuned.)
A little fast-forwarding shows Izzy handing the arm to Phinney, Phinney bending the fingers to flip the bird, and then the poor dumb kid goes and asks for more money. Nick kills him, this we know, but then Izzy’s guilt over getting Phinney killed leads him to want to talk to Yancy, and Nick and Eve can’t have that. So Nick kills his bestie in cold blood. I’m hoping that this isn’t the last we see of Braff on the show, but if it is, I just want to say that he should be in more things and I would also love to see him in more dramatic roles, because he balanced Izzy’s tragicomic arc beautifully while still delivering some of the biggest laughs of this episode.
In the present, we learn that Izzy is being framed for Phinney’s death by a crooked cop named Jonny Mendez, the same dude that caused Yancy’s exit from Miami PD. We get the backstory: Mendez was in charge of the Crime Busters tip line, which he used to feed his friends and family info about solved crimes so that they could collect the reward money and split it with him. This is pretty egregious and gross, but the city thinks that Mendez can stay on. And they give Yancy the boot for his general attitude about, well, everything. This is why Miami can’t have nice things! Anyway. After five years, Mendez ends up getting promoted to detective anyhow, where he’s bungling his job by looking over the fact that a guy who got shot in the back of the head couldn’t possibly be a suicide.
Rosa and Yancy commiserate over Izzy’s dead body, and both come to the absolutely logical conclusion that his death was not a suicide. But the detective work turns them on, and Rosa jumps Yancy’s bones on an examining table, which is one of the most off-putting places I can think of to do it with a new partner, but I’m not trying to yuck Rosa’s yum here. Yancy leaves, but not before Rosa can tell him the story about how she wasted three years of her life on a guy who lied about going to the symphony. Somehow, this story — along with a three-legged Key deer — helps Yancy connect the dots that Christopher and Nick might just be the same person. As he’s leaving a message on Rosa’s voicemail, Nick comes up and slams Yancy over the head with a crowbar. My only hope is that Yancy wakes up for long enough to banter with him, because Vaughn and Delaney are certainly among the great banterers of our time.
Monkeying Around
• One of the funniest exchanges in the episode is when Eve compares Phinney’s request for more money to the children’s book If You Give a Mouse a Cookie. Nick responds by saying he has a kid, so of course he’s read it. But then he shakes his head for a minute and asks Eve why she would have read it. The head shake and line read of his response, “Why did you read it?,” are priceless, but if we’re being real here, the age difference between him and Eve is the issue. Eve is in her 30s, and the book came out in 1985, so she totally read it as a kid, not an adult. And clearly she learned all the wrong lessons from it.
• My favorite scene in the episode is the one where Ya-Ya offhandedly (pun intended, folks) asks Nick what happened to his arm, and Nick responds with some serious disrespect. Ya-Ya responds by silently raising a finger and circling his face in the air, in a move akin to a curse. Nick’s reaction, and then the Dragon Queen’s response when her grandma keeps circling people in their vicinity, “That’s enough circling for today, Ya-Ya,” is compelling, and it’s comedy, and it’s what makes Bad Monkey so damn fun.
• Tom Nowicki is continuing to kill it on the voice-over narration. I’m starting to feel like this show took a few pages from the Arrested Development playbook in its ability to deliver wry and unexpected one-liners from an omniscient being as a way to add laughs.
• Tom Petty Cover Watch: The one and only cover in this episode is “You’re Gonna Get It” by Jason Isbell and the 400 Unit.