Okay, so you know that whole thing where Lydia murdered Paul’s brother? It turns out that No Good Deed was just kidding! Mikey lives! The guy took a fire iron to the head and lost what looked like a lot of blood, but he lives! I have several questions, but mainly: Did no one check for a pulse? And not that I condone taking a life or anything, but it should be said that the Morgan family is, like, really bad at murder. I guess that’s a good thing, but also, can they stop doing it?
Of course, at first, Paul really does think his wife killed his brother. While that’s not exactly great news, it does force Paul to finally let some of those tightly repressed feelings out of the bottle. Yelling at your wife that she’s the real dead person in this house and that her own daughter won’t even talk to her because she’s so stuck in the moment of Jacob’s death, so unable to move forward that she has barely left the house in three years, might be a cruel way to go about things, but at least he’s being direct and actually telling her how he feels for once. The whole thing where he flashes the lights in Jacob’s room and tells her that Jacob’s telling her to get the fuck out, now, that’s just cruel.
Lydia does yell at him that he’s dead inside and also doesn’t actually seem that upset about killing his brother, so maybe they’re even? I’m sorry, but her “I can’t believe this is happening again†just did not have enough alarm in it to seem all that sincere. Not that I want to feel bad for Mikey, but even Paul, initially, seems more worried about how to get rid of the body and how to stay out of prison — both important things to worry about — than the loss of his brother. Eventually, though, we do get to see him slowly process it throughout the episode.
Once Lydia takes Paul’s advice to get the fuck out, Paul’s left to tend to his brother. Is he going to use Lydia’s “dump his body and make it look like an overdose†plan when he starts dragging Mikey’s (not really) corpse down the stairs? We’ll never know because just as soon as he starts, he has to drag that body back up into the secret room when Greg arrives with Dennis, Carla, and Denise, who want to take one more look at the place.
Greg finds Paul upstairs having just shoved Mikey (he still thinks he’s dead) back into the secret room looking sweaty as hell. “You look like Nick Nolte’s mug shot,†he tells him before informing him of his own rough night in which he and his husband Larry “had trauma sex.†They’re talking again! I’m so happy for them. Paul, understandably, does not have time for this. Greg informs the family that the owner’s brother died, so this showing will have to be quicker than normal. But they definitely shouldn’t just leave immediately, “Paul’s brother would not have wanted that,†Greg assures them. The man is nothing if not Good at His Job.
Dennis winds up taking a call from his doctor in the bathroom. The news isn’t great — his blood work showed some symptoms that may or may not be sarcoidosis, and he wants Dennis to get a CT scan. Dennis takes this as a death sentence. Just as he’s getting this news, Paul walks in to take a shower. They wind up talking about how short life can be, how you only have one family, and how Dennis would love to raise his son in this house “for as long as I have to raise him.†They hug, which is sort of awkward, but also Paul really needs it even if he doesn’t want to admit it, so I’m okay with it.
After his de-Noltefying, Paul does maybe the hardest thing having to do with his brother’s (not real) death aside from body removal: He texts Mikey’s son Nate from Mikey’s phone and tells him that he’s going to be gone for a while and that he loves him. Something tells me that “love you†might come to bite Paul in the ass later because Mikey doesn’t exactly strike me as a dad forthcoming with affection. It doesn’t much matter, though, since after Paul’s done screaming into a pillow over the absolute hellscape his life has become, that’s when the thumping starts. Mikey is alive. And thriving by the sound of those thumps.
Paul’s face here, as he has to keep up a lie about a raccoon being inside the walls while Dennis and Carla are still in the house while realizing that his brother is very much alive, is such a wonderful mix of relief, disbelief, and realization that Mikey is going to be so pissed at him.
He’ll probably be pissed at Lydia too since she, you know, “brained him,†as Paul would say. But at the moment, Lydia is having quite a weird day of her own. When she storms out of the house after her fight with Paul, he sends her off with a little “try not to kill anyone else†as a good-bye. Lydia gets into her car, attempts to call Emily for the first time in who knows how long (she gets voicemail), and then immediately backs up into Margo.
Later, we’ll learn that Margo is only faking her ankle injury. She’s manipulating Lydia into spending time with her, or having some empathy for her, or both. She wants to build a bond. She wants to do this to attempt to save her marriage (although not because she loves JD, let’s be so clear), and her husband can’t stand to be in this house “haunted by the ghost of [her] and [her] fuck-buddy past.†She offers to do anything in order to get him back: she’ll go to counseling, she’ll sign another pre-nup, she’ll even get rebaptized. They decide moving might be the best bet here but, as JD learned from Paul, Lydia doesn’t even like Margo, and there’s no way they’ll sell to them. While JD heads off to a meeting with his agents, in which he gets let go by the valet stand, Margo heads over to the Morgans’ to get run over by Lydia.
The two women spend the afternoon at Margo’s drinking the vodka that is supposed to be icing her injured ankle. Margo opens up about cheating on JD. Lydia opens up about her troubled relationship with her daughter Emily. They talk about Jacob, too. Margo tells her how much her step-daughter, JD’s daughter, Harper, loved getting piano lessons from him. The only reason they had to stop was because they interfered with Harper’s ballet classes, and she really needs those classes, Margo says. “She is graceless.†She also hands Lydia a Dodgers hat that she says belonged to Jacob. He left it here once during lessons, and she never got to return it. She just didn’t know what to say. She “always thought Jacob was a special young man.†She also tells Lydia that she knows some grief as well: Her brother Bobby died when she was 15 after she left a space heater on. “Sometimes I feel guilty for just being alive.†Whether any of this is true — it’s hard to imagine Margo so sincere, isn’t it? — we don’t know, but it is effective. The two women are in tears. That is precisely the moment Margo brings up making an offer on the house. Oh, she is good.
One Margo makeover later, Lydia returns home to find Paul talking to the door to the secret room. He is apologizing to his brother “for all of it.†We get a flashback to their childhood and learn that their father was abusive, and Mikey got the brunt of it. “Just because things got fucked up doesn’t mean it has to stay that way,†he tells a groaning Mikey through the door. Paul wants to start over. Hey, maybe it’s possible.
Just kidding, it’s not. At least not any time soon. Mikey comes out of the room swinging. The two brothers fight, and to set Paul off, he tells him to ask his wife what his lips taste like. Paul goes ballistic and beats his face in until, we have to assume, Mikey goes unconscious again. And we have to assume that because next thing you know, Paul is sealing up that door to the secret room with Mikey locked inside. How grim!
Closing Costs
• Oof, just when it seems like Dennis and Carla have worked things out and have agreed to tell Denise that they don’t want her to live with them in the Los Feliz house, it all goes to shit. Dennis can’t bring himself to tell Carla about the CT scan just yet and instead confesses that he’s been lying about his second novel. He hasn’t written any of it; there’s just too much pressure. Carla is not pleased.
• Everybody’s lying to their wives on this show! JD tells Margo that his meeting was about getting a part in a Marvel movie instead of the truth. He also seems to have forgiven her — he tells her it’s because everyone should get one mistake, but it’s definitely because his one mistake — bringing a gun to set while on that meltdown with his meds — has cost him everything. He has nothing else but Margo and his daughter now that he’s lost his agent and any hope of work.
• Is JD actually dangerous, or just a big dummy?
• Margo and Lydia when Lydia helps her inside her home and needs to turn off the security alarm: “The code is 6969; it’s an inside joke.†“I think I get it.â€