After last week’s revelation that Edgar was most likely poisoned with Devil’s Trumpet — a hallucinogenic and fatal flower that Hannah grows in the garden outside her yurt — all archery arrows seem to be pointing at Edgar’s adopted sister re: the murder. So, of course, that’s where this episode kicks off, with Zoë, Aniq, and Danner heading to Hannah’s yurt to question her.
Well, Danner and Aniq are “headingâ€; Zoë is what I would call “storming.†She is on a tear, convinced that Hannah is guilty, guilty, guilty. Zoë is single-minded when it comes to protecting her little sister. Hannah quickly sees what’s up: The trio thinks Devil’s Trumpet killed Edgar, and because it’s in her garden, they think she did it. (She doesn’t point out that literally anyone could have accessed the poisonous plant from her garden since it’s, you know, out in the open, but I was thinking it.)
Hannah’s tale starts long before the wedding weekend, though, and is styled as a quirky Wes Anderson–esque mind movie. (How on trend of Hannah!) This means: muted yet saturated color; lingering camera shots; Belle & Sebastian tunes; quirky asides; title cards onscreen; pregnant pauses between dialogue; and more.
Getting one potential motive (hatred) out of the way quickly, we learn that Hannah and Edgar had a good relationship in childhood. Hannah was a precocious child who took up odd hobbies (taxidermy, architecture, carving wooden anchors, etc.) to fill the void left by the lack of affection from her adopted parents, and Edgar did those hobbies right alongside her. They bonded due to a “frigid mother and absent father.†Sebastian was … also there. As they all got older, Edgar got more interested in work and less interested in their hobbies, but Hannah still loved him dearly.
But! Turns out, Hannah also loves … Grace! After Edgar brought Grace to Hannah’s Francophile-themed Adoption Day (because she doesn’t know her birthday) party and gifted her the typewriter he’d bought from Grace, the two women discovered their shared love of antiques and France and began spending more and more time together (including in Amsterdam, where Edgar brought Grace for lunch but ended up being too busy with work). At Grace’s bachelorette party, after Grace and Zoë fight, Hannah comforts Grace and they kiss. Which leads to a monthlong affair in which they seem happy and lovey (in Hannah’s story, at least).
Unfortunately for Hannah, Grace breaks things off for real about a week before the wedding. While in a sad bubble bath (with eggs cooking on a hot plate nearby, which does not seem safe from an electrocution standpoint), Hannah gets this blunt advice from her cold mother: “Get over it.†(Not that Isabel knows what “it†is, as far as we know.) Hannah gamely tries, but when she sees Grace walking down the aisle at the wedding rehearsal, she realizes she cannot.
So she hatches her first scheme: She’ll distract everyone at the rehearsal dinner with talk of plants (including Devil’s Trumpet) and Aniq doing drugs in order to talk to Grace alone. Hannah proclaims her love, but Grace is adamant that she’s going to marry Edgar and that she loves him. After a brief attempt at making Grace jealous by canoodling with Travis, Hannah awaits Grace in her yurt later that night, typing her a letter (which is when she realizes the “G†key is broken) and rejecting a clumsy advance from Sebastian.
Grace never shows, and after some archery and advice from Uncle Ulysses (an Apache data analyst told him to aim with his heart), Hannah hatches her second scheme, this one with Travis: to disrupt the wedding, the plot of which is shown to us in a quirky Claymation sequence that — while I understand how it fits in spirit — didn’t really click for me. Anyway, that scheme fails, too, because Hannah hears what Edgar says to Grace in the vow box. It’s a lot of biohacking stats that add up to say (at least to Hannah’s ears) that her brother truly does love Grace. Hannah decides to back down for good and books herself on a yearlong ocean passage.
Note: This episode all but confirms that prior to the murder, Isabel, Hannah, Edgar, and now Grace, do all live at the family vineyard, which seems … less than ideal.
Hannah makes an appearance at the wedding after-party, which in her memory is a subdued affair that finds her and Edgar reading books side by side and only Sebastian getting drunk by himself in the corner. She gifts Edgar the “G†typewriter key, they toast, and then she leaves — bumping into a drunk and sad Sebastian on her way out.
That’s the end of her tale, and Danner and Aniq try to show her how her own story is basically “all motive.†Yet Hannah claims she didn’t kill her brother, and while walking through her end-of-the-night actions once more, Aniq has a “HO-LY SHIT†epiphany about Sad Sebastian and runs out. Danner follows, but not before asking whether Hannah will try to get Grace back now that Edgar is dead. “I don’t know,†says Hannah, which seems like a lie to Danner and me both.
But is Grace interested? I’m not so sure, judging from her conversation with Zoë, who, after realizing her sister kept something from her (this time her affair with Hannah), storms out of the investigation to once again whisper-shout at her sister. Grace tells Zoë it was just a fling, and Zoë is too preoccupied with protecting her sister to notice how uncomfortable she looks. So far, Zoë’s blind spot around Grace amounts to her whisper-shouting at her sister a lot in the name of protecting her and being unable to keep her cool in questioning sessions with Aniq and Danner because she’s focused on what Grace didn’t tell her and/or proving her sister’s innocence. Understandable and noble in motive, yes, but I have to wonder if it means Zoë is missing something …
On the opposite end of the spectrum and house, Aniq and Danner are putting pieces together in Edgar’s office. They’re still confused about the SEC4 paper Travis found, but Aniq realizes that Edgar was firing Sebastian and the list of names was a list of replacement candidates from an executive headhunter. But Sebastian is still carrying on with business — including wrangling Feng into making a call in Korean for him and then blowing him off and impersonating Edgar on a phone call at the end of the episode — because no one knows he was fired. Suspicious? Yes. A motive for murder? Maybe …
Clues Clues Clues
• Suspect Watch: As is becoming the weekly pattern, the end of the episode casts someone new in a highly suspicious light, which immediately makes me think it can’t be them. In this episode, it’s Sebastian, whom I’ve been suspicious of the whole season so far and whom I still don’t like. But Grace is still looking like she’s hiding something, too. When Zoë tells her to stop keeping secrets because it makes her look guilty, Grace looks … well, kinda guilty (and also nauseated).
• Though if Grace does know something, she’s not working very hard to cast suspicion elsewhere; she tells Zoë she really doesn’t think Hannah killed Edgar.
• There’s a scene between Sebastian and Feng in the middle of the episode that seems to be there to show us that Sebastian is obnoxious and still conducting business on Edgar’s behalf and maybe to give Ken Jeong a chance to riff a bit. It also — perhaps? — brings up the fact that Feng is looking for an investor/business partner in his bing business. Let’s bookmark that info for later …
• The best line of the week has to be Grace’s: “I really think whiskey tastes like drinking a catcher’s mitt.†Runner-up is Hannah referring to Edgar’s late lizard Roxana as her niece.
• It remains really impressive how these actors — particularly Poppy Liu and Zach Woods, who, as the marrying couple and the No. 1 suspect/murdered party, are so often the center of the stories — handle the different genres from episode to episode.