This week’s episode, as Danner promised Aniq in last week’s episode, explains why she really quit the force. It’s entertaining but doesn’t do much for our murder mystery at hand, and since we’ve crossed the middle-of-the-season threshold, that fact is a bummer and has the effect of making Danner’s episode (which otherwise has some great comedic moments and imitates a ’90s erotic crime thriller to a T) feel a bit like filler. Tiffany Haddish’s food-related physical comedy deserves better (though, actually, the scene with all the food in Devereaux’s fridge was pretty great)!
But, alas, that’s that (for now — if I’m proved wrong and this story connects more to the main one by the end of the season, so be it!). So let’s just get to recapping what we learned in “Danner’s Fire,†eh? Since it doesn’t connect to Edgar’s murder, there’s a lot less plot here to juggle — and no competing perspectives to compare her story against (unless John Early’s Detective Culp pops up in a future episode to tell his version of these wild events).
The long and short of Danner’s story is that when investigating an arson case after the Xavier murder, she was seduced by the lead suspect’s psychologist, who turned out to be the arsonist himself. He ended up getting away, all while handcuffing her to a bed in a burning bedroom. She was (luckily) rescued by Detective Culp (I missed him!), but … well … she was metaphorically burned by the whole ordeal. She quit the force because she let her heart — and libido — get in the way of solving a case. She got too close, which is the whole point she’s trying to make to Aniq by telling him this story. It has the unintended side effect of Aniq finally realizing she’s a real person (“Damn, that’s cold as hell,†Danner says in reply to this “epiphany†of his), and it also convinces him to choose to put their search for the truth above his unwavering loyalty to Zoë and her family.
That’s the point of Danner’s tale, and while I’m not sure that six episodes in was the right place for such a detour from the main mystery, the beauty of it is in the details of the execution. It’s a ’90s erotic-crime-thriller “mind movie,†and it replicates that particular genre well and gives Haddish a chance to do her comedic bits more than she’s gotten the chance to do all season so far. Highlights include the extended sexy-time food-play scene between Quentin Devereaux (Michael Ealy) and Danner, Aniq’s reactions to Danner’s explicit retelling of her and Devereaux’s sexcapades, the phrase smedium dick and Danner and Culp’s enthusiasm for that penis size as the perfect penis size, the reveal of Devereaux’s in-progress canvas just having a stick figure with two cartoonish boobs painted on it … I admit, I saw the twist that Devereaux was the arsonist coming 100 miles away, but I did not see that crude stick figure coming, and it got a real LOL from me. I also giggled when Devereaux referred to Billy Joel as “William Joel.â€
This episode did solve the (small) mystery of the scene in the opening credits that shows a silhouetted woman having hot wax poured on her chest — that’s something Danner and Devereaux do during one of their seduction scenes! It had been bugging me because most of the other opening-credits imagery had already been accounted for (the dance between Edgar and Grace, the Adderall pills, crypto keys, Ulysses on a horse, etc).
While Danner is making Aniq want to burn his ears off with her very detailed sexual-encounter recounting, the rest of the murder weekend crew is … well, also kind of participating in some filler content. There’s some clunky expository conversation between Zoë and Ulysses; they talk about Dutch baby pancakes and why he left when Zoë and Grace were kids (he says he was restless; she says she and Grace always thought he was a spy) and then run into Travis, who has brewed and ingested some devil’s-trumpet tea.
Everyone — including Travis — immediately frets that he’s taken too much and thus poisoned himself, but for once Reddit steered him right and he’s just fine. Well, he trips his face off, but he’s fine from a poison standpoint. Everyone gathers to witness him hallucinating, and Grace steps in to calm him down with some “steampunk slang.†Hannah gets jealous of the attention Travis is getting from Grace, and Isabel sums up the situation neatly with this line: “I really don’t want to be here, but this is riveting.â€
When Travis sobers up — thanks in part to a famous Ulysses Dutch baby — he makes his ultimate point: Anyone could’ve brewed that devil’s-trumpet poison tea; it was easy. All it took was hot water and a teapot. At this, Grace stares thoughtfully into space, and a lightbulb goes off over Zoë’s head. She sneaks out of the kitchen and into Edgar’s room — where he is still just lying on the bed, dead AF — and homes in on a teapot sitting on the dresser. She takes the teapot’s knitted hat off, smells it, then hears Sebastian and Isabel whispering and hides in the bathroom.
Zoë eventually stashes the teapot and its cozy in a bathroom cabinet and sneaks out of the murder room again, but I must point out that her fingerprints are now ALL OVER THE TEAPOT (and multiple doorknobs in the bedroom). If the poison is really in that teapot, that was a very stupid move. But, as she admits to Ulysses earlier in the episode, she doesn’t really know what she’s doing. If Aniq is too close to the case because of his love for Zoë and his need to impress her parents, Zoë is really too close because of her single-minded pursuit of protecting her sister, and she’s starting to unravel in her desperation to do so.
In season one of The Afterparty, Aniq was trying to clear his own name, and he ended up missing — until the very end — that his own friend Yasper was the murderer. Is something similar going down this season? Is Danner’s “You’re fucking an arsonist†line a signal that Aniq is … dating a murderer? It seems unlikely that Zoë did it, but we have to consider all angles. On another note, what could Zoë be missing because she’s so focused on proving that Grace is innocent? All of Grace’s guilty/conflicted looks into the middle distance, for one thing …
Clues, Clues, Clues
Suspect Watch: Aniq finally commits to putting finding the truth above his loyalty to Zoë’s family, so Ulysses will be up next on the interview docket. His glass-tinkering seems like a classic red herring to me, but who knows? Zoë and Grace are actually looking a bit more suspicious this week with the teapot high jinks and knitted cozy that definitely seems like a Grace creation.
• When Zoë overhears Sebastian and Isabel while in Edgar’s room, they’re whispering:
Sebastian: “It’s all going smoothly. No hiccups yet. We’ll get this done.â€
Isabel: “Well, it has to happen now.â€
• What does this mean? It’s probably about money because everything with those two is about money, but could it also be about pinning the murder on someone?
• Ealy and Paul Scheer feature heavily in Danner’s erotic thriller, and they both serve up 110 percent with their performances, really doing the most with their guest spots. I never knew monologues about fire and arson could be so … heated and steamy and funny.