Listen, I’m not going to defend all of Greer Garrison Winbury’s life choices because she may or may not have murdered the woman who we now know for sure was sleeping with her husband and also what is this wig she’s wearing, but I do empathize with her because goddamn is she surrounded by a bunch of incompetent men. Her three sons are weenies at best, psychopathic, drug-addicted douchebags at worst. Her husband has one job — to keep his shit together for the sake of Greer’s career — and he can’t seem to do it. No wonder she constantly has a look of disappointment on her face.
Take Thomas, who we spend more time with in episode two. Thomas is not a complicated person to figure out. (Although, like all of the characters in this ensemble, I do appreciate that he never feels stereotypical or one-note.) Thomas is a complete asshole. There’s not one person, and I’m including his wife in this, who actually likes him. His mother, maybe, tolerates him? From the very beginning, we understand the way he works. In the first episode, we watch Abby totally dominate him, demanding he find the money to buy an apartment at the Beresford — she even gives him a deadline. He goes immediately from that conversation to cruelly ripping into Benji; he’s looking for someone to dominate. He’s trying to find someone he can make feel small, the way he feels in his marriage. But it’s bigger than just his marriage. In that same episode, we also saw Tom ask his dad for that loan, and Tag replied by comparing his son to a boat that [checks notes] “drop[s] to the bottom like a fucking stone.” A very cool, very chill parent/child relationship.
Typically, Tom would just continue on doing what he does best — being a dick — but we get to see a different shade of him in episode two when we find him at the Sand Dollar Motel in bed with Isabel. It’s more than just an affair to him, though; he’s in love with her, he says. Isabel is definitely only in this for the sex and drugs, to be clear. It’s not really surprising given that Isabel is a woman of the world and Tom is the type of guy who loses a ton of money in crypto and whose idea of pillow talk is whining about how no one takes him seriously. He isn’t wrong — literally no one takes him seriously — but he also isn’t going to do anything to change that. Tom’s self-awareness only goes so far and most of the time it seems like he just cannot help himself but be a complete asshat.
That version of Tom certainly attends the family meeting Greer calls to make sure everyone gets their story straight as to what happened and prepare them all for the press release her team is putting together in which, apparently, they’ve decided on their own to rule Merritt’s death a suicide. They conveniently forgot to invite Amelia to this family chat, but she walks in on it and doesn’t hesitate to question the Winburys’ actions here. It’s Tom who condescendingly explains to her that they need to “control the narrative” and this is just how they do things here — as if that dipshit has any say. Benji once again reveals how much he’s under Greer’s thumb when later he arrives at his grieving fiancée’s bedside and is basically like there, there, my mom needs you to sign this NDA real quick, thank you, bye. Greer is in control of everything going on in this house, is what I’m saying.
So why is ol’ GGdubs scrambling to get the story she wants out there? It all has to do with Tag, of course. Thanks to the flashback playing over and over again in Amelia’s head in which she and Merritt have a massive fight on the beach about Tag, we know for sure that Merritt and Tag were having an affair. So, Tag has a vested interest in everything going on — even if he didn’t do it, he must know he’d be top of the suspect list if the truth got out. It’s no wonder, then, that he pays a visit to Chief Carter and Detective Henry as they search Merritt’s bedroom. He tries to cozy up to them with coffee and casually floats a theory of accidental drowning to see if there’s any traction to it, but it doesn’t help his situation at all. Henry has zero time for this rich guy trying to impede her investigation — she refuses to be pushed around or charmed by him. Watching Tag try to get all buddy-buddy with Carter only to call his daughter Chloe by the wrong name is a delight — for both me and Henry.
When Detective Henry calls out Chief Carter for going too easy on the locals, he explains that he simply knows how to handle these people and he’s trying to stay in control of this case. He doesn’t want them bringing in hotshot lawyers to shut things down. “The minute [these people] feel like they’re losing control, they burn it all down.” He knows what he’s doing. It’s enough to convince Henry — it feels like the two cops are willing to become a team now. We find them at the bar later trying to piece together the events of the evening. Thanks to some intel from Abby, they are honing in on the fact that Merritt was one of the people in an after-party late-night crew; they need to figure out who else was in that group.
With Tag going rogue and doing it so poorly, it seems right that Greer would feel the need to lock this shit down. But is her frustration with her husband rooted in something deeper? What does Greer know at this point? It seems like she knows a lot since later, Tag seems to be mending fences by bringing out a tray with all the fixings for a gin and tonic, and afterward, she tells him to clean it up because, after all, she’s “been cleaning up after [him] all day.” The woman is a famous writer, so I shouldn’t be that surprised that she can fell a man with one sentence, but still. How cutting!
Honestly, Greer’s right to be worried about her husband flying off the handle or getting caught up in his emotions. Later that night, a definitely drunk Tag (he’s always drunk and/or high) calls Amelia into his office to talk about what a great girl she is and what a great girl Merritt was. He knows that Amelia knows the truth. When she sees this guy getting teary-eyed, she cannot stand there any longer and let Merritt’s death be swept under the probably insanely expensive Winbury rug. What does she do? She drives herself over to the police station to tell Henry and Carter what she knows.
And what she knows is that Merritt was pregnant with Tag’s baby. So whatever was going on between Merritt and Tag was intense and the last time Amelia saw Merritt, her best friend was running up the beach, sobbing.
The news of Merritt and Tag’s affair might shock Carter and Henry, but you know who won’t be surprised at all to hear about it? Greer. It turns out that Greer clocked that gold bracelet on Merritt’s wrist the moment Merritt got out of the cab the day she arrived. She’s known the whole time. And in the last few seconds of this episode, we watch Greer alone in her kitchen, sipping on some tea, remembering the way she screamed at her husband, “What the fuck, Tag?!” So, uh, yes, one might say Greer definitely has a motive.
Wedding Favors
• Abby is acting suspicious as hell: At the top of the episode, she vigorously washes a glass sitting in the sink and seems jumpy when Detective Henry approaches her in the kitchen. Later, Tom finds her packing up their things, claiming “Danielle at Sally Hershberger had a last-minute opening,” and she really needs some “me time.” I don’t doubt that Abby would find a way to make Merritt’s death about her or that she would think a hair appointment is more important than being with her family at this time, but there’s no way she didn’t know the police weren’t going to let them leave.
• Abby remains the absolute worst (by which I mean best, obviously). From repeatedly denigrating Tom’s college girlfriend to basically demanding their unborn child be a girl, and yes, for sure, gleefully ransacking Benji and Amelia’s wedding gifts with zero hesitation. Even the way she calls Merritt “such a cool girl” sounds scathing.
• Shooter Dival has shot up on the suspect list. (Although it’s so early in the season, I doubt it could be him.) Like Abby, he gets a little jumpy after seeing all the police around Summerland and so he grabs his passport and tries to take the ferry off Nantucket — Carter and Henry grab him before he can. They want to question him because his prints were found on her phone, but we saw him take that photo of Merritt and Will in episode one, so it could be nothing.
• Gosia doesn’t trust Shooter because “he makes his bed, like a poor person.”
• Another piece of evidence that washes up on shore: A man’s suit jacket. That, paired with the bruising on her wrists and the gash on her foot in addition to her drowning makes it look like Merritt wasn’t alone out there — this was more than likely a murder.
• Greer ignores another call from Broderick Graham — who is this guy?
• A perfect character moment: Greer rolling calls about the canceled wedding. Yeah, she looks really torn up about what’s going on as she apathetically reapplies her lip gloss and gets annoyed that she has to field a call from Oprah Winfrey.
• “Frankly, I’d rather be spending the weekend with my kids, which is saying a lot because we have passes to Water Wizz, which, as it turns out, is a very accurate name.” Donna Lynne Champlin is so good in this role.