I think it’s really healthy for couples to have separate interests, which is why it’s so lovely to see that Dean has an independent thing going where he spends all his time having clandestine mystery-solving meetings with Theodora and her crazy suspect board, and Nora devotes her energy to the country-club scene where her only friend is her Realtor.
In gobsmacking news, Theodora reports that Andrew is a batshit-crazy pathological liar. “I guess I should have vetted him better before I made the introduction,†just incredible work here. Again I ask: Has Dean considered putting this woman’s name in a search engine? Has he looked up anyone he has come in contact with since moving to Westfield?
Theodora has ruled out M&M and their son, Christopher, and is turning her attention to Jasper Winslow. Jasper allegedly lived in uneventful near-solitude until one day in 1995, when he stopped speaking and appeared to have schizophrenia and eventually was diagnosed with PTSD. Now we’re chasing our tails trying to find out what happened to Jasper, because there’s not really a whole lot of plot just hanging out with the Brannocks and waiting for the mail to come in.
The tangential mystery I actually care about is: Who is Karen getting that “good, consistent dick†from?? Do we think it’s Darren? I feel like it would be more interesting if it were the detective. Karen deduces that Nora is tense because she isn’t getting laid. Personally, I think maybe she is tense because her house is being stalked by an anonymous creeper who broke in and murdered Sprinkles the ferret. #JusticeForSprinkles. Karen solemnly tells Nora that if she and her husband don’t have sex every day “there is no hope for you guys†and suggests he’s having an affair with a younger woman at work; Nora responds to this by ordering some daytime wine.
And here things get intriguing: Nora doesn’t like the way that Dean fixates on their daughter’s sexuality. Has she considered … talking to him about this? I always think it’s funny in shows like this where we’re supposed to believe the protagonists are making all these sacrifices just for the good of their children (e.g., spending too much money while living in a haunted house), but then we basically never see them interact with those kids beyond the bare-minimum logistics (“Honey, get in the car, you’ll be late for schoolâ€) or to berate them for some unforgivable act of teendom (“Stop textingâ€).
I also ask: Why is it taking so long to install security cameras? Am I insane or can you not just do that in an afternoon? Nora brushes off the Watcher letters as a prank, and Karen rejects this: “You’re living a FUCKING NIGHTMARE in there. You need to do some minor construction and get the fuck out.†Karen wisely points out that the house won’t sell for a dollar once people find out about the letters. And she’s found an alternative home! But Nora didn’t get those butcher-block countertops to move into some slightly not-as-nice house, even if it’s the sort of dwelling that would not leave her and her husband in financial ruin but could still keep their kids in the same school district. (Karen, voice of reason: “I would think that, like, not being terrorized by an ax murderer, that’s really nice.â€) Nora says she’ll talk to Dean about it, but we do not see them have this conversation, so, probably not on the table.
Back home, Carter is playing soccer in the backyard in khakis, as young boys love to do. Every young man I’ve ever met enjoys doing fitness in khakis. Dean is mad that Ellie’s door is locked. (What is with this show and locked doors?! Let people have privacy!) And Ellie’s like, there’s construction workers everywhere and a whack job trying to kill us. She is, of course, 1,000 percent hooking up with the alarm teen in there. As the rules of TV-teen hook-uppery require, he hides in the closet and escapes through the window.
Yet again we are reminded that Dean is the dumbest dumb-dumb who ever dumbed, because when he sees a total fucking stranger making a sandwich in his kitchen who identifies himself, vaguely, as “John the building inspector,†he does not so much as ask any of the construction workers who are right there in the basement if they let John in, nor does he ask John for any identification whatsoever. Wouldn’t he have a clipboard or something? It takes Dean a VERY long time to figure this out, but we all know from the get that “John†is not a “building inspector†and is only here to say ominous, bizarro stuff while holding a knife.
John wants to know if the Brannocks are a “Christian family.†He reports that his daughter wore too many low-cut tops — he later calls her “the school whore,†neato — so he couldn’t help but notice that Ellie Brannock was speaking with “that young African American man putting in the cameras†in a way that made it clear they were “intimate.†Oh, also he has a lot to say about how “all of civilization is just burning down†(classic building inspector conversation, no red flags here) and how they’re in the Fourth Turning, and every four turnings is a saeculum, which in America will end in a war, and now that he’s delivered this extremely normal information and done exactly zero building inspecting, he is no longer hungry.
As John leaves, Dean has one more question, and I’m like, okay, finally he’s gonna ask for a business card or SOMEthing, but no instead he just asks for parenting advice from this super-reliable source. John says more stuff about how people used to not lock their doors. ENOUGH with the door locking! Oh, also he wants people to go to church more. Thanks for weighing in, John. Obviously, when this chat ends, Dean goes downstairs to yell at the contractor about it, and the construction dude tells him none of the building inspectors in town are named John and anyway they wouldn’t come to scope out a project until it was completed. In my notes, I write, No wonder Randy made partner over you, Dean!!!
Nora puts on her sexiest outfit — enormous cardigan the color of wet sand, khakis — to seduce her husband. Unfortunately, he cannot concentrate on having sex with his beige wife until he turns on the alarm. Yet ANOTHER dog barks distantly, and I swear that dog better be the Watcher. As his wife and children depart for the motel, Dean clumsily accuses his daughter of doing “something†with the alarm teen, which presents Ellie with the opportunity to say “so you’re having me WATCHED now.†The series cannot be complete until everyone says at least one line about ~watching~ someone else.
Theodora calls Dean at work and he slips out of a meeting for an EXTREMELY lengthy confab with her. I guess he has given up on getting a promotion. What follows is a looooong digression about John, who we already know is the man who pretended to be the building inspector because television is a visual medium and John is played by the same actor, with the same styling … like, we know it’s the same guy, I’m not sure what dramatic tension is created here by waiting 20 minutes for Dean to figure this out. But then at the end, as Dean puts it together, we are treated to flashbacks from earlier in the episode, just in case we missed it. This episode could’ve been 40 minutes long, is what I’m trying to say.
So Theodora has intel that would “run afoul of the Westfield Police Department and the whole town.†Scandalous! She asked Detective Chamberland for all the files on the house, and he was all, “I was waiting for you to ask me that.†I mean … duh? Why wasn’t he also looking in the file box? That would be the first place I would look?? Everyone here is an idiot (unless he’s the Watcher, covering his tracks).
Here’s the sad, bloody tale: John was living in New York City, which in the world of the show is a den of violence and cruelty that can only be escaped via NJ Transit. John gets mugged and assaulted on the way home from work one night, prompting his mom, who just inherited a bunch of money, to help him buy — you guessed it — a house in the suburbs.
This whole set piece reminds me of the Chilling Adventures of Sabrina, which was clearly intended to be a period piece set in the 1960s until they wanted to do Riverdale crossovers, so it’s just the most distractingly out-of-place show you’ve ever seen in your life. All these scenes with John and his family have a real 1950s feel to them, right down to the fateful Halloween party that is scored by a record player, even though we are to believe that scene took place in 1995, and an actual human teenager in that cultural moment would’ve used a boom box.
Anyway, John’s wife drinks Tami Taylor–size goblets of wine and berates her husband a lot (she’s honestly kind of funny). His son is a golden child (sports boy) and his daughter (“the school whoreâ€) is pretty. His work life ain’t great: John gets fired and cries in a corner about it, but then just pretends he still has a job and starts quietly siphoning money from his mom’s account. Then the letters start coming, and they’re exactly the same as Dean’s: slut-shaming the women, asking after the children, demanding young blood, shaming greed, blah, blah, blah. When he gets home, he finds his daughter throwing a Halloween party and yanks the Frankenstein’s Monster mask off her dance partner to find out it’s her teacher (!).
At this point Dean wants to know if the house is haunted. Theodora responds with a non-answer about how John’s life was a facade and only the Watcher knew the truth. Whose side are you on, Theodora?
After reminding his family during a totally chill dinner that they will ALL DIE, so they better repent now so he can see them in heaven, John cuts himself out of all his family photos (okay, Lila!!!) and then murders each member of his family, one by one. The dialogue that accompanies these scenes just destroys me because HOW would Theodora know any of this?? Like literally no survivors and John went missing, so I’m pretty sure the police blotter doesn’t include “his wife was telling him about how she couldn’t wait to have an affair.†His “whore†daughter’s lipstick is the one that Ellie found in the house, just in case you were like wait, are these two girls connected in some way?!Â
At the end of the killing spree, John puts Wagner’s “Götterdämmerung†on the intercom. It’s the last of the cycle — does this ring a bell or WHAT — and the bodies lay in the house for weeks before Jasper (remember when everyone left their doors unlocked so neighbors could stumble upon the bloodless dead bodies of their neighbors?) stumbles upon them.
What is irritating to me about this sequence is we are told that Jasper was friends with John’s son. So why is Jasper a fully grown adult in the flashback? And if Jasper is supposed to be an adult (since we’d been told he was working at the grocery store for years on end without incident until 1995), why would he have been friends with the son? Luckily or unluckily for Ryan Murphy, I cannot stay focused on this continuity error because I am distracted by those Halloween-ass-looking corpses. Just to top off this absurd detour, we learn that the bodies were drained of blood and that, in the basement, there were empty milk jugs that had been filled with blood at some point, but were now empty. John’s body was never found. Dun dun DUNNNN.
Oh, also later the pervy teacher was found shot dead in his car. Different gun, though. Could’ve been somebody else. I’m not sure your pervy teachers are typically monogamous creatures, you know? Somebody else’s dad might have had a motive. Also ALSO: Even though John was MIA, somebody — presumably the Watcher? — was getting his family’s mail and the newspaper and all that.
I’m not sure why we need lingering shots of the Watcher letters and the crime-scene photos as Dean evaluates them, because we just saw them all in the flashback. As he puts two and two together, Theodora explains that the cops covered this up, but we can’t blame our friendly neighborhood slacker because he didn’t join the force until after this all went down. NOBODY wants this to get out, she says, or people might discover that Westfield, New Jersey, is not the sweetest, safest town in the whole USA.
Dean goes over to Pearl and Jasper’s house, hoping to ask Jasper about John, but Pearl sends him away with a warning that the Preservation Society is just HOPPING mad about the dumbwaiter (drink!) and also PSA, they’re allowed to come into his house whenever they want just to, like, check on it, I guess?
Nora is at peace in her lovely kitchen and her ecru sleepwear as Dean is keeping his inner chaos a secret. But then she goes to get the mail — and leaves her front door WIDE OPEN, good Lord — and what do you know, there’s another letter from the Watcher. Just in case you were like, What is the Watcher up to?? Been a while, buddy! Maybe your interests have changed?, the note assures us: “I’m still watching.â€