Nora is combing through the phone records, presumably because she thinks one of them will say “Pigtail Ghost Girl,†but instead she discovers the call. You know, the heavy breathing call Nora answered that night at the motel back in episode two. In a panic, Nora rings up Theodora and meets her … at the diner? What, why? If Dean is at work and Nora is at home, shouldn’t Theodora just come over? Wasn’t she there to look over the suspect board?
Theodora is already describing the girl in the video as being 17 even though we have no idea who she is, we really only saw the back of her head, and she’s probably a poltergeist whose age is unknown. Nora has fixated on the fact that Karen mentioned “a girl in pigtails†being the likely type with whom Dean would cheat, but she lets that go to stay focused on her REAL hunch: her husband is the Watcher. Just in case you weren’t following the first eight minutes of this episode, Nora helpfully recaps them for you. (Maybe I just find this extra-offensive because I am here to recap and I don’t like feeling redundant, but this also bothers you, no? How dumb does the show think you are?) We even get a flashback to the call, just in case anybody missed it.
Nora’s theory is that Dean freaked out because they couldn’t afford the house, so he tried to terrorize her into selling. What a marriage these crazy kids have! I love that, at this juncture, Nora still doesn’t realize that Dean must be lying to her about other stuff and it takes Theodora spelling it out for her to realize that Dean never made partner and never will. Theodora also spends a lot of time talking about handwriting analysis — and what do you know, Dean has a distinctive letter k that matches the one from the Watcher envelopes. (It is very funny to me that he wrote one valentine to his wife in all-caps, just, like, SHOUTING his love at her. It’s also very Mike Pence-y that he refers to her as “Mrs. Brannock.â€)
Theodora also talked to Steve, the guy from the bank, who reported that Dean cashed out every investment he and Nora had in order to secure the loan for the house, leaving his wife with exactly $10,000 in a checking account and her AmEx. He basically swindled her into signing away her IRA and THEN because he could NOT do special pasta night with that Carrara marble he found some “shady people†to give him a high-interest $150,000 loan for the renovations. Really A+ choices all around. Whether or not Dean is the Watcher, each of these lies plus the whole wrecking-ball of her entire savings is a divorce-able offense, don’t you agree? Just one of these treacheries would be enough. This is what I like to call a dayenu situation.
Back in the neighborhood, Karen — impeccable pink outfit, fur collar and cuffs on the coat are so right for her — invites herself over to M&M’s for a little chat about real estate. She’s just popping by to let M&M know that their house is now a “stigmatized property,†(you know, because of the murders), and she, Karen, would be delighted to help them sell the house — to HER. Because … she and Darren do this all the time (!) with their LLC (!!).
We get a little pointless detour where Dean goes to threaten Andrew, who insists that everything he said was true and just because he was in one advertisement for one weird drug doesn’t mean he’s a liar, and meanwhile Dean is a psychopath.
Nora goes to the gallery where her work is on display and I started laughing as soon as she walked in because of COURSE everything she makes is also beige and gray. Her vases are as boring as she is. The woman who owns the gallery is also in beige. Did Big Beige fund this show? Nora is relieved because almost every piece of cardboard-colored ceramics has sold, and while we are not told what the rates are for her pottery we are to believe she can … support her entire family indefinitely? Sure, I don’t know how art money works.
When Nora gets home, she wraps herself in a white scarf and rushes outside to the sound of a dog. Barking. DISTANTLY. I swear to GOD there better be some payoff for this fuckin’ dog we hear every episode and have yet to see!!
Nora then runs into Pearl, who is just being spooky in the yard, as is her standard practice. We are treated to just an absolutely delicious bit from Mia Farrow, whose delivery of “Turns out they weren’t murdered in the face with a shotgun. I don’t know whose funeral I went to!†nearly killed me. The way she responds to Nora’s claim that her husband heard gunshots in the night — “I don’t know that we can necessarily trust your husband at this point, really,†with a helpless little hands-up gesture: just sensational. Pearl is hosting a “good old fashioned Yankee potluck†which sounds like some sort of ritual sacrifice situation (baby bloodletting?) for which she tells Nora to bring a Nixon chicken casserole, reciting the recipe on the spot.
We never see Nora make the casserole and nobody eats anything at this potluck. But we do learn what really (supposedly) happened to M&M: Their troubled son started using drugs, became paranoid, found two elderly people at a homeless shelter who resembled his parents, waited until his actual parents went to their Floridian timeshare, brought the decoy parents back to his house, and killed them for the insurance money. Mo starts sobbing, admitting she thought her son could be the Watcher; Pearl jumps in to say that she thought it was Jasper. Wow, women supporting women! Pearl also got an unsigned letter in the mail a while back, a little poem titled “Ode to a House,†suspiciously around the time she’d considered, blasphemously, painting the house her parents had left unaltered since the 1940s.
Nothing really creepy happens at the Yankee Doodle potluck except some weird thudding sounds from upstairs, which Mo suggests could be a “gentleman caller†for Pearly’s needs. Umm I love it here!! I would join this witchy book club in a heartbeat.
At home, Ellie approaches her mom mostly to say vaguely ominous shit — “When somebody makes me mad, there’s nothing I won’t say to hurt them. Nothing I won’t do.†— so she can now join our suspect list. Somehow Ellie already knows that Nora thinks Dean is the Watcher, which is a conversation I would’ve liked to see on screen! (Also, I just can’t get over what shitty parents they are … IMAGINE just sort of suspecting this about your husband and then … telling your teenage daughter?! With no proof and no plan, just like “hey honey wanted to keep you in the loop, your dad might be a sociopath because he didn’t make partner.â€)
In the city, Dakota the alarm teen stages a run-in with Dean because, famously, there is only one diner in all of New York and everybody goes there to talk about unsolved crimes. Dakota reports that he’s gone through all the camera footage from outside the Brannocks’ house and little miss pigtail is nowhere to be found. She just APPEARS inside the house. (How creepy do you think this show wants to be? Like … is it Ellie?!!!!)
When Nora, Ellie and Carter get home from … somewhere (school?), Dakota and Dean are waiting on the front steps. I burst out laughing at Carter’s clueless “hey Dad!†Is he even in this show? Does he exist in a parallel universe where none of this is happening? Is that why we’ve never seen him wearing a soccer jersey, returning from a game with other teammates, but instead only in khakis in the yard, playing a team sport all by himself?
Dakota explains the whole situation again, even though we the audience heard this explanation approximately three minutes ago. Ellie is trying to eavesdrop from the steps but for some reason her parents won’t let her stick around for this, even though Nora would let her daughter know that Dean was suspect number one. I’ve always said that great parenting is about inconsistency. Keep your kids on their toes! Anyway we are back to the “how did she get in the house?†question, and the likely answer is that those tunnels Andrew told Dean about are, in fact, real.
The alarm teen is excused so that Nora can grill her husband, by which I mean she can ask him one very easy question (did he fuck the pigtail poltergeist) and one tough question (did he write the letters). He immediately folds on the letter front: “Just the last one, I’m sorry.†The AUDACITY to use the word “just†as if writing only one extremely threatening letter on top of the string of terrifying mail your family has already received is some de minimis offense and not just a batshit crazy thing to do to your wife and kids (and Sprinkles, RIP). He panicked, okay?!??? It’s really hard to know what to do when you want to put butcher block countertops in and everything is so expensive and you haven’t really done your job in months! He BEGS her not to divorce him and I’m like Nora I swear if you don’t divorce this guy you deserve each other and she’s like, well let’s put that conversation on ice and see about those DNA results.
Detective Chamberland is nonchalant as ever; he’s had the results for a week but lost them in a stack of catalogs. (Again I say: the Westfield Police Department is going to love this flattering depiction of their officers.) There’s no match to anybody in the database but there’s no Y chromosome either, so the Watcher must be a woman. Over big glasses of red wine, Dean and Nora consult their suspect board again which DOES NOT EVEN HAVE KAREN ON IT. How are they not considering one of the only people who would obviously directly profit from them selling this house? They are so clueless, good lord. Dean is still obsessed with John Graff. Honestly watching these two ding-dongs talk themselves in circles skipping over everything that is obvious to us is quite dull. We return again to the idea of Occam’s razor, which Theodora already brought up a while back but matters more now for some reason (it’s the title of the episode). This is when Nora FINALLY realizes that Karen is an obvious Watcher frontrunner.
The next day (I think?), Karen calls Nora to say that there’s an offer for the house: all-cash, $1.9 million, from an LLC. Well well well. Nora isn’t about it since she and Dean paid $3.3 million for the property. For some reason Nora does not immediately report this to Dean but goes to the country club on her own to see about unsuspending her membership. Instead she finds Karen having a very cozy lunch with Detective Chamberland. Did I not say he was possibly the man from whom she was getting that “good, consistent dick†she was so happy about earlier in the series?
Nora calls Dean, who rushes over in an Uber, I guess so he can complain about wanting a second car. Buddy, learn to live within your means! What follows is such an ill-advised and barely-plotted confrontation that I have to assume the Brannocks are such idiots because the real-life family from the Watcher house implored Ryan Murphy to make the family in the show resemble them as little as possible. Perhaps Nora and Dean are profoundly stupid as a gift to the real couple, to create a clear distinction between them. Even though we know Nora and Dean are connecting some good dots, they sound insane and can’t prove anything. Much like with the alarm teen, it would have been savvier to keep this hunch to themselves and get closer to Karen to see what they could find; instead they have blown up their access to her, further alienated the detective, and probably put the kibosh on Nora ever getting that country club membership back.
That evening, Ellie is here with a contribution. Unlike her parents, she knows how to use the internet. She looked up “Ode to a House,†which took her to a Facebook group of a bunch of people who went to Westfield High and had the same English teacher, Roger Kaplan, who had his students write a love letter to a house. If Roger looks familiar to you that’s because he was at the open house in the series premiere. And down in the basement, if you’re feeling a cold breeze, that’s because the construction guys just found the tunnels.
As usual, Dean and Nora just barge in without any strategy or even hard hats. The tunnel seems to go on forever and finally they see SOMEONE coming at them. But once they yell, this mystery visitor vanishes into the dark, and the episode ends.