When I started watching Under the Bridge, I never imagined that I’d be shipping two of the characters, but here we are. It feels a bit weird that there’s a rekindled romance at the heart of this true-life murder story, but it’s also kind of a relief from the doom and gloom of the rest of the narrative. Also, Riley Keough and Lily Gladstone have fantastic chemistry. The way that they often wordlessly communicate through eyebrow raises, shrugs, and face journeys is enough to hope that these two crazy kids might just make it by the end of the series … or, if not, that the two women might get cast together in something more lighthearted down the road.
This is a big piece-moving episode, and the development of Cam and Rebecca’s relationship is an important one. We find out in no uncertain terms that they were in an intense relationship when Rebecca’s brother, Gabe, died. In the wake of his passing, Rebecca wasn’t doing very well, and instead of letting Cam take care of her, she ghosted her, peacing out of the country entirely. Cam is still hurt, but she’s also happy to see her former lover. When Rebecca seeks out Cam to tell her that Josephine confessed to the murder, Cam shakes her head. She drove that route in her cop car the other day, and given the time when Reena was last seen (11:47 p.m.) and the time that Josephine returned to Seven Oaks (before the midnight curfew), there’s no possible way for Josephine to have interacted with Reena and gotten back to the group home in time. So much for Josephine impressing Gotti.
In this conversation, we also get a little more information about Gabe’s death. Whatever happened seems to echo what happened with Reena, enough that Rebecca confesses that she’s really struggling with the situation. Cam shoots back, “Why would I think about how this affects you?!†But then, oh, her face. And Keough’s face. The layers of expression and emotion here are like a delicious acting lasagna. If they gave out Emmys for face journeys, this scene would win, hands down.
Eventually, the two go out for a drink, dance, almost kiss, and then when Cam becomes aware that they’re in public in the boondocks in 1997, they move their dalliance to the bathroom. They hook up, but abruptly stop for a second until Rebecca says, “It’s okay to feel that.†Did anyone else get the impression that Rebecca might have some sort of a scar, possibly even a scar related to Gabe’s death, that gave Cam pause?
While we’re talking about relationships, let’s check in on Warren and Samara. Warren has had two very sweet interactions with Rebecca now, most recently running into her at the diner where she offers to buy him a meal and suggests that he order spaghetti and meatballs. Dinner for breakfast, just like her brother loved. We don’t find out what Warren ordered — since he’s a polite kid, I’m guessing that he got the spaghetti dinner — but we do see that he’s having a hard time. When Rebecca sees him at the diner, he’s literally begging for scraps, and we also see him very excited to do laundry at his girlfriend Samara’s house. Warren and Samara seem to be deep in puppy love, but when she goes to wash his pants and finds blood spatters on them, she has questions. Samara confronts Warren, saying she heard from a girlfriend of hers that he was involved in the fight with Reena. Uh-oh.
In a very high-school-boy effort to explain what happened, Warren puts on a song with the lyrics “187†in it. Street slang for murder is 187, and, honestly, we already know that Reena was murdered — we find out more about her brutal beating during her autopsy later in the episode — but is Warren trying to tell Samara that he had something to do with it? And if so, why?
We also check in with Josephine and her minions in Reena-centered flashbacks as well as the post-murder timeline. In the flashbacks, it feels like Dusty and Reena are really starting to become friends. They hang out and banter over whether they’d prefer Will Smith or Leonardo DiCaprio to be their dad. (Neither one of these hotties was old enough to be a father of a 14-year-old girl in 1997, but go off, queens.) They also hang out with Josephine and Kelly and watch as Warren is indoctrinated into the local teen gang by surviving a beating. It’s a haunting echo of what happens to Reena, with her as a reluctant witness to it all. Josephine is unfazed by the beating; she just thinks it’s unfair that the girls can’t join the gang, too. So she creates her own gang, and she and Kelly swear a blood oath, cutting their palms and mixing open wounds in an era where AIDS panic was a very real thing. Throughout this episode, Kelly is proving herself to be more and more of a borderline psychopath, and it occurs to me that we haven’t heard much from her, but we’ve seen her an awful lot.
Later, when Reena asks them if they’d like to come to her house for dinner, Dusty seems genuinely excited. Josephine, on the other hand, sneers and snarks when presented with the idea. She gives Kelly a pointed look and then agrees to go to the party; we just know that she’s planning to steal shit. Josephine is truly the worst.
Or maybe Kelly is the worst? Because later in the episode, we see that she’s been keeping Reena’s mud-caked Steve Madden boots in her closet. When Josephine sees this, she nearly has a heart attack, leading us to believe that she was truly not complicit in anything that happened to Reena after she walked away from the bridge that night. But it’s starting to feel like Kelly might have actually done something terrible. Also, maybe Kelly is a complete idiot? Because why would she keep a souvenir stolen from the body of a dead girl?
The Steve Madden boots are a coveted object in the teen-girl circle, and Reena’s cool uncle, Raj, gifted them to her for her birthday. As Reena’s parents, Suman and Manjit, mourn away from prying eyes, Raj goes to a memorial for his niece. He’s angry, though, screaming about how any one of the kids in attendance might have killed her. Honestly? He’s probably right. He runs into Rebecca and she gives him her card. Later, Cam gets some information on Manjit from her absolute dickhole of a father and asks Rebecca to run it by Raj. She does, but we don’t get to see the conclusion of this particular interaction. The reveal on Manjit’s secret past will have to wait until next week. (Or you can just Google it now.)
As everyone in Victoria is abuzz with speculation and trepidation, Reena’s body is recovered. We hear Rebecca dictate a passage about the divers having “carefully floated†her corpse out of the river, a hauntingly poetic passage that is lifted directly from Godfrey’s book. Director Catherine Hardwicke treats the body with respect, carefully floating the reveal of the mangled corpse, but she also doesn’t shy away from giving us glimpses of the horror that was wrought upon Reena before her death. We see the body being examined by a coroner who says that her injuries were consistent with a car crash. Given that Reena initially walked away from the beating, this might suggest that she was assaulted again at some point before her death. A bit later, when Suman goes to the morgue to identify the body, the camera lingers on the blue paint on Reena’s fingernails and the horrifying cigarette burn in the center of her forehead.
The scene with Suman is absolutely heartrending. Archie Panjabi is able to convey so much with just a few glances at the body. Hardwicke stays with her for most of this segment, giving time for Suman’s incapacitating grief and staggering guilt to radiate outward and pierce our collective hearts. Thus far, Suman has not been a very sympathetic character — from what we’ve seen, she pushed back against her daughter’s maturation process so much that it alienated her entirely — but here we see the regret and helplessness. Past a certain age, parents cannot protect their children from the horrors of everyday life, and while Suman surely knows this, she also feels as if she’s failed. The emotion of the scene is heightened given the fact that Suman cannot touch her dead daughter’s body because it is now considered “evidence.†Panjabi instinctively moves to touch her child multiple times, only to suddenly draw her hand back, remembering that the killer is still at large.
Random Thoughts
• As mentioned above, this episode was directed by Catherine Hardwicke, of Twilight and Thirteen fame. Hardwicke is great at capturing teens in their natural habitats, and she demonstrates that ability here as she follows these kids into increasingly precarious situations as the walls close in and suspects are identified.
• Speaking of suspects, I cannot emphasize how stupid they’re making Kelly Ellard out to be. Who keeps a pair of shoes from a dead girl?
• Book Club Corner: I feel the desperate need to note that, in real life, both Josephine and Kelly took Reena’s shoes and threw them in a dumpster the day after the murder. So they were obviously more complicit than the show lets on. In addition, Warren did not bleach the blood stains out of his own pants; his girlfriend Syreeta (named Samara in the show) did that for him instead. I feel like these are important distinctions, and I’m interested to see how the changes play out for the characters in the show.