Adele shoots heroin (between her toes, probably so David can’t spot the track marks). Passing through the second door in your dreams means your spirit can pass out of your body and back into the real, conscious world and then it can fly around and go sightseeing or spy on people. When this happens, your spirit or soul or whatever it is takes the form of a candy-colored wisp of light, like Tinkerbell or the visual effects at an Ice Capades show. Louise just learned to go “traveling” like this and therefore just realized that Adele has been able to do it all along. (Adele also taught Rob how to do it.) According to what Adele told Rob, your spirit can visit only places you’ve actually been to before while you were conscious and awake and in your body, so she wouldn’t have seen David and Louise’s meet-clumsy at the bar, but she did see them discussing that encounter the second time they met, at the office, which she and David had visited in person the day before David’s first day of work. Adele has also spied on David and Louise hanging out and fucking and fighting a lot over these past few weeks (basically, every time we previously saw a David-and-Louise scene that included an overhead shot). Adele thinks David killed Rob, and David at least knows Rob is down there in the well because he peered into it at one point in the past with Rob at the bottom of it. (Although I don’t know, I guess it’s possible that you can see all the way down to the bottom of the well.)
There. I just wanted to start by tabulating all the things we more or less know for sure with one more episode to go. Because isn’t that why we’re still watching? Aren’t we pretty much just hanging on for the big reveal at this point? Thank you for this episode’s bread crumbs; please, may I have some more? Then how ’bout we wrap this thing up? Or here, I can lay it out for you in a poker metaphor: I’ve paid to see the flop and the turn, so sure, why not, let’s see this thing through to the river.
Look, I wanted to be highly invested in this show. I wanted to feel like Louise says she feels, even though I don’t even feel that Louise really feels that way. Like, if Louise were truly, helplessly obsessed with this whole thing, don’t you think she would have already Googled the fire that killed Adele’s superrich parents? Or have read Rob’s notebook cover-to-cover long ago? Why is she just paging through it in dribs and drabs as if it’s as put-downable as … this series?
“Adele’s got no one else, not properly, and I know how that feels,” Louise tells her friend Sophie as the reason she can’t just walk away. Yet I find myself tsk-tsking Louise in my head because she should know better. It’s like yelling at the screen when characters in horror movies make ill-advised, foolish decisions. She breaks into her old office to steal David’s file on Adele, then brings it to Adele at the house she shares with David!
When Adam comes back from his month away, I was surprised to see Louise engage with her ex Ian in an emotionally honest and productive way. I think she even surprised herself. She tells him she’s happy for him and his pregnant s.o., and I believe her; she also appears to be genuinely happy with herself. The next day, she and Adam enjoy an extended mum-and-son outing in the park, and she looks elated; she looks like she doesn’t have a care in the world. Go live that life, Louise. Go live in those healthy places. You haven’t even known David and Adele for two months!
I do feel bad for Louise, and I can buy that she felt lonely at the start of this whole thing. And I do get it when she wonders why she can’t be the one who fucks up for once. I do know what that feels like. But the depths of the shit she has gotten herself into, when she really always had a viable choice to walk away, are hard to sympathize with. I don’t want to see Louise at the bottom of the well next to Rob, although I feel like she’ll be heading in that direction if she’s not careful. And then, surprisingly, I find myself caring the most about Rob. He really strikes me as the most sympathetic character; he’s just a dude whose life has been total garbage, and he finally found a bright spot in Adele and it led to his demise.
I keep thinking of the other suspense thriller I’ve been watching on Netflix: Lupin. Its structure is different, to be sure. It signals from pretty early on that its protagonist (whose name is Assane, not Lupin) is on a morally righteous quest, even as we know that (most of) the cops on his tail are doing their own version of “the right thing” by chasing down the criminal. There lies the rub: How will Assane succeed without winding up behind bars? I don’t know yet, but I do know I feel good about rooting for him. When it comes to Behind Her Eyes, I can’t say I’m rooting for anyone. I’m just curious to see how it all plays out, which is a very different thing.
At the end of the episode, Louise mails a letter to a detective outlining her suspicions about David. Then she finally figures out what it means to go traveling outside your body and realizes Adele has been scheming and spying all along — all the way back to their meet-clumsy on the street in the first episode. “Oh, you lying bitch,” Louise says, seething, and boy, did I laugh! It was such a soap-opera moment, but it was appropriate because that’s where this series is at. In my first recap, I mentioned that “sudsy” is a quality I enjoy in the maybe-crazy-definitely-unreliable-femme-fatale genre. Be careful what you wish for!
