Do you feel like our show is barreling toward a juicy conclusion? I worry that we’ve got two parallel tracks that will never connect in a meaningful way. One that is about suburban intrigue, wealth, and envy, where the likely culprit is something pedestrian (Karen and Darren realty, Detective Chamberlain, Roger Kaplan, Dakota). The other indicates that there is something more supernatural afoot (baby sacrifices, blood cults) which points towards our weirder and maybe imaginary suspects (Pearl and Jasper, Andrew from the drug commercial, Theodora). And unless the end game is to show us that Dean has been losing his mind this entire time and that fully half the show is something he hallucinated — like, what if HE is the one who has been sleeping in the basement tunnels?! — I’m not super optimistic that a satisfying end is in sight here.
As is their standard practice, Dean and Nora just chase the intruder through the tunnels with absolutely no plan (even as Nora is shouting that the person they are chasing could have a gun) and they run into a scene straight out of Parasite: Somebody has been LIVING in the tunnels! Then we see John Graff (or whoever he is) buzz up through an underground tunnel and arrive at Pearl’s place to tell her: “They’re onto us.”
Once more with Dean and Nora really handling things like morons: They barge into Detective Chamberlain’s office approximately 24 hours after accusing him of being the Watcher to describe what they just saw (tunnels, evidence of a tunnel squatter) and their pitch to get the detective back on their side is “help us so we can cross you off our list of prime suspects.” Literally why would the detective give a single solitary fuck about Dean and Nora’s personal list of suspects? With what authority could they do anything about suspecting anybody that they haven’t already done (scream their heads off in a country club of which they are no longer members in good standing)? Unsurprisingly to everyone but the Brannocks, the detective’s plan of action is to “ignore the shit out of you two.” He reminds Dean that filing a false police report — which, since Dean wrote one of the Watcher letters, he has done several times over — is a felony.
If Theodora and Chamberlain are such good buddies, why didn’t the Brannocks send her to talk to him? Because they are absolute idiots who deserve to get Watched out of their dream house, that’s why. And again because we have not seen it I doubt that Dean so much as Googled Theodora Birch (such a real-sounding name) and the way they’re just doing a trust fall off the table straight into her outstretched arms tells me she is lying about everything. Her latest conviction is that the Watcher is definitely Roger, the English teacher of “Ode to a House” fame. (Never mind that whole thing where the DNA on the envelopes was from a woman?)
Are you excited to hear Roger’s whole life story? I sure hope so! Roger was just your classic young boy who was hyper-fluent in architecture terms and walked around the neighborhood asking normal questions like any seven-year-old would, like, “Is that a widow’s walk?” and “These coffered walls are just delicious!” Roger grew up poor before marrying Trish, then spent his weekends stalking his favorite houses and gazing at them and yearning for them and wondering why the laws say he had to marry some mere human like Trish when he would be so much happier to be bound forever to something sacred and holy like a 1920s Victorian with gingerbread trim. He tried to buy his dream house but didn’t have the money and wrote one of those valentines realtors tell you to write, which is just a waste of time because obviously they’re gonna sell to the highest bidder. He got his heart shattered, started his “Ode to a House” lesson, became the unlikely sensation of the Westfield High School English department, and left his wife for his student, Miko. Roger then started sending letters addressed to the house where a friend of his used to live that was later occupied by the friend’s sister, Carol, which started off sweet-ish but took a DARK turn.
Nora and Dean pay a visit to Carol. Here we see that Dean is further along on his journey toward becoming the villain he hated, what with his fixation on the details of Carol’s interiors. Carol, naturally, thinks Roger wanted to scare her out of the house so he could buy it, and she responded to this threat as any reasonable person would: By standing on her front lawn in the middle of the night with a kitchen knife in her hand, screaming at the dark that she would “SLICE YOUR TINY BALLS.” After that, no more letters. Has Nora considered this approach? No, but no matter: Nora thinks the Watcher’s letters are different from Roger’s.
Dean wants to do yet another brainless impulsive thing and drive over to Roger’s house but the women talk him down. Dressed in head-to-toe cream, Nora gets back to plotting. Dean is in on it with her so they kiss again like they mean it because as everyone who watched Chuck and Blair’s relationship blossom knows, scheming brings people together. They stake out Roger’s place that night. It is genuinely hilarious of Nora to be like, what is he so pissed about? Their house is FINE when she dismissed the barely smaller house Karen showed her a few episodes ago and felt the need to do massive renovations on her $3.3 million house that she couldn’t afford.
Nora and Dean follow Roger and Miko to the grocery store to trap them in an aisle because, I cannot stress this enough, they are so deeply stupid. (Have we ruled out head trauma at some point prior to the start of the series? They’re not the first characters I’ve said this about … for some reason it comes up a lot in my recaps.) They learned exactly nothing from their recent, pathetic experiences re: in-person confrontation in public arenas. Get a LAWYER you hapless yuppies! Stop doing slander and harassment or you will end up in JAIL and Ellie will have no one to tell her to keep her bra straps under her sweater while she’s busy raising Carter, your cardboard-cutout son, out of the back of the alarm teen’s security van!! We get the Dean and Nora special — accusations with no proof, threats with no power for follow-through — and Roger and Miko leave them standing in aisle three.
The next day Roger plants himself in the street staring at the Brannocks’ house. Nora is wearing THREE layers of beige … the crisis is getting worse. “You’ve made a very powerful enemy,” says the retired English teacher with a hard-on for historic houses and nothing better to do. “I am your worst nightmare come true.” He calls them “rich sacks of shit.” I mean, are they rich? They’re not exactly liquid right now! It would be funnier if he knew that detail so he could say they weren’t even rich sacks of shit, they were just regular sacks of shit, drowning in debt even Joe Biden can’t forgive.
Over at the Winslow household, the Westfield Preservation Society is holding a meeting. The Society is literally three people: Pearl, Jasper, and “John Graff.” Some fun updates: Jasper got mad about new windows so he smashed them with a hammer. (Pearl, approvingly: “Six-by-six windows on a Queen Anne is a travesty.”) “John” is horrified by change and wonders what started it … maybe it was the COMPUTER. Just a one-man Black Mirror episode over here. Dean rings the bell and Pearl tells “John” to hide, which he does sort of successfully except for he sneezes and Dean is like I KNOW SOMEONE ELSE IS IN THERE but to no avail.
Before the sneeze, Dean asks Pearl about the tunnels (“Turns out the police are no longer cooperating with us, long story,” LOL) and she says that without a warrant she can’t have him coming in and snooping all over the place. Not sure why Dean is shocked by this. Then she reads him for filth re: his sickly pallor, horrid kitchen. “Butcher block countertops? Are you turning your house into a delicatessen? I have never seen anyone spend so much money making a house look so awful.” (Pearl probably hasn’t seen the excellent documentary The Queen of Versailles but if you like stories about the very rich and their very big, very bad houses, you should!)
That night Dean has a very vivid nightmare, and you can tell it’s not really happening because Roger Kaplan is in the kitchen holding Carter hostage with a gun, and Carter would never play such a central role in the actual plot of this show. In the morning, Dean has scotch for breakfast. He and Nora agree they need to get out of the house and sell it. Dean continues to unravel, though his escape is supposedly nigh: He sees “John” and Mo talking in the street and screams at them about the tunnels, sounding utterly unhinged. This scene is mostly worthwhile because it’s very fun to watch Margo Martindale say, “Okay, here we go with the blood cults again!” Also her dog is cute. Dean shouts that they WIN okay?! He is going to SELL. And then in the evening he has Dakota over for dinner just like I suggested several episodes ago. He apologizes for previously being rude to this enterprising young man. “Having a daughter, it’s hard, you know?” is Dean’s idea of a cool conversation to have with a 19-year-old boy. “Let’s go have some wine.”
It is during this meal that Dean and Nora tell their kids, with no preamble, that they’re selling the house (A+ parenting yet again) to which the kids are like: what the hell? We finally have lives here! But no one cares what they think or how they feel, least of all their parents. The Brannocks enlist a different real estate agent who somehow got them a $3.5 million offer from — good lord — an LLC, which obviously is going to fall through, but before it can, Theodora and Nora and Dean have to have one more look at the suspect board. The suspect board, which somehow excluded Karen, has ELLIE on it. Ellie! Next to Pigtails!! Dean continues to be offended that no one is taking John Graff, a man who probably never existed, seriously as suspect. And then Bruce the realtor calls to say the buyer is backing out because of a new article which describes the Brannock residence as a “House from Hell” that could be host to a Satanic cult. Impact journalism, so powerful.
*Deep sigh* Nora goes to confront Karen, in person, with no plan or attorney or anything, to accuse her of planting the article. Karen: “Oh wow, what an astonishing feat of deduction, seeing as I told you I was going to do it.” The way Jennifer Coolidge says, “I thought we were friends, too, cunt” is so beautiful. I also love that she calls Sprinkles a muskrat. She says she sabotaged the sale because the Brannocks don’t deserve to make a profit; probably it’s because she wants to make that profit and is pissed Bruce got it … or else maybe she wants to buy the house for herself?
At the end of the episode, the Brannocks are moving back to New York. Wait, is this literally their old place? How did they get it back? Didn’t someone else move in? And if money is so tight plus they still think New York is dangerous and bad, why don’t they just move to a different Jersey suburb? Good luck keeping those beiges bright on the filthy streets of Manhattan.
