No voiceover to start us off this week. It’s 35 years ago, and a boy who will turn out to be Young Hank is running. He gets home and tries to hide his bruises, but Hank’s mom knows about his bullies. She tells him the other boys are jealous because Hank is smarter and one day they’ll be working for him because justice is the way of the world.
Present-day Hank is in a hospital bed as he recovers from the beating he got last week. Meyer wants to know who did it, and he’s all “John Warren, duh.” Meyer has a Moment of Doubt.
Over at the Red Pines Tribune, Bad Reporter is excited about the paternity test she got from the drugstore. She got John Warren’s coffee mug (ew), and Maybe-Adam’s Q-Tip (double ew) and Gus points out that you can’t just steal stuff from people for a story. Bad Reporter says “You say potato; I say investigative journalism.” Yeah, she’s keeping this nickname for a while. Gus says that if she doesn’t have a source, anything she gets is awful hearsay tabloid crap and unusable. Bad reporter. Bad! Not that she gets fired or anything. Neither she nor Gus seems particularly upset about the laws or journalistic ethics she’s trashed, so whatever. Bisexuals aren’t smart about that stuff. Just randomly sneaky!
The TV news is talking about Claire and her candidacy because the nation is consumed with the Maine Governor’s race. She gets in the shower and hears one million loops of commentators talking about her lack of experience.
At breakfast, Willa asks Claire if she’s sleeping OK and oh, yes, Maybe-Adam’s teacher will be there at noon. Too bad, she’ll make him do math, ha, ha! Maybe-Adam hears that and says one reason the bunker was awesome was that there was no math. Willa and Claire try to laugh as they absorb what a fucked-up joke that was to make.
John’s hand has a cut on it! Dun-dun-dun! Adam looks at a postcard from Cape Canaveral with no writing but the address on it. At a mailbox, Craggy Doug sends a different postcard from Kitty Hawk and asks if it’ll go out today. Does he not worry about prints? Or the handwriting on the address? Or the fact that North Carolina does not deserve anybody’s tourist dollars right now? Not even Craggy Doug’s.
Maybe-Adam tells Clements the Bad Man told him he would take him places if Maybe-Adam was a good boy and stopped trying to run. So they made a list of places, and he brought Adam guidebooks from those places. To read in the pitch-dark bunker? Clements says they’ll make a list of those places and heads his list “Catch the Bastard.”
Craggy Doug is taking his pregnant wife on a road trip so he can send a bunch of postcards. Craggy Doug is allllll about the prep work. But he won’t tell his wife where they’re going.
Ten years ago, the family has an ordinary morning squabble about the dishes and a Little League mom who apparently has no access to any form of her local news calls to say she’s looking forward to Adam being on the team and everyone gets all sad.
Back in the present, Meyer confronts John about assaulting Hank with a baseball bat. John denies it but whoopsie, he’s got that hand injury. John says he and Hank just argued at 4:00 in the morning when no one could see them. Meyer tells him to call a lawyer.
Clements wants to know if Meyer thinks John did it. She says he’s angry, and Clements points out that anger makes you do stupid things. Meyer and Clements wonder if anger is making the Bad Man do something stupid, like treat himself to the whole Good Boy list. So where will he go next? (Probably not The Alamo, which is on the list.) Craggy Doug and his wife are at a rest stop. She gets chatty, and he shreds a magazine so that it looks like the boy’s face on the next page is behind bars. Yikes.
Willa says John’s prints are on the baseball bat, but John points out that it’s his, so of course they are. We’ve all learned since the wiping-prints-off-the-ship-in-the-bottle incident. Willa definitely needs to blow off some stress. May we suggest a stiff drink at a different kind of bar than you normally go to, Willa?
Meyer’s not arresting John because why would he leave his fingerprinty bat over at the crime scene? Everyone wonders how the bat got over to Hank’s place, and then we have about 30 shots of Maybe-Adam to remind us that he can disable the alarm now. Willa accuses Danny of turning the alarm off while he was drunk, but we’ve all known it was Maybe-Adam for a week, so let’s keep moving.
John gets arrested for assaulting Hank, and the dozens of reporters who seem to be able to make a living in Red Pines are there to catch the moment. How many newspapers and TV stations do they have? First, I think we now know Hanks’ revenge plan for the Warrens ruining his reputation. Second, how did Little League lady miss the Adam Warren story when every second resident of the town is a reporter?
Hank looks at cakes in an otherwise empty bakery and orders a full-sized one. He says he’ll eat it there and has the baker ice “I WIN” onto it. He digs a fork right into the middle. Monster.
Ten years ago, Willa finds drunk John at the Little League bleachers. Hey, show! How about we NOT have tight shots of 13-year-old Willa’s legs in her miniskirt? John is rambling about how Adam’s team won, and the other kids grew. Willa wants to tidy everything up and take him home. John needs a moment because he has peed himself, because Young Willa doesn’t have enough to deal with. Keep being good, Willa! Keep being good!
Present Willa walks through the enormous City Hall of Red Pines while Bad Reporter tries to give her coffee and offers an insider in the press. Willa doesn’t trust her and is also pissed off at how good Bad Reporter’s perfume smells. Bad Reporter says she can “give good spin” on John’s assault rap. Willa is skeptical. And turned on. But like angry turned on.
Back at the Tribune, Bad Reporter asks for a favor from a non-bad reporter, and he says “I’m not going to another lesbian club with you!” This is to remind us that Bad Reporter is some mysterious not-straight sexual orientation (apparently they are all the same thing). The show is concerned that we may need to be reminded of that because Bad Reporter has been shtupping the daylights out of a dude ever since she announced that she’s a lesbian lifestyle blogger a few weeks ago.
Bad Reporter delves deep into her blogging skills and comes up with a solution to giving good spin. She tells Non-bad Reporter to retweet everything with #PapaBear and use the Tribune‘s Twitter handle. Because if there’s one thing major newspapers condone, it’s using their official social media presences to take sides on open cases. Anyway, the entire nation is following this case closely enough to assume that this #PapaBear thing will trend.
Willa, who apparently isn’t following this building tweetstorm, tells John to take a guilty plea to aggravated assault. He’d get a fine and community service, but Willa is worried that a trial would go on for months and tank Claire’s campaign. Claire says no plea, even if it costs them the race Willa is baffled. The Warren marriage gets a little tighter.
Danny asks Maybe-Adam where he went when he turned the alarm off. Maybe-Adam says he wanted to know he could leave because sometimes it feels like he can’t. Adam tells Danny he got another postcard, because why would you mention that to the police first? It’s the postcard from Kitty Hawk.
They do take the card to the police, who determine that the Bad Man is going up the East Coast. For the record, the other spots on the presumed route up the East Coast are: Colonial Williamsburg, Washington, D.C., The Liberty Bell, and the Statue of Liberty. Because if you ask an eight-year-old boy where he most dreams of going, he is definitely going to be dipping some beeswax candles and looking at some bells.
The cops have people posted at all those spots, and they’re expecting to catch the Bad Man at the Statue of Liberty. Sure, sure. A popular tourist spot in New York City sounds like a fantastic place to catch a guy that you have one grainy picture of. What the hell, investigators? Also, he went all the way to Florida and sent no postcards along the way when his route would be unpredictable, and now he’s working his way back up to probably New York and definitely Maine while sending postcards? This makes no damned sense. Anyway, we’re sending out some tourist trap APBs. Kabam, a cop pulls Craggy Doug over!
Ten years ago, Nina Meyer comes to the Little League park in answer to Willa’s call. Meyer sensitively notes that John is hammered and gets extra cheery tells Willa it’s not a big deal and to go home and do her homework and Nina will take care of John. She reassures Willa that her dad is just having a hard time.
Clements, at the Statue of Liberty ferry, asks Present-Meyer about her therapy sessions, and she says she’s supposed to do yoga and not shoot people. Heh.
Turns out Craggy Doug got pulled over for taking a road trip before getting license plates for his new van. What about your meticulous prep work, Craggy Doug? Craggy Doug’s APB/bad wanted poster goes up right there in the police station, and Doug’s cop looks at it, and I’m sorry, but this is a badly telegraphed fakeout, so we’re blowing by.
Danny takes Maybe-Adam to learn how to drive and basically tells him to just figure it out, which seems like poor instructorial technique. Did Danny teach Bad Reporter’s journalism classes? Anyway, like 5 minutes later, Maybe-Adam is driving perfectly well.
Craggy Doug is nervous about the wanted poster even though we know it’s a fakeout. He tries to get his wife to go ahead and leave the station even though the police aren’t done with them. No dice! Their cop stops them because of course he does because this is a fakeout.
Maybe-Adam hits the gas hard and closes his eyes and tilts his head up to the sun. Danny regrets the impromptu Driver’s Ed class and freaks the hell out and finally gets Maybe-Adam to stomp on the brakes. Back at the station, the fakeout finally completes as the cop hands Craggy Doug proof of ownership of his van. Back at the car, Danny yells at Maybe-Adam, who says he doesn’t want to die “anymore.”
Claire is at the Red Pines police station. Meyer says they have agents all over the place, not really mentioning that the place is a major tourist destination in a giant city. Claire says John didn’t beat up Hank though she can’t personally verify that because he’s been sleeping on the couch. The women have a showdown over who knows what John is capable of. Claire says Meyer has been between them in their bed for 10 years, so she doesn’t get to play this one like she’s a visitor to the situation. Claire tells Meyer to get on board and do what’s right.
Claire comes home to a bat in the driveway. God, I wish it were a giant mammalian bat, but it’s just a baseball bat. It has “#Papa Bear” with that space in there on it, which means it was written by someone who’s been following the hashtag on Twitter but doesn’t know how Twitter hashtags work. Claire is so freaked out that she calls for John, and then we see that it’s HUNDREDS of bats all over their yard. God, why couldn’t the assailant have used the flying kind of bat? That would have been amazing.
What’s amazing right now is trying to figure out the size of Red Pines. What percentage of the population just drove by to toss bats on the Warrens’ lawn? Is anyone going to have bats left for Little League? Or have people caravanned in from other cities? And how did they throw all those bats in the lawn without anyone in the house noticing all the cars and thunking noises?
Ten years ago, John wakes up on the couch all hung over. Whoops, he’s on Nina’s couch. He sees her personal Adam case board that is stuck up on her wall by her bed. Yeesh. He walks in on Nina dressing and then talks about how Claire is grieving all wrong. She took down Adam’s pictures and erased the pencil marks from Adam’s height chart on the wall, and it’s not normal. (Did Claire or Willa accidentally kill Adam?) Meyer says everyone grieves differently, and a light bulb goes off over John’s head that says “WRITE A GRIEF BOOK!” on it. John thanks Meyer and is gone. Meyer takes a moment to stand by the closed door and be in love with him. And then John comes back, and they’re power-kissing.
Which means that next they’re going into Nina’s bedroom to have sex next to a wall full of pictures of John’s kidnapped son.
Related: I’m really grateful for the shot that indicated somebody washed John’s pants.
Present-day Claire is in the shower, and John joins her. He thanks her for never doubting him, and they start to repair their relationship via the magic of shower nuzzling.
Late at night, Danny and Willa talk. He says Maybe-Adam is messed up, and she agrees. Unfortunately for all of us, she doesn’t follow that up with “Speaking of things that are messed up, are you and Bad Reporter broken up or what?”
Clements is shocked that the Bad Man didn’t show at the Statue. He says he know he didn’t because they checked all the surveillance footage at the dock, which means someone on this show has not looked very far into the kind of time and manpower it takes to go through surveillance footage, let alone surveillance footage of crowds. Clements got a Meyer a keychain.
Nina arrives at Hank’s place and looks at all the broken stuff in his apartment with a new eye. He bitches about the glass everywhere, and she looks at a Delft blue tile of a mother and son. Hank says it reminds him of his mom and wants to know why Meyer is there. She says she’s worried about him, which he finds a switch. Also, he misses the part where she’s totally scrutinizing his wrecked furniture.
Nina notes that Hank’s hands are blistered like he was using a baseball bat to break stuff. And also that someone smashed up all his furniture, including the table that the tile was on, and yet that tile is intact. He says the tile is sturdier than it seems.
She apologizes to Hank for everything, by which she means railroading him into jail and stuff, and then as she leaves she totally brushes the table with her jacket and the tile falls off and breaks. And thus, Hank is also busted.
A few days ago, John wakes up on the couch—he’s always doing that—and sees Hank in his yard. They have a verbal trespassing dustup and John throws Hank out and locks the gate, but does not beat him up with a Louisville Slugger. Hank sees the Warrens’ discarded bat lying in the yard and reaches way in and grabs it. (So why did Maybe-Adam disable the alarm?) Hank wrecks his own house, carefully moving the tile before he trashes the table. I feel like we’re way ahead of this, and the show is worried that the stupider folks in the audience won’t be able to catch up. Maybe it’s just the perception advantage conferred by watching TV for subtext most of your life.
Just in case, people couldn’t figure out the second part, we see Hank bash his own face in.
Ten years ago, Willa, obviously waiting up, sees John come home from Nina’s place (what is his job at this point?), and he tells her he slept at a hotel. The second John goes away, she grabs his phone and sees a text from Meyer: “We screwed up. It can’t happen again.” That text still works without the preposition. Willa erases the text before Claire can see it, and thus a lifelong pattern of cleaning up is solidified.
The thousands of reporters who live in Red Pines—how many get sent to cover those Little League games? Like 30?—want to know about charges against John now being dropped, and now John is machoing around and enjoying the #PapaBear thing. Probably fun for him, and they all know it ain’t bad for the wife’s campaign.
Back at his mansion, Governor Lang wants to focus on the issues, but dozens and dozens of other reporters don’t want to hear it. They’re all about Claire. I have a lot to learn about Maine’s entirely reporting-based economy. With so much competition, how does Bad Reporter keep finding work? Or do newspapers in TV stations think you just have to hire every reporter who shows up? That would explain a lot.
Willa meets Bad Reporter in a bar—NOT EVEN THE AFOREMENTIONED LESBIAN BAR, JESUS CHRIST—and pointedly won’t thank her for the #PapaBear thing though she does say Bad Reporter could maybe find a spot on Claire’s campaign. Because that’s not 17 bad ideas in a row.
Bad Reporter smugly says it must be exhausting being Willa because Willa is white-knuckling her purse. She says that if Willa dropped her perfect, clean purse onto that dirty bar floor, she’d throw it away and never use it again. Willa says Bad Reporter knows nothing about her. Bad Reporter says she knows who Willa is and kisses her right there in the straight bar while two poor male extras try to figure out how much to react.
They hold that single kiss for a long time. Repressed Willa doesn’t struggle and does drop her purse. I’m sorry, but I don’t buy this moment. I know Willa wants Bad Reporter, but she’s also repressed as hell and has had her guard up and been keeping everything OK and perfect since she was 13 years old. She doesn’t flinch or take a step back or shove Bad Reporter away or stop the kiss and then give in and re-start it or anything. She just lets Bad Reporter kiss her and drops her purse. Bad Reporter finishes kissing Willa and hands her purse back. Willa stares at Bad Reporter and then walks away. Well, Bad Reporter, you either just completely blew or totally nailed down that campaign staffer job.
bike trails
JavaScript is disabled!The police station now has a pile of postcards from all over the country. Clements and Meyer figure out that Craggy Doug asked a bunch of traveling strangers to mail postcards for him as a “game for his son.” Clements says Craggy Doug is obsessed with scaring Maybe-Adam or making him jealous. Meyer says Craggy Doug is lonely for him.
Craggy Doug goes to his secret shed basement and turns on the light, and it’s an empty cement-block bunker. He puts a lonely stuffed dolphin in it.
Meyer arrives at the Warren house and says she knows how to get the Bad Man. She wants to use Maybe-Adam as bait.
Back at the Tribune, Bad Reporter announces that the paternity test is back. Maybe-Adam is now officially Not-Adam.
Well, that last revelation certainly suggests that a lot of hell is poised to break loose. Let’s hope that Willa will be breaking loose in this fabled lesbian bar as well.
