Bad Sisters Recap: Like a Swedish Norman Bates

Oh no, Becka killed Minna, didn’t she? The final moments of “The Cold Truth” have Becka coming, exhausted and triumphant, to Eva’s house to let her know she’s taken care of the problem — she’s killed The Prick. Eva embraces her, still in shock at the revelation and what it could mean for her baby sister. We’re reeling too. Like whoever is dead in that basement freezer, the audience isn’t given a chance to catch their breaths — presumably intentional on the part of Bad Sisters. We’re meant to leave this episode with a sense of unresolved dread. Unlike Becka, we know this is a TV show with two more episodes, which makes the likelihood of JP’s death in episode eight unlikely, though not impossible. We also know Minna has not shown up in the present-day, post-JP timeline. If Minna were still alive, Becka would be taking care of her, right? She loves her. Their connection makes the possibility that Becka may have accidentally killed Minna even more horrific.

Minna gets more narrative time than ever in “The Cold Truth” — not so much onscreen, but in the way her presence is felt in other scenes. When we see JP talking to his terrible father in flashback, Minna is the bullet fired and the shield wielded in self-defense. George asks JP why he hasn’t visited his mother and uses his lack of maternal attention as an excuse not to loan JP and Grace money. JP argues that he saw her just that very night, but George isn’t having any of it. It’s not enough for him. He’d rather JP know that he could easily help him, and he chose not to. It’s not dissimilar to what JP does to Becka when she asks for a loan for her business a few years later. I guess he learned from the worst? Like JP, George understands emotions — maybe too well. Rather than using that intelligence to empathize with others, he wields it to cause others, to keep them far away and little. With JP, he knows that growing up with a dead sister and a grieving mother couldn’t have been easy for him, and that it might keep him from visiting the family home as much. But that knowledge is a weapon to be wielded against JP, not a reason to comfort his son.

For Becka, who is convinced that JP killed his father, Minna is the new main reason she wants to take The Prick out. She argues to her sisters that JP would kill Minna before he paid to put her in a home — which is probably not true, but we can now confirm that he probably wouldn’t step in to save Minna if she were choking. Becka gets swept up in the narrative of it all, imagining herself as Minna’s protector from a cruel world, in a way she rarely gets to be for anyone else. Amongst her sisters, she is the daughter Eva never had, and the one who can’t be trusted with any kind of real responsibility. Always the protected, never the protector. Becka might be eager to take JP out for Grace and for Blanaid and for Minna, but she’s also doing it for herself. For the person she gets to be in that story.

Much of the rest of “The Cold Truth” is devoted, as always, to reminding us just how terrible JP is. Though we gain more context for his cruelty through meeting his father, several of JP’s plans come to fruition in this episode. In falsely reporting Roger to the police for pedophilia, JP has effectively ostracized Roger from the community. Someone (maybe JP?) paints “peedo” on the brick wall outside of Roger’s house, and when Roger comes to check on JP after hearing about his harbor accident, JP repeats the pedophilia allegations that he made up as an excuse to send Roger away.

Meanwhile, at work, JP’s attempts to sabotage Eva’s bid for the promotion are successful. He gets the job and wastes no time in lording his new power over both Eva and Gabriel. When Gabriel confronts JP about his bullying in the bathroom, JP is absolutely vile. He tells Gabriel that Eva let spill details about his sexuality when she was drinking, and then sexually assaults Gabriel. “I should have let you drown,” Gabriel tells him at one point in the conversation, only just now seeming to realize how bad of a man JP is. He punches him and leaves the office.

JP may have assaulted and harassed Gabriel — matters not to be taken lightly, in terms of their toll on a person — but it’s Eva who breaks his heart. These two have been one another’s lifelines recently. When things have gotten hard, they’ve been there for each other, with a small smile across the office or a held hand in an art gallery. Gabriel believes in Eva so much that, even when he suspects she may have had something to do with JP’s near-fatal accident at the harbor, he doesn’t mention it to the police. When Eva follows him out of the office after the bathroom incident, Gabriel is furious. JP may have lied about Eva telling him about Gabriel’s sexual orientation, but he told just enough of the truth to make the betrayal stick. Because Eva did tell her sisters and, in this moment — when Gabriel is angry and in pain — it’s enough.

“Whatever game you two are playing, I want no part of it,” Gabriel tells Eva, before removing himself from the situation. Eva may be right that JP manipulated the truth to drive a wedge between the close friends, but Gabriel isn’t wrong. Among the many other complex interpersonal dynamics at play in this murder show, one of the central ones is the power struggle between Eva and JP. Both want to be the head of this family. Eva thinks she deserves it, as the person who gave up everything to raise her sisters when their parents died. And JP thinks he deserves it because he is a white man. Of the two, Eva is obviously the better choice, but it’s a flawed system to fight for and within; one need look no further than the ugly fight Becka and Eva get into to understand that in a family of adults, no one should try to control another person to the degree JP and Eva often try to.

“Don’t lay your guilt on me,” Becka tells Eva when Eva finds out she’s been seeing Matt and yells at her about it. She doesn’t give Becka a chance to explain that she is falling in love. “Did you sleep with every other man this side of the city?” Eva asks instead, using one of Becka sensitive spots—the way she’s perceived by the family and the community for enjoying sex with men (it’s one of the things Becka and Minna have in common) — in an attempt to control her. It’s the kind of move George or JP might make. Eva is so much better at love than either of those men, but sometimes she’s not. Sometimes, she falls into the trap of using the social power she’s been given in selfish ways.

If Becka did end up accidentally killing Minna, I worry both Eva and Becka will use it as confirmation that Eva does need to make decisions for Becka. Or perhaps the immense grief and guilt that would come of such a tragedy will make Eva see, once and for all, that she can’t protect Becka from the world. The harder she tries, the more Becka struggles.

Eva may not see that Becka is in love, but Theresa sees that Matt is. She tells Tom as much as they’re lying in bed together, while Tom is in a good mood after the exhumation of JP’s corpse. Theresa uses the observation as a way to further question where Matt’s loyalties lie, but perhaps, for Tom, it’s an opportunity to put himself a bit more in Matt’s shoes. In his desperate quest for the truth he wants, Tom has only ever thought about how JP’s maybe-murder would impact him. And to be fair, it would be bad. But a confirmation of JP’s murder at the hands of the Garvey sisters would probably break Matt’s heart — which, we know from Matt’s sad story of Life As a Bassist, has been broken before.

Tom thinks of himself as the protector in his relationship with Matt, but it’s really the other way around, isn’t it? Matt is doing everything he possibly can to keep Tom safe — from his own anxiety, from prison. Again and again, we’ve seen him prioritize his brother’s needs over his own. But Tom isn’t incapable of emotional intelligence or empathy. He may be slow about it, but he’s been given the pieces. Will he be able to stop long enough to put them together and truly see his brother as something other than another “mistake” his father left him to clean up?

As Bad Sisters races towards its finish, I continue to be impressed with the way it weaves the interpersonal drama of these many characters together without forcing the viewer to align too closely with any one person. To do this so seamlessly across two points in time, without making one storyline feel like the important one and the other like backstory, is even more masterful. More and more, I find myself forgetting which events are happening in the past and which are happening in the present. Not because there is no temporal logic to the storytelling, but because the show recognizes that the ebbs and flows of relationships, and the growth (or not) of the humans who are in them, aren’t linear. And because this show is so much more interested in exploring why and how these characters care and hurt than in discovering how JP died. I am too — but, for the record, I would like to find out the latter sometime soon.

Sisterly Advice

• So JP didn’t technically kill his dad, but he didn’t really not kill his dad either.

• This episode has a subtle two-day time jump in the present-day storyline that I found oddly jarring.

• We get a few different shots of Blanaid listening to her parents’ conversations. I continue to wonder what she thinks of her father. We get glimpses of her true teenage emotion coming out, but we’ve yet to get formal glimpses into Blanaid’s perspective. Perhaps that will change in the next two episodes?

• “Are you deliberately trying to find holes in my plan?” “Yes.” This is meant to demonstrate the power struggle between Becka and Eva, but a thorough vetting of the murder plan is not a bad idea. As Eva points out, with every failed attempt, this gets more dangerous.

• Okay, the What We Do in the Shadows song coming in at the end of this episode really threw me. TV shows should not be allowed to use other TV shows’ theme songs.