1x04 Ripe

[7.0/10] I gotta be frank. This one felt like a whole heap of wheel-spinning that didn’t go much of anywhere, or at least nowhere new or interesting. A show can only coast on the intrigue of its premise for so long before it has to start either paying things off or building to new places, and halfway through the mini-series, “Ripe” doesn't really do either.

We get some drama with Adora and Alan over Chief Vickery’s presence. I guess part of the point is to make clear that Alan is, if the last episode didn't make clear, frustrated about his situation with his wife. There’s some ominous images of him adjacent to a gun, and his final scene with Adora and its lead-up suggests there’s some potency and anger within him that makes him more of a suspect than we might have expected before.

But mostly, it’s another scene of Adora and Vickery going over similar ground as they did in the last episode: there’s some unspoken accord and overfamiliarity there, concern about how the town will handle these grisly events without a culprit, and hand-wringing over what Adora’s daughters are up to. It’s not exactly a reheated version of the scene we got in the prior episode, but it’s close.

We also get more of Amma’s Lolita routine, as she subtly comes on to her theater teacher. It’s an odd scene, among many that, like last week’s outing, reinforce that Amma is playing dangerous games. She’s trying to what she views as older, more mature things, like smoke a joint and treat her years-older sister like a peer, and try to gin up an adult man’s interest in her,

Again, as uncomfortable as some of this material is to watch, I don’t mind if I feel like it’s going somewhere or if it seems like the show is building something with it. But this is essentially another redo of the same things that went on with Amma in the prior episode, so it doesn't feel like we really learn much that’s new or that develops her character from when we last saw her.

The one thing that does change is the connection between Camille and Richard, which goes beyond flirty and becomes explicitly sexual, though in a strange “you touch me while I think about murder” sort of way. But more than that strange bit of psychosexual kink, the show seems to be pointing to a new intimacy between the two characters, who are now more apt to share details, both personal and about the case, with one another, despite their traditionally antagonistic press vs. police dynamic.

That includes Camille’s oblique commission that she was once a participant in the football players’ festivities in “the end zone.” Camille tries to own it as consensual and part of how things are in Wind Gap, but Richard recognizes it as rape, and we recognize it as something that clearly hurt Camille when she was younger. It was something she wasn’t ready for, both because of her age and because of what she and her family had been through, even if she can’t admit it to herself.

That’s the closest thing to a theme in this cul de sac of an episode. We get melodramatic scene between Adora and Camille where Adora implies that she was quite young herself (a child, by Camille’s reckoning) when she had her daughter, and that it led to an estrangement with her own mother (or at least didn’t rectify it). There’s the attendant implication that this sort of activity made things harder on Adora when she was a young woman too.

And given the fact that Camille is not only still scattered and triggered by seeing the old hunting cabin with the S&M pictures, but also thinks about it and blood and other disturbing images when she’s in the throes of sexual pleasure, suggests that her sexual experiences as a young woman in these woods gave her more than her share of damage to deal with as well.

There’s a sense of Amma on the cusp of the same thing, poised to make similar mistakes to her mother and older sister, with the fear (as evinced by Camille’s waking nightmare), that as society has grown darker, the consequences for such things have gotten more severe.

On the plot/murder mystery front, we learn that Amma’s risk is heightened because she was friends with both Natalie and Ann, and that the three of them used to play in that hunting cabin. It seems like a detail that’s been conveniently omitted up until this point, but I guess you need the occasional dramatic cliffhanger to end an episode on. So we have Camille freaking out and fighting to shove off the images of these dead girls who keep invading her mind’s eye, and invasion which now includes the ghastly image of Amma as the next victim.

That’s supposed to make things more personal and immediate as the newly teamed-up Camille/Richard squad heightens their investigation of the murder. But so much of it feels like a repeat of things we’ve already seen to lead up to this point, that the show feels like it’s marking time between plot reveals or genuine bits of character development rather than advancing its story or its major figures in the interim.

The one truly laudable element of the episode is the way it uses editing and montage to communicate the way that Camille is fighting her urge to self-harm. The way the show splices together horrible memories, spectres of the deceased, and images of the titular sharp objects that Camille normally uses to cope, mixed with her splashing water on her face or downing another water bottle full of vodka to try to make it go away conveys her internal struggle, a struggle she’s not exactly forthcoming about, in an effective way without having the character announce it.

But otherwise, “Ripe” is, ironically, an episode that feels like it’s waiting for the other seeds the show has planted to be ready to harvest. Sure, we get a minor bombshell at the end of the episode to propel us forward into the back half of the mini-series. But in the interim, Sharp Objects is just looping around with familiar beats without changing the melody.