I have to say, I was a bit disapointed. I think they should have made John the killer and end it that. Having it ackshully be Ryan was just a jump-the-shark moment and totally ruined it for me.
It’s funny, I watched the “behind the scenes” afterwards and they seemed so proud of themselves that they kept the real killer a secret and how it was so unexpected. Okay, yeah, you got me, I never would have guessed it was a 13 year old kid who had like 2 lines beforehand and maybe 2 minutes of screen time. At first I was like “Ryan who??” Good job!
I swear you could have made ANY other character the “real killer” and it could have come up with a motive as believable and interesting as that. Has any young kid ever killed (accidental or otherwise) the affair partner of a parent? I know a lot of kids (me included) who have had their lives touched by a parental affair and murdering them would be the last thing on my mind. C’mon.
I thought Ryan’s motives were plausible. Most important thing to a kid is keeping their foundation of Mom & Dad intact. Ryan saw the cracks in that foundation, knew his dad was vulnerable, and blamed Erin poking at the cracks.
Ryan gets pissed when when he sees the text message, decides to go confront Erin. He knows he probably won’t be taken seriously so he gets the gun to wave around to make his point. Erin starts a scuffle for the gun and the accident happens. Parents panic and start the coverup. Pretty simple.
I felt the timeline of the gun’s provenance was wacky. A retired detective finds his handgun missing, and then it’s where it’s supposed to be a few hours later, meanwhile someone’s been shot to death in a small town, and, while he notices the gun coming and going in the middle of the night, he doesn’t report this to the lead detective whom he knows personally?
Perhaps we were supposed to attribute that to his declining mental state.
Also, let’s remember that Siobhan didn’t tell Mare she was at the party (and on camera).
Marc didn’t tell Dan or Mare about actually with Erin and trying to keep her away from the party.
Frank didn’t tell Mare about helping out Erin. In fact, instead of saying ‘she had family problems’, he could have come right out and said ‘I bought diapers and formula for the kid’. Would have put an end to the whole paternity red herring.
There’s more I’m not thinking of, but a lot of people didn’t say a lot of things that that should have been said. Either to provide an alibi or to move the case forward.
I have to agree there. I’m one of those people that do like for there to be some clues that, even if realistically you wouldn’t (or couldn’t) have put together on the first watch, they were there. The ONLY clue we had, as far as I recall, was the prowler out by the shed that looked like a ‘ferret’. Plus the misdirects with the graffiti on the shed (who did that?) and not to mention all actual clues they gave us led us to Freddie. He was hanging out back there, he had Erin’s clothes.
In any case, I still thought it was a great mini-series and managed to watch the entire thing in two sittings. The only real issue I had, and it’s not the show’s fault, is that there were too many ‘relationships’ within the small town. It was hard to keep track of who knew who, who was married to who, which people were cousins or exes or whatever. I don’t have any issues with shows set in towns that everyone knows everyone. But here I spent a lot of time thinking ‘wait, why does she know about that…oh, because her roommate used to date his cousin’.
Also, did anyone else get a Silence Of The Lambs vibe when Mare found the house with the girls?
ETA, for those that liked this, check out Unbelievable. Slightly less ‘gritty’, but still really good crime drama miniseries, with a vaguely similar plot.
I wasn’t clear on the time frame there. If it was only a few hours it makes no sense. If the gun was gone for a couple of days I can see him questioning his own memory and experience. If it was just for a few hour there’s no explanation why he would be checking his gun in the middle of the night.
Anyway, assuming that was supposed to be covered somehow, it was a good enough ending for me in terms of the murder and kidnapping plots. The rest of it is a giant mess though. Mare is a corrupt cop, her investigation was a mess, lives were ruined, you couldn’t pay me to live in that version of Easttown.
Big time. The whole scene I kept thinking “SOTL!!! Buffalo Bill pursuing Clarice through a disgusting hoard-filled house while the victims are crying out to be freed. But exactly!!” They should have had to pay for the rights. Total ripoff, I felt.
I think there’s two overlapping timelines going on here.
Timeline of the gun: Ryan takes the gun at night, returns it a few hours later
Timeline of Mr Carroll: Mr Carroll goes to get his gun early in the morning because of ‘the prowler’ (Freddie?), so he knows it’s there. Later that night, he hears another noise (Ryan?) goes to retrieve the gun, it’s not there, chalks it up to failing memory. At some point, what, a week or two later, he was in the shed and found the gun with the missing bullets. That’s when he called Mare.
In other words, it’s not that he noticed it as soon as it went missing and ‘found’ it as soon as it was returned.
He noticed it missing right when it went missing (because the noise of it getting stolen prompted him to get it), but only noticed that it had been returned some time later.
When they noticed the pack of Winstons on the table, I was waiting for him to do that weird thing that Buffalo Bill did, when he ran out of the room (can’t find a gif right now). But it seemed so similar to SOTL that it I had to put effort into wrapping my head around the girls being up in the attic and not the basement (plus a couple of true crime documentaries that I’ve seen with kids locked in basements didn’t help either).
Attic just seems like such an odd spot to keep someone locked up like that.
I liked the main murder resolution more than some of you seem to have. It certainly makes the John-and-Billy scenes all make sense. John and Billy both helped Ryan clean up. John convinced Billy that if necessary, Billy should take the fall, because John has a family. John was going to kill Billy because that way Billy can be blamed as a dead guy and who’s going to defend him?
And while Ryan himself wasn’t someone we were invested in, the impact it had on the relationship between Mare and Lori definitely gave it more weight than if it had just been some random guy.
What I did NOT like was everything with Dylan and Jessie and so forth in the past few episodes. All of that was just (in retrospect) red-herrings-for-red-herrings’-sake. So did Jessie want to burn the journals or not? And if so, then why keep the picture? And why were Dylan and his unnamed buddy so threaten-y all of a sudden? And when did Dylan have all these changes of heart? Etc.
Still an excellent series overall, but did fall down a bit at the end, imho.
I thought the Katie Bailey case was solved rather easily especially since the case had been cold for a year. For a town where everyone knew each other no one thought to have the lady who had connections to the prostitutes ask around if any of them had been violently attacked? Then when they do one says “oh yeah, I did, and I remember the vehicle and plate.” 7 vans pop up and the 3rd one is a hit.
This is what I was assuming must have happened to make sense. Possibly they didn’t convey that well, or maybe I just missed what was said. I still find it a little off overall with the timeline and Mr. Carrol’s reactions, but it’s not like a story killer either.
I agree the timing on the gun being there, then not there, then there again; was very poorly communicated. I definitely think we’re meant to believe that Mr. Carroll was aware enough of his own failing facilities that it took him a while to convince himself he wasn’t just making it up.
That actually makes sense based on what Billy was saying when he had the gun pointed at him, about not having a family.
I was under the impression that John and Lori convinced Mare that Billy killed Erin (and is possibly the father). John would make it look like a suicide and the family wouldn’t have to deal with media and court and everything until it dies down.
Of course, at some point, they would have done a paternity test on Billy and realized he wasn’t the father, which would have thrown a wrench in the works…possibly even more so if (and I don’t know if they can do this) the paternity test was negative for Billy, but showed that the father was in that family.
Did they know Katie was a sex worker? I don’t recall.
But that wasn’t about Katie from a year ago, that was about more recently missing girl (Missy?), they just happened to be connected.
FWIW, I don’t remember being all the confused about it when I actually watched it (helped that I binged the entire thing though). However, in order to double check my memory I looked around online and there’s a lot of articles talking about the plothole with the gun…or rather how it’s not a plot hole, just not as easy to follow as it could have been.
A basic paternity test probably wouldn’t rule out Billy since he’s a brother. They would need additional testing to tell which brother. But if Billy came back a probable match and everyone believed he was the father it would prob stop there.
Agreed. Mare’s drug-planting ass needs to be thrown in prison with the rest of the lot, and serve longer time than most of them. That’s what bugs me about her “do whatever it takes to get the perp” image.
While I know she didn’t get thrown in prison or even fired from the force, at least they didn’t entirely brush it under the rug. It’s interesting that they went that route with her stealing the drugs from the evidence locker. It almost would have made more sense if they had her go out and buy the drugs off the street herself and do it. The rogue cop, breaking the rules (or more often, breaking the law) to catch someone is something I thought TV shows were trying to get away from. I know I saw some youtube thing somewhere that walked through all the ‘great cops’ that only managed to solve cases by, for example, beating a confession out of a suspect or illegally breaking into their house to search it.
I agree that the ‘real killer’ made sense in context. As for Dylan-as-red-herring: the one scene with Dylan picking up the kid and clearly feeling attached to him even after learning they weren’t related, worked for me as an explanation of his actions. He was borderline-scary about burning the journals because he didn’t want the boy to be taken away from him and from his parents. (And Jessie went along with burning the journals due both to agreeing with Dylan that having the child stay with his family was a good goal, and to being intimidated by Dylan. She kept the photo, though, out of a streak of independence and a wish to do right by Erin.)
The most interesting part of this series, to me–clear only after the final episode–was the way that John was revealed as a self-serving narcissist. He did redeem himself somewhat by being willing to take the rap for his son, but at the same time, he was willing (in theory, at least) to both blame his brother and murder that brother. All the while he was doing what he wanted pretty much all the time. I do think the writing could have been a bit more pointed about the way he ruined so many lives, in the service of doing exactly as he pleased.
The most annoying aspect of the show for me was not the fuzziness about the gun or other plotting choices mentioned so far, but rather the clichéd killing of the ‘alternate love interest’ for Mare. The ‘captive girls’ reminded people of Silence of the Lambs, and the ‘kill off the partner’ development is also familiar (from the 1995 movie Copycat, to name one).
All in all, I enjoyed the series and found it worth my time. I wouldn’t be surprised if Winslet got some award nominations out of it.
I had no problem with the final twist in the investigation. Remember the father confessed at the very top of Episode 7 so you KNEW another shoe was going to drop.
The only thing that was not clear why Dylan was so eager to coverup his timeline the night of Erin’s murder and was so eager to cover up he stuck a gun in Erin’s friends face (why didn’t he threaten Brianna too?). My wife explained he didn’t want anyone to discover the baby was not his because his parents wanted to adopt him so much. Not only does that not add up for me as a proper motive, but if that is true, that’s weak.
some of this sounds like the first season of “the killing”… there could have been 50 more interesting murderers for better reasons than what was in the last episode…the red herring of the s&m den under the school …and no one even mentioned the possible affair the dad ofo the murdered girl was going to have with the sister in law or the asshat boy who was giving drugs to the girls he was with in one scene
the end was of it was "I watched this for 2-3 months for that? "