So my wife and I have been bingeing Mare of Easttown on HBO, and I figured this is our last chance to discuss it, before the series (season?) finale airs.
SPOILER THROUGH EPISODE 6!!! BE WARNED!!!
-Overall, it’s excellent. Kate Winslet is (unsurprisingly) amazing, and there are really no weak links in the cast. The writing, the sense of place, all top notch. Special acting props to Mare’s mother and daughter.
-It does suffer a little bit from a slightly implausible case of “every single person has a dark secret”… but I can roll with that
-I went to Haverford College. We did have a radio station, but it was famous for being comically weak. The joke was you could hear it in the dining center… if you sat in the right spot in the dining center. The outdoor shots that are presumably supposed to be at Haverford (where Anne semi-dumps Siobhan) do not look ANYTHING like Haverford. Not even close. I didn’t spend enough time driving around nearby decaying cities to really know how accurate that all is (plus it was pre-opioid-crisis) but certainly some of the superficial terms that get name-checked are spot-on.
-Having Mare be as bad a person as she is is an interesting choice. I mean, we sympathize with her a lot but… planting heroin is pretty unforgiveable. The show shares a lot of DNA with Broadchurch and Happy Valley, two excellent shows about tough-as-nails female detectives solving crimes in tight-knit communities and revealing secrets, but in both of those cases, the leads are WAY more generally-virtuous, even if they have screwed up personal lives.
So… whodunnit? Billy, obviously. But there must be something more going on, with Dylan and the photo. And how did Erin end up undressed but not assaulted? One possibility is that two different people were involved in killing her. Like, Billy shot her, but she was still alive, then someone else killed her. Or something to that effect. And Dylan 100% seems guilty of something. But I can’t really make those pieces fit together.
Other suspects:
-Guy Pearce, because why hire such a big name actor otherwise?
-Mare’s ex-husband, just for the double fakeout
-The less-creepy priest, because otherwise why does his character exist?
And one super-wild theory:
-The father of Erin’s baby is not Billy, although Billy might think it is. It is… Kevin, Mare’s dead son. Not sure if the timeline really lines up, but we know the baby is > 1, and I think it was two years ago he killed himself? Out of shame at having gotten his underage fling knocked up?
My theory is it’s John, Billy’s brother. The receipt only said Ross, no first name. John is gaslighting a perpetually drunk Billy into thinking he had something to do with her death.
I came for Kate Winslet… and stayed for that beautiful long “Ö”.
I agree that the “say it, say you killed her” scene seemed kind of gaslight-y. That said, we know that Billy came home with blood on his clothes. So hard to see him being totally innocent (unless John also gaslit his father into making that up) (plus it was Billy who Erin was staying with at the reunion).
Erin’s kid is likely John’s. He’s a horndog who’s had one known affair, and his brother Billy saying to John ‘you can’t keep it in your pants’ when John moved back in with dad seemed to refer to more than just the known affair.
John was likely involved in Erin’s murder as well, either alone or with Billy’s help, so he was trying to gaslight his brother into believing it was him alone. But then Billy decided he was going to confess, which backfired on John because he knew once that came out that DNA testing would show that Billy was not Erin’s kid’s dad, but there was a sibling connection, and John would be outed as the father. that’s why John was taking Billy up to the fishing cabin with the gun- to make sure Billy never talked.
Or, John’s son Ryan may have been Erin’s killer-- he showed a propensity for violence when he beat the shit out of the kid in the cafeteria with a lunch tray when the kid teased the girl with Down’s Syndrome. He might have killed Erin to protect his dad or something. Ryan and his dad have some whispered secret that the mom overheard and she assumed it meant Ryan was covering up his dad having an affair with the same woman again.
There’s a small chance that Ryan is Erin’s kid’s father. Maybe John and Billy did a ‘let’s make Ryan a man’ at the cabin kinda thing. And the heart locket seems more like a kid thing than what a grown man would give to a teenager, so maybe Ryan was the ‘Ross’ on the receipt. But Ryan was probably too young at the time for that to be likely.
Yes, Dylan is guilty of something, or knows something and is protecting someone, but he’s too obvious of a red herring to be the killer. The pic that Erin’s friend (Jem? Jen?) saved from the diaries they were burning and gave to the cops has some key, maybe a pic of the father with Erin (in a compromising position?)
Outside chance Guy Pierce is guilty of something too. As pointed out, he’s too famous an actor and too “what’s the point?” of a side character otherwise. His character seems to be slumming with Mare, so maybe he’s getting close to her to find out what she knows.
I think that exhausts about all the theories my wife and I have batted around.
Just as an FYI, the girl with Down Syndrome is his sister.
I thought so, but I wasn’t positive.
My wild theories are always wrong but that never stops me from posting them.
I keep thinking about how ballistics said the gun used was one that was popular with law enforcement agents and Mare’s father probably had one like it. That seemed like an odd thing to say. Maybe someone close to Mare got their hands on his old gun. Or maybe it is someone she works with on the police force.
I feel like they need one more big twist revealed for the finale. I guess it’s kind of cliché to find out the killer was right there with Mare the whole time but that doesn’t mean they won’t do it.
I have been thinking there was more to Siobhan’s story than she has let on. It was strange that she never mentioned to Mare that she had seen Erin shortly before she died and she wouldn’t answer her phone the next day. I don’t think she was the killer but I wonder if she knows more than she lets on.
I am probably wrong but it’s fun to speculate.
I thought it was kind of far fetched that Mare didn’t put 2 & 2 together when they were first asking Billy about the time Erin stayed with him and he got all nervous a left immediately. When they showed the camera shot of Billy’s just opened Rolling Rock I thought Mare was going to grab it for some DNA to see if he was the father. I guess the shot was more of a “he was in such a rush to get out of there he didn’t even touch his beer” visual.
Also seems out of character for Mare to rush to the cabin without back-up for no apparent reason especially after seeing her partner get shot. Billy is a loose cannon at this point and could be suicidal, homicidal, all of the above since he has nothing to lose.
Clueless as to what the Dylan angle might be.