We may be (entirely unnecessarily) entering the lynch mob portion of Gracepoint as events unfolded last week, that by hour’s end, frankly made me a little nauseous.
The Solanos decide enough is enough and agree to sit down with Renee, who sways them on the idea that Danny doesn’t meet the correct demographic for continued news coverage, but an interview with her will put him back on the front page, and maybe get them closer to finding his killer. They bite, giving her an exclusive, which doesn’t sit well with Carver and Ellie, or Owen, who Renee slept with, or his editor, Kathy who wanted first dibs.
Susan continues to be menacing for reasons that aren’t completely clear, and when Gemma runs her social on a job application, and gets a different name, she tells Kathy, who’s dumb enough to ask Susan about it. That gets her a creepy late night visit telling her to back off.
Ellie and her husband have dinner with Carver and that goes reasonably well until he passes out at the hotel. Gemma finds him and gets him help but nobody’s the wiser about whatever is going on with him.
Carver runs the medium out of town, convinced he’s doing Beth harm.
We find out Paul has recurrent insomnia and there seems to be some shade thrown his way but that may be a misdirect, unless we’re maybe angling that he’s Danny’s or Chloe’s dad?
The queasy part of the hour comes when Carter finds out via ye olde interweb that Jack was convicted of having sex with a minor way, way back there before he came to Gracepoint, but it predated the sex offenders database so nobody knew. By all accounts, he’s been a good guy for the kids in town, including Owen when he was younger, via the nature club, so the suggestion otherwise is decimating.
While Renee chats with the Solanos, she sends Owen to interview Jack, and it goes badly. Owen also gives a heads up to Ellie and Carver, who formally interview Jack. He’s upset enough that he interrupts a Solano family dinner to tell them he didn’t hurt Danny. He also burns a trove of his photographs of himself with the kids over the years.
Not at all nuts about where that’s going when it looks highly likely that Jack is going to end up hurt or killed on the basis of something done ages ago (which may be truly awful or may amount to sex with a 17-year-old — we don’t have the full story) while everyone just looks the other way on what they actually know to be true about his interactions with their children. I completely realize that if you hire Nick Nolte, you have to give him something to do, but still…
Beth is still hiding her pregnancy, and drinking wine freely, so we’ll see where that goes. She does tell Mark she knows about the affair, though, right before Carver puts the family in front of the press for a press conference (spawned by Renee’s article).
We’re just past the halfway point in the series and there’s still a lot to unravel, including why the mystery boat was left to burn in the harbor.
Gracepoint airs tonight at 9/8c on FOX and Global TV at 9 e/p. At press time, there were no clips available for tonight’s episode from the North American networks, but I did find one for Australia (thank you, David Tennant News). Enjoy!
Photo Courtesy of FOX. Video Courtesy of Universal Channel Australia.