Blood Sacrifice
After the second letter, episode 2 of The Watcher sees the Brannocks really shaken. They go to Chamberland once again and plead with him to investigate Jasper. He turns down their suspicions and instead asks them to list their house to see who would bid. Among other things, he also suggests hiring private security. But it is too expensive. A good Private Investigator is the next suggestion and they think it is a good idea. Dean meets with Theodora Birch, a jazz musician turned PI the next day. She has liver cancer and tells her story of how she came to be obsessed with murders while she was in rehab. That is in fact what saved her from her alcoholism. Dean does not say yes but for the price, she offers her services seem tempting.
Although Nora says she wants to sell the house, Dean does not support the idea. The renovation in the kitchen and basement is to start soon and with the dust, Carter’s asthma might start acting up again. Citing that, Nora says they should move into a motel for the time being. Dean agrees with her. The family gets a room in a motel nearby and Dean goes back to the house to sleep to let the workers in the next day. As soon as Dean lies down, the doorbell rings. When he goes out, no one is there, but we can see someone standing in the shadows and watching him. He hears music coming from upstairs as Ellie did in the previous episode.
He inspects the room and it is actually coming from the speaker in the walls. When the camera turns the other way, we see someone behind him, watching on. Nora gets a phone call in the middle of the night. The person on the other end just breathes and does not say anything. She calls Dean with this information and when they ask the receptionist to try that number again, we see it ringing from the Brannock residence. The Watcher is indeed inside their house. The next day, Karen reveals she went through the offers on the house. The other offer was a lowball one, someone trying to flip the house. But because it was from an LLC, there are no names on the documents. She suggests Nora sell the house but with a hefty discount to what they brought it at. Nora does not like the idea as that much amount of money would be detrimental to them. Karen also says she is surprised that Nora isn’t angry about some stranger trying to force her out of her own house.
Dean meets with Theodora, who gives him the number for the previous occupant of the house, Andrew Pierce. He is a talent agent and she asks Dean to set up a meeting. He says that Nora just wants to leave the house behind and go back to the city. Theodora, though, warns him that not knowing who was behind it would leave him unsettled for the rest of his life. It happened with her and her husband’s girlfriend. Dean thinks it over. Nora mentions her newfound encouragement to feel angry about the situation to Dean. She gets support from Dean and they decide not to sell the house for the time being. Duke offers to watch the house for them during the nights. The couple is relieved for him to be taking such responsibility.
Dean meets with Andrew. The guy looks like he has been through a lot and narrates his tragic stay at the house. Before that, he asks Dean not to waste any more time and just leave the house as soon as possible. Dean’s wife, Rosie, was a cellist. Once they had Caleb, they moved out to the suburbs for a change. The move affected Rose and she rediscovered her force in life. Everything changed when they met Mitch and Mo. Rose started to go through the same episodes that Dean has gone through in the house. Andrew was forced into leaving Caleb with the next-door couple.
One day, Caleb said to his father that he saw a bunch of old people in Mo and Mitch’s living room wearing red robes and standing in a circle. They had sacrificed a new-born baby and were drinking its blood. Andrew then learned of a three-month baby who went missing from Stanford, confirming his theory.
And then, the letters started coming. The cops did not believe them. Mo and Mitch stared at them all day. The letters started getting more violent by the day and drove him mad. One day, Rose narrates an incident where Mo comes out through tunnels or something in the house and drinks blood from Caleb’s hand when he cut himself. After that, they left the house. But soon enough, Rose committed suicide. Dean is conflicted about whether to believe him or not. The accounts seem incredulous almost but they are crazy enough to be true in this kind of setting. Duke and Ellie make out when he is watching the house. They speculate it could be Mo and Mitch behind all the trouble.
In the morning, pearl notices workers outside the house and calls Mo, who goes over to confront Dean. The Italian is stout in talking back to her and says he can do whatever he wants in the house. He also jokes about Mo getting Melanoma from getting too much sun, something that gets her emotional. When he goes to work, Dean learns that someone else has been made partner ahead of him. He is furious but his boss tells him his focus has been off work in the last 3-4 years. He has slacked off. Dean hears gunshots that night but thinks they are just dreams. The family returns the next day and when they hear ambulances outside the house, Nora and Dean go out to inspect.
Mitchell and Mo are both dead. The former killed himself first and then murdered his wife. Their son blames Dean for making them feel out of place. He is also mentioned in their note. The family sans Dean goes back to the motel. That night, the alarm blares as Dean investigates. When he looks out the window, he sees a smiling Jasper standing outside and then walking back to his house.
The Episode Review
What is wrong with these people?! I doubt anyone has seen a weirder bunch on screen unless the genre was sci-fi. This is a true crime drama and the true crime in The Watcher is not seeing more of Jennifer Coolidge. The magnificent Jennifer Coolidge is perhaps not shaping up to be her usual chirpy, goofy self. She is straight as an arrow in identifying and then working toward what she wants. Karen will definitely be an important part of things going ahead. We still do not know if she is involved in the bid to remove the Brannocks from the house.
The unreliable narrator syndrome has caught on fervently until now. Everyone is under the scanner and in the traditional whodunit style, we now even have a PI to spice things up. This show is shaping up to be a compelling mystery with moving parts about family dynamics and the idea of drowning oneself with paranoia. The Watcher has the sensation of every house intrusion movie where you have no idea how and when will the intruder strike. Or if they will at all.
Can Dean be called an anti-hero at this point? I am not sure about it but strongly lean in favour. He is lining up to do more damage than good to the family and his fracturing relationships in the sinking boat that is his family is not a great sight. The Watcher has me hooked and who knows where will this crazy ride take us?
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(4)
Hi Arnav!!
So glad to hear that you enjoyed hearing some of my thoughts as much as I did yours! I just finished watching episodes 3 and 4. I came back here because I wanted to read your recaps of those before I move on to ep. 5. I’m definitely planning on sharing my thoughts in the comments after I get done reading them, but I promise I won’t do anymore unsolicited proofreading – or, maybe I better change that to a promise to keep it to a minimum 🙂 Thanks for not taking it the wrong way. And I’m glad you liked that last line…..you said that I seem like an interesting person, and as far as I’m concerned, the fact that you both noticed AND understood the joke I ended with tells me all I need to know that you are almost certainly a person I would enjoy conversing with. A million years ago, my lifelong best friend and I came up with this phrase to describe someone who has a certain type of intelligence. Not necessarily book smart…the type of smart it’s referring to has zero correlation with any level of formal education. Actually, it’s far less about “smart”, more about perceptive, insightful, quick witted, understanding nuance, etc. We would say of such a person “he/she gets the joke”. As in, I might say to her “I got dragged to an awful party last night full with some of the most vapid people I’ve met, but the night turned around when I bumped into an old acquaintance I hadn’t seen in ages. Although we hadn’t been close friends, I knew him and liked him well enough that I was immediately relieved to see him knowing that I’d at least have someone there to converse with. He gets the joke. He was likely the ONLY person there who gets the joke, besides me , of course!” Typically, the “joke” being referenced is not actually a literal joke of course. It’s meant as a metaphor for a much broader understanding. After I read your first two recaps and your insightful reviews, I already had the sense that you were someone who “gets the joke”. But then, just in case there was any doubt in my mind at all, in this specific instance there just so happened to be a literal joke at the end that I think would have been lost on or simply gone completely unnoticed by most people. You saw it and understood it, therefore you must not be most people. You got the joke, so you get the joke, got it?
Hey Emilynn,
I cannot thank you enough for making the time and reading my article. Comments like these are what keep me going. They mean a lot. Thanks again. Completely agree with your remarks. The analysis seems to be spot-on, re Ellie and the lipstick and other points about Dean. Re the second paragraph, you are right again. My bad. I recapped the entire series together and missed out on Dakota being called Duke. Apologies for that. Hahaha, the last line is absolute gold!
You seem like an interesting person. 🙂
Hopefully, you liked the show too.
Regards,
Arnav
Thank you! You did a great job recapping this episode, but I gotta say I enjoyed reading about your overall thoughts/feelings/impressions in “The Episode Review” even more. You had some great insights that made me want to go back and re-examine everything. I particularly liked what you said about the idea of the unreliable narrator and Dean as an anti-hero. I had not yet thought of it in those terms, but I totally agree that he is definitely going to do more harm than good to his family, despite his “good” intentions and mentioning several times his specific desire to keep his family safe. I put “good” in quotation marks because while he is clearly telling himself that he is only doing what is best for his family, you don’t have to look too hard to find an ulterior self-serving motive behind a lot of his actions. For example, when he gets mad at Ellie over the lipstick, he tries to make it seem like his only concern is for his daughter and that he doesn’t want her growing up too fast or for her to be overly sexualized as she’s still just 15-16 years old. However, not only is his anger WAY too harsh and totally disproportionate to the situation- a 15 year old girl putting on a little lipstick does not warrant anywhere near the level of aggression he displays – I’m absolutely certain that it is way more about his own fears and shortcomings than it is about keeping Ellie safe. He wants her to remain a little girl and he doesn’t know how to adjust to her becoming a woman and it’s stirring up a whole bunch of uncomfortable emotions in him, but instead of 1) being honest with himself and his wife and kids, 2) facing his fears and challenges head on like a man, and 3) working together with his family towards a solution that will likely require a good deal of compromising on his part, he goes into a fit of rage over half a tube of used lipstick.
Anyway, thanks for sharing your review and your thoughts and another big thank you for listening to mine. Real quick before I submit this, though, there are a couple of relatively small things I noticed when I read this that I think are inaccurate, and while they certainly aren’t huge or anything, to me they are significant enough to that if someone noticed something like it in something I wrote, I’d want them to tell me so I could edit it. I definitely do not mean any offense at all and I hope you don’t take it that way. First, the young guy that runs the security company and has a budding relationship with the daughter…his name is definitely Dakota. You call him Duke in at least 2 places I saw. At first I was racking my brain trying to remember who Duke was lol! Second, right after you say that Mitchell and Mo are dead, it says “the former killed himself first and then murdered his wife”. I had to re-read that sentence a couple times because I think you meant to say the opposite, it doesn’t make sense the way it it. He can’t possibly have killed himself first THEN killed his wife. He’d have been dead! Can’t kill anyone if you’re dead. I think it should say “the former murdered his wife and then killed himself”. Ok, that’s it! I apologize if I seem like the grammar police….not my intention. But, after all, what did we just learn about good intentions??