AFTERWARDS

As families often do, we've repaired to the parlor after dinner to braid one another's hair and play card and board games on the tables and floors. Julian Goes Fish with the Tater Tots, while Joanna and Mia peruse her latest crop of Moments.

Joanna: "These are really good! Not at all dated. But maybe you should find a safer place for your Moments or at least one for kids your age, rather than for apparently the ghosts of kids who finished high school before you were born."
Mia: "What fun would that be? I like acting all tough!"
Joanna: "You are so very like Vivian sometimes. Mostly when you say that exact same stuff and then I say this. It's comforting to have a routine. She is not your mother, she is just your sister. Don't stress out about it."
Mia: "Did you fuck my brother in the Bahamas?"
Joanna: "I wish."
Mia: "Look at this picture of Julian and Vivian together. Particularly the ring he's wearing which matches the lacerations on her dead face that he threw away at the end of the pilot."

Joanna, because she is a professional and always keeps her cool, spends about ten minutes bleakly staring across the room at a smarmy and oblivious Julian, then once everybody has noticed that she's acting super fucked up, she excuses herself, drives into the city and fucks Will with nary an explanation, and then tells him to arrest Julian for his sister's murder.

The way this is all subjectively told is beautiful, this sequence. It throbs, that headache of crazy you get when you don't want something to be true but you have to deal with it. I don't know, they got something across. It was neat. In some ways I felt like it was a clearer read on who Joanna is than all the flashbacks in the world, just this thrummy crazy WTF wub-wub-wub that got her into the car and down into the city and in bed with the guy who keeps telling her the same things over and over.

NEXT WEEK

Joanna goes in wired for Julian's confession, which means Will gets to hear her sleep with him, but also hear her get murdered by Julian because she thought the most appropriate time to ask him about murdering his sister is while he's chopping peppers with a massive knife. I dunno. The whole thing with the Will/Julian love triangle would be a lot less icky if 1) Julian were a lot less icky, 2) Will were a lot less invested in telling Joanna what to do for such personally transparent reasons and 3) It wasn't explicitly laid out that Joanna's entire identity is constellated around what dick is where.