Mare of Easttown is a 2021 HBO series starring Kate Winslet.
0 out of 10 stars. This is really sloppily written by a white male writer with Mommy issues. It’s very misogynistic too, like many of HBO’s series. I really don’t know why they keep making this crap.
Episode 5 Illusions
*Graphic violence*
This episode is hard to watch because Zabel is senselessly murdered for, frankly, being incredibly stupid.
Betty Carroll, the old woman who keeps calling Mare about a prowler, dies in a tragic car accident when she has a heart attack. She hits an electric pole and takes out most of the town’s electricity. At Betty’s funeral, her husband confesses to having an affair with Helen.
In therapy Mare tells Dr. Graham that her dad killed himself. He’d have depressive episodes and Helen would make him go live with his brother until he was over it. Then he’d come back. Until eventually he killed himself. Kevin had the same depression and he killed himself too. Now she’s worried that Drew has it because he’s showing the same tics that Kevin had.
Kenny asks Lori and John Ross (his cousin) to raise Erin’s son DJ while he’s in prison for shooting Dylan.
Mare discovers that when Erin was 14 and her mom died, the Ross family (Pat and his sons John and Billy) had Kenny and Erin spend the summer with them at a family reunion. During that time she also lived for a while with John and with Billy. This was in 2017.
Briana can’t get into college with her criminal record (yay), so she plans on going to beauty school to become a hairdresser. Dylan dumps her and she gets angry, so she tells him she knows he went somewhere that night Erin was killed. She woke and he was gone.
Katie tells Missy that another girl was there before her–Hilary. Hilary got pregnant and the kidnapper got really angry, so he took her and she never returned. So she’s probably dead.
Mare meets with a retired hooker named Tammy who she’s friends with. A year ago, after Katie went missing, Mare gave her Katie’s photo and asked her to ask around. No one recognized Katie. She does the same thing with Katie’s photo again, Erin’s photo, and Missy’s photo. She recognizes Missy. She worked on the riverside. So Tammy asks around if any of the girls who work the riverside have seen Missy or had problem johns.
A boy throws food at Moira (Lori and John’s down’s syndrome daughter) at middle school, so Ryan (her brother) beats him up with a lunch food tray. 🙂 You go, Ryan. Lori asks him if John is having an affair again. He nods. With the same woman as before, someone named Sandra. Lori kicks John out and he goes to live with his dad Pat where his brother Billy is also living.
Mare goes on a date with Zabel, but he tanks it by telling her all the negative things his mom said about her. He’s pretty immature for a guy in his forties. She gets up, pays for her food, and leaves maturely. Before she leaves, however, she tells him he should call a detective in Melville about a missing girl there named Hilary who was like Katie and Missy.
Helen invites Carrie over to learn Drew’s routines and Carrie gives him a bath.
Jess, Dylan, and some black kid go to steal Erin’s money for DJ’s ear surgery. She has it hidden in her new hiding spot which Jess deliberately lied about. She told Mare the old hiding spot. While Dylan burns the journals and steals the money, Jess tears out one page and keeps it.
Mare sees a prowler outside in Betty Carroll’s neighborhood. She chases him and tackles him. It’s a 77 old man with Alzheimer’s who forgets where he lives so he peeks in his neighbor’s houses.
Deacon Mark gets beat up outside a diner by a young group of thugs. Father Dan tries helping him then Mark confesses that he gave Erin a lift the night she was murdered and he dumped her bike in the river. She had him drop her off at Brandywine Park, but he doesn’t know who she was meeting, only that she was angry.
Mare takes Zabel to meet Tammy who has a girl who was strangled and almost kidnapped/killed by a john near the river. She says when she got in his van, he immediately strangled her. She fought back then passed out. When she woke, he was injured, so she got away and took down the first three numbers of the license plate. It was a blue work van and the man smoked Winstons like her grandmother. Zabel runs the plates and they wait 2 hours for the results. They talk about their disastrous date and Zabel tells her he never solved the Upper Darby case of the missing 10 year old girl. It was her neighbor and his alibi fell apart when the family of the missing girl hired a retired cop. The retired cop tried calling Zabel and Zabel ignored him. Then Zabel finally stopped by the cop’s house and his sister was cleaning up his stuff. Turns out he was dying. There’s a folder named COLIN ZABEL, so Zabel takes it and it lays out the entire case. Zabel took the credit rather than giving it to the dead cop and the neighbor confessed to killing the girl. :0 So she tells him about planting drugs in Carrie’s car. :0 Colin kisses her then he gets the call back on the partial plates: it matches 7 people.
Mare and Zabel go knocking on the doors of the blue van owners that match the partial plates. Number 3 is Wayne Potts and he lives in a house connected to Bennie’s Tavern. He has loud music playing and a pack of Winstons on the coffee table. Mare asks him to turn down the music. While he’s out of the room, Zabel points out the Winstons. Mare points out that she does NOT have a gun. Meanwhile, Missy and Katie hear the music get shut off and that there are people in the house with the kidnapper. Potts is in the other room turning down the music AND getting a gun. When he comes back out with Mare and Zabel, the pipe along the wall begins violently shaking. Mare keeps waiting for Zabel to draw his gun, but he does nothing. This goes on for three very long minutes in which Mare tries talking to Potts to keep him calm. Then Zabel finally pulls his gun too late. Potts shoots him in the head dead. He shoots at Mare as she’s running and hits her in the wrist.
Bernie’s Tavern is under construction. There is no way out, only upstairs. So Mare runs through the construction and up the stairs right to where Katie and Missy are being held. There’s a thick sheet of plastic on the window so they can see her and she can see them. She texts 9-1-1 the address and “officer down”. She hides when she realizes Potts has cameras everywhere including upstairs. He can see everything she’s doing and everywhere she’s going. When he comes upstairs and begins shooting, she comes up behind him with an iron griddle and hits him over the head twice. Then she runs downstairs with him chasing after her. She reaches Zabel and his gun and shoots Potts four times when he enters the room shooting. He dies. She lives. Multiple police cars arrive within seconds.
Although tragic this was the best episode of the season. Wish they were all written at least this well and maybe better.
0 out of 10 stars. Sloppy writing. Potts was pulled out of the air at the last minute. Seriously. No clues getting there either. if not for the hooker who escaped Potts they would never have gotten anywhere on this. Is the writer trying to say Pennsylvania cops are incompetent? Or is he just a bad writer?
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