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Love & Death Recap: A Husband Should Be Home

Season 1 Episode 4 Editor’s Rating3 stars ***

Photo: Jake Giles Netter/HBO/JAKE GILES NETTER The previous episode of Love & Death left off with an ax looming in the foreground. We all know what Chekhov said about an ax looming in the foreground of the final scene of an episode of true-crime prestige TV: It’s an opportunity to tease a sense of dread out of the audience while tacitly insisting that this isn’t Dateline NBC territory. (Chekhov was remarkably prescient in this regard.) Accordingly, “Do No Evil” walks us right up to the moment of Betty Gore’s death without actually showing it onscreen. At least, not yet.

Instead, the episode opens with what feels like aftermath: There’s a grieflike haze to the way Betty reacts to the confirmation of her husband’s affair with her friend, Candy. She cycles through a series of seemingly contradictory phases and instincts. She holds an ax, then puts it down; she tells Candy she never wants to see her again, which she then extrapolates to Candy keeping Betty’s daughter Alyssa with the Montgomery family overnight, as planned; she goes to fetch a towel for her daughter’s swimsuit and reminds Candy to bring peppermints as a reward for Alyssa’s swim lesson; and then, when Candy literally reaches out for a final apology, Betty flies into a violent rage. She picks the ax back up and a struggle between the two women ensues.

Whatever then transpires between Candy and Betty, however, is partially omitted, with a cut to a ringing phone and Allan on the other end, then a child across the street blowing on a pinwheel as Candy emerges, roughly showered (as we saw in the first episode), but with some blood still dripping from her hairline. She seems to need to remind herself how to drive a car before pulling away. For reasons not entirely clear, the neighborhood kid then goes across the street and rings the Gore doorbell, with only dogs barking and the Gore baby crying as a response.

The episode returns to Betty’s death a few minutes later, with flashes of blood splatter (and a shot of Candy swinging that ax) running through Candy’s head as she zones out at a stop sign on her way home. Candy has taken over the shell shock from Betty and integrates the post-murder chores — washing her stained clothes, taking a proper shower, finding an excuse for her lateness in meeting the kids at vacation bible school — into her busy day. By the time she gets to the church, she’s already circling through her overthought and under-rehearsed alibi just a little too often: She was at Betty Gore’s, they got to talking, she thought she had time to swing by Target to get some Father’s Day cards, she realized her watch had stopped and she was late to meet the kids.

Meanwhile, the Gore-residence phone keeps ringing without her: Allan is trying to reach his wife and increasingly (albeit quietly) panicked about her not picking up. He sends a neighbor over to knock on the door to no avail. He doggedly keeps at it, eventually gathering a multitude of neighbors and asking them to get into the house however they can manage. What the trio find is, as we expect, horrific: a dead Betty, a crying (but still alive) baby, and a whole lot of blood.

The revelation that Betty has been murdered — first presumed shot, eventually corrected when the police show up and examine the scene — places both Candy and Allan in different, strange types of limbo. Candy must feign shock and sadness as Allan asks her to keep Alyssa for another few days while he makes his way home from his work trip; playing the part of concerned friend also means being part of the discomfiting and intimate moment when Allan arrives home and must tell his oldest child that her mother is dead. When Candy joins Allan and Alyssa in their embrace, is she playing her part with unnerving skill or feeling a genuine sense of loss over her horrific actions?

Before Allan gets back to his family, he’s stuck in a numb helplessness as he can only receive information on the phone, unable to take much additional action beyond trudging his way through travel routines that can’t be sped up. He’s trapped in a limbo based on what he knows, with devastating clarity, was Betty’s most paranoid fear, now come true: “She always said I should be here … a husband should be at home,” he laments, and while Betty’s fervent wish that he could always stay home with his family wasn’t necessarily realistic, it does seem inarguable — almost more than he realizes in the moment — that if he had been closer at hand, Betty would not be dead.

I wish Love & Death were digging more into these strange, tragic passages that seem to scramble up everyday life: Allan living through a nightmare unfolding from an impossible distance; the happiness Alyssa will temporarily experience on her extended movie night and sleepover with family friends who won’t retain that status for long; Candy forcing herself to sublimate her guilt into “normal” pain, adding a series of calculations onto her list of domestic tasks. There are moments where the show drifts into this more psychological territory before snapping back into methodical-procedure mode. The unease is too palpable and the acting too strong for Love & Death to become altogether routine or boring. But the somewhat workmanlike exploration of this crime’s aftermath evokes a familiar sensation: that of TV movie material being buffed up with a prestige sheen. As a commenter pointed out last week, this story did inspire a 1990 movie-of-the-week, with Barbara Hershey as the murderous “Candy Morrison.” At some point, it feels like this show should add more to the true-crime formula than its evocative episode-closers and hints at something more complicated beneath the surface.

“Do No Evil” doesn’t quite excavate whatever’s buried there, and the episode becomes more perfunctory in its second half. Candy’s repeated recitation of her morning as the last — oh, excuse her, second-to-last — person to see Betty alive pays off as she gives that same story to the police. However, close-ups of her tensely entwined hands reveal her anxiety over the big lie. Allan, too, lies to the police in his customarily unshowy, plainspoken way: He neglects to admit that he had an affair with Candy (or anyone else). These deceptions keep Candy and Allan up at night, but only one does anything about it: Allan calls the cops late that night to correct the record and reveal his indiscretion with Candy. Candy, however, lies motionless but awake in bed, as if straining hard enough will allow her to overhear the beginnings of murmurings about her guilt.

Love Notes

• Soundtrack watch: There’s mordant humor in how a post-murder Candy switches on the car radio, hears exactly one utterance of “Oow! Ma-ma-ma-my Sharona,” and decides that now is not the time, the Knack. In general, this episode feels less soundtrack happy than the first three; songs like “Queen of Hearts” by Juice Newton and “Sunday Girl” by Blondie accompany Candy’s uneasy drives around town; they don’t overlap into other scenes, which mostly rely on the show’s quiet, tense musical score.

• Period watch: As if to rebuke stereotypes about tawdry or violent TV movies that this show so clearly recalls, the old-fashioned big-screen cinema of 1980 is depicted as, if not exactly a cesspool of depravity, certainly liable to disturb anyone with real-life violence already on the mind. Candy goes to the movies with her family, and there is a brief moment we see her watching the scene from The Empire Strikes Back in which Luke slices open the belly of a tauntaun, exposing its guts. (In the movie, it’s a survival move, perhaps reflecting Candy’s mentality about her crime.) Later, a newspaper ad for The Shining is complemented by a minor character talking about seeing it just before witnessing the Gore crime scene, giving him the heebie-jeebies. Fun fact: While this show takes place several weeks into their theatrical runs, Empire Strikes Back and The Shining really were released on the same Memorial Day weekend in 1980. Release patterns being what they were 43 years ago, it makes sense that they wouldn’t be premiering in the Wylie, Texas, area until a few weeks later.

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