Cruel Summer Recap: Hot-Girl Summer

Cruel Summer Recap: Hot-Girl Summer,So the douche gene didn’t skip Luke after all. A recap of ‘The Plunge,’ episode six of season two of ‘Cruel Summer’ on Freeform and Hulu.

Cruel Summer Recap: Hot-Girl Summer

Season 2 Episode 6 Editor’s Rating3 stars ***

Photo: Ricardo Hubbs/Freeform Okay, now I’m really confused. Does Megan know how Luke died or does she not? Because one minute she’s stashing and disposing of floral sheets stained with his blood (we assume) and the next she’s going all Harriet the Spy and compiling evidence that Isabella is a teen serial killer. Unfortunately, the July 1999 and December 1999 scenes in “The Plunge” continue to offer very little insight into the circumstances of Luke’s death, which is still the show’s central mystery, believe it or not.

What we have learned is that Luke died on New Year’s, which would be about a day after his first act of real shittiness on this show — telling Megan that Isabella kissed him but he rejected her, when it was really the other way around. We also know from an earlier episode that Izzie found Megan’s positive pregnancy test on New Year’s Eve, so maybe Sheriff Myer was on to something after all when he thought the pregnancy had something to do with Luke’s murder.

But then again, maybe not, because suddenly Megan is as busy trying to solve the murder as anybody else. She begins July 30, 2000, having somehow hacked into the St. Bart’s police department’s sealed records of their investigation into Lisa’s death, with the help of a new laptop and her highly sketchy “friend” Ned. According to Megan’s ill-gotten documents, witnesses claimed Isabella convinced a very drunk Lisa to go swimming one night, and the two were heard arguing in the water before Lisa ultimately drowned.

Says Megan to Debbie, “A falling-out with her best friend and then someone drowns. I mean it’s …”“Terrible?”“Familiar.”Dun, dun, dun.

Obviously, Isabella denies this version of events when Megan storms into her sad motel and accuses her of killing Luke just like she killed Lisa. Personally, I think it’s less likely that Isabella routinely lures former friends to their untimely watery graves than it is that the police just got the story wrong, but nobody seems keen on believing anything Iz has to say right now.

Steve and Brent Chambers have also become convinced that Isabella murdered Luke, even though they’re working with even less evidence than Megan is, and are driving around town on a rampage. First they demand to know why Sheriff Myer hasn’t thrown Isabella in jail already, and when Myer says he doesn’t have enough evidence to start arresting people willy-nilly, Steve says he’s going to hire a real investigator of his own (which is not a bad idea, to be honest). Next, Steve wants to question Megan personally, but Debbie refuses to let him put the extra judicial screws to her daughter, even though she’s got an armful of the bloody sheets Megan was hiding under Isabella’s bed.

Another question I have for Cruel Summer: Y2K is why we’re still spending so much time in July 1999 covering plot points already fully developed in scenes from December and July 2000. “The Plunge” sees the teens in the summer of ’99 celebrating Luke’s 17th birthday with a rager hosted by Megan, who shocks the whole town by wearing her hair down and thus revealing her hotness, as if none of these kids have seen She’s All That. We see that Izzie has broken up with Luke so that he and Megan can finally act on their feelings for each other (which we knew), and that Jeff is suffering from a fit of Nice Guy pique because Megan clearly has more hots for Luke than she does for him (which we knew), and that Brent hired a stripper to give his little brother a private birthday lap dance because general acts of douchiness are just how Brent shows love (which we also knew).

We did not know that the douche gene so clearly shared by Brent and Steve may not have skipped Luke after all, but it definitely shows up in the winter of 1999 scenes.

By December, Megan has been spending more and more time on her computer hacking side hustle with Ned (a.k.a. Captain Creepy) and less time with Luke and Izzie. Upon receiving Ned’s AIM summons, Megan abruptly cancels her plans to go to the Chatham Plunge — an annual polar-bear plunge she describes to Isabella as “the bomb,” which she and Luke have never missed — telling Izzie some obvious bullshit about a scholarship paperwork deadline. I can only assume Meg figures that they, being rich kids, would not understand her need to hire out her coding skills to this grown man in his secluded cabin, and that is why she hides it from them.

And so, Megan heads to the home of Ned, Chatham’s local Ted Kazinsky, without informing anyone, to help him update his home-security system ahead of Y2K. Literally everything about Ned is suspicious, from his high-tech fortress of a house to the nervous way he’s hastily unplugging monitors before Megan can get a good look at them. But Meg is so jazzed to be getting paid for her computer skills that she doesn’t even pause to consider why her mentor would need her help with such a straightforward task to begin with. Nor does she find his trophy case of failed tech products or his bitter griping about the “Chambers family dynasty” particularly noteworthy. Ned tells Megan that he got fired from his last job so now he “makes his own rules.” I mean, does Sheriff Myer know about this guy?

Anyway, left to their own devices at the Chatham Plunge, Luke and Izzie are getting slightly flirty. Or Luke is, anyway. Personally, I blame his behavior here, at least partly, on Myer, who is shaping up to be a real villain on this show. At the top of the episode, we saw Myer offering Luke this pearl of wisdom: “Don’t let people tell you what’s what. Unless it’s a beautiful woman. Then we just let them think they call the shots. But always make sure you have the final say.” So maybe this is what Luke is thinking about when he lies to Megan about kissing Isabella. We saw Luke go in for a smooch and get shut down, but he later told Megan that it was Isabella who instigated the kiss.

Sigh, and I’d so hoped that this love triangle wasn’t taking us in this direction.

Clues to Watch

• Could the floral sheets be covered in blood that was not actually Luke’s?

• Has Megan actually gotten a hold of Trevor, or was she only confronting Isabella with what she’d learned from the police reports?

• We keep hearing about this stash of Isabella’s money found in the cabin, but I’m still not clear on how that would have anything to do with the murder.

• Where are Isabella’s parents???

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