RaveDash

I have a theory that’s not exactly about the mystery but is more of a meta-mystery: Do you think this show was maybe supposed to be eight episodes long and they just … stopped writing it? Because boy do we have a LOT of unsolved mysteries at the end of this series, and that’s before we get to the main event. Who was living in the basement tunnels? Was John Graff a real person or was he actually a Bill and either way what the hell did he mean when he told Pearl “they’re onto us?” Will it ever matter that the DNA of the Watcher-envelope-licker was a woman? Why did we have to talk about LLCs 10,000 times if they were never going to matter? If Theodora’s entire explanation was, as her daughter says, untrue, who was Little Miss Pigtails and how did she get into the Brannocks’ house? And did she really gaslight Andrew Pierce into believing he’d been Watchered or was he telling the truth or was he lying but for reasons independent of Theodora? I don’t know but perhaps in the act of recapping we will answer some of these important questions for ourselves!

Even though we haven’t seen Nora do much of anything except wrap herself in camel-toned shawls, she is the It Girl of the pottery world. Her pieces are moving like hotcakes and she’s getting invited to two Basels. The art world is simply mad for pottery the color of pizza crust. Dean isn’t at her show because they still feel uneasy leaving the kids home alone, and also he feels like a failure for bailing on the house (and I assume losing his job? We never see him go to work again.) Nobody’s made an offer on the Westfield house yet, and meanwhile Dean is making a new suspect wall in the New York apartment because he can’t stop thinking about John Graff, and what if they hired a composite sketch artist, and Nora is like ENOUGH. We will NEVER KNOW. Is this Ryan Murphy yelling at us through the screen to prepare us for his failure to bring his series to a satisfying and cohesive conclusion? Probably!

Dean and Nora go visit Theodora, who has been removed from the trial and will likely die soon. I will admit I thought her cancer was a hoax but apparently it’s one of the only things she was telling the truth about. In a moment alone with Nora, Theodora learns that Dean can’t let go of not knowing who the Watcher is, and this supposedly inspires Theodora to spend her final days on this planet not cooing over her granddaughter, bonding with her daughter, performing jazz one more time, etc. etc. but instead coming up with an elaborate explanation for how she, Theodora, was the Watcher, just so Dean, an idiot she barely knows, can know peace after she is dead.

Nora spots a “Page Six” story about new Watcher letters being sent to former Watcher suspects, letters that reached Westfield through a Manhattan processing facility, because of course Dean is sending them. Dean is so unfathomably stupid I simply cannot care about what happens to him. Like at LEAST go to another borough to mail the letters? To be honest it would have been way more interesting if he had ended the series in prison for all of his casual felonies (false police reports, harassment, etc.), a nice downfall from “man who thought he could have his dream house” to “man in a cell with no countertops whatsoever.” Tragically, we’ll be denied this arc, and he’ll end the series a free man. “You’re just making everything so much worse,” Nora tells him, which is one of the only astute observations she has ever made. But will she divorce him? It appears not.

Remember how Nora and Dean didn’t feel safe leaving their kids alone? Well as soon as Nora goes out with a friend so Dean can think about what he’s done, Dean abandons his children to go to Theodora’s bedside, where she gives this dramatic, made-up confession, claiming that she is the one who sold the Brannocks their house. She’d wanted to live there so badly, she bought it, she joined the country club, then she got sick and the only doctor who would treat her was so expensive she had to sell the house, but then she found out her shitty ex-husband had hidden away $1.4 million and also he died at some point so anyway the thing is she didn’t need to sell the house after all. For the umpteenth time in this series, someone will say that what was happening to them felt like a prank. In the end, all she needed to do to get her house back was convince the Brannocks to sell.

Does Dean even do a modicum of fact-checking? It would be VERY easy to find out if this fabulously dressed Black woman had ever belonged to that lily-white country club, for starters. But no, Dean believes every single syllable and reports it all to Nora. (This is why Randy made partner!)

Dean shows up at M&M’s with flowers on a bright new day. Mitch died of an embolism so it’s just Mo, dressed eerily like Nora in a white button-down and khakis. No more jumpsuits, I guess? What is THAT about? She accepts Dean’s apology, having reached a sort of Zen state after going through so much violent what-the-fuckery with her family. But when Dean tells her that the Watcher was Theodora, Mo reports that the people who sold the Brannocks their house were Samantha and Ted Forest, and that a Black woman never lived there and certainly Theodora was never a member of the country club. Duh!

So Nora and Dean go to Theodora’s funeral where they ask her daughter what was up with the whole deathbed-confession-I-am-the-Watcher thing. Sort of an inappropriate place for this conversation but the daughter doesn’t seem to mind. She says it was Theodora’s way of appeasing the Brannocks and solving One Last Case, but yeah it was all made up. You can tell because of how made-up it all sounds.

We are to believe that even without this real closure, the Brannocks are moving on. Ellie is still texting Dakota. Carter, who we have only seen playing soccer in the yard alone, somehow made the basketball team. Nora cannot allow her son to have even one moment of attention so she’s like, well enough about you we got an offer from (major eye roll) an LLC.

Now for a meeting of the EXPANDED Westfield Preservation Society: Maureen, Roger Kaplan, and “John Graff” who introduces himself as William Webster and says he goes by Bill and only moved to Westfield in 1995. Did John Graff move back to town after changing his identity? Was there ever a John Graff?? Will the show give us any indication that it has the answers to those questions???

Roger thinks John-Bill looks familiar but Pearl and John-Bill insist the only place they could’ve ever seen him is at the public library. Roger, who has taught in Westfield for I guess ten centuries and never forgets a name or a face, asks, “How’s your family, Bill?” in a very suggestive manner, but again we will never follow up on this, we must let it go, the answers we seek are nowhere to be found, they are lost in the labyrinthine prohibition tunnels that ties all these neighbors together. Jasper interrupts by banging his gavel very hard and letting everyone know that the new next-door neighbor is putting big slabs of pink marble into the kitchen. John-Bill pretends he’s only been in the house one time a hundred years ago and that he knows the countertops should be “polished black walnut,” and even though the Society does not have jurisdiction over the interiors they WILL be making a strong suggestion. I have never thought about countertops and dumbwaiters this much in my entire life!!

Everybody playing along at home knows who the new owner is, given her noted love of the color pink, but in case you didn’t pick up on it we see Karen pacing the kitchen of her new house. “A single girl taking care of herself,” she says, but she’s not alone: Nora is there. Sigh. Nora accuses Karen of having been the Watcher. I’m not saying I’d be amazing at threatening somebody, but I’ve never seen a less intimidating intimidation scene in all my days of television-watching. Like, “I will be watching?” Nora, get new material.

Pearl and Mo pop over to greet Karen and presumably shame her for her tacky interior design, but Karen basically just shuts the door in their face. That night, though, spooky things start happening to her: The bathtub is overflowing with piping hot water, leaking through to the floor beneath; the phone rings but when she picks up, nobody is there. She calls Detective Chamberlain who is none too pleased to hear from his ex who said she could get along fine without him (“Don’t even bother calling 911,” he says … Westfield Police Department just getting the gold star treatment here, super flattering, they must love this).

Baron the dog is barking up a storm in the basement. Was HE the dog that was barking in the distance this whole time?? We’ll never know! Anyway, Karen can’t find whoever he is barking at and just as she lies down to sleep the dumbwaiter DINGS. Is it the spirit of Sprinkles the ferret? No, it’s one of those silver food domes. All I can hear is that TikTok audio “I hope you’re hungry … for nothing.” But it’s a letter from the Watcher. Karen runs downstairs and when she gets there, Baron the dog is DEAD and there is a hooded figure behind her. WHO is the figure?? We never find out. She escapes and sprints down the street in her bare feet.

We next see Dean in therapy, where his facade of “I’m doing great” crumbles under virtually no pressure at all: He is still obviously obsessed with the house, which Karen sold in like two days for $2.6 million. He admits he can’t let it go.

He drives on over to his old place and introduces himself to the new owner as “John,” pretending he lives a few blocks away. When Nora calls, Dean lies and says he’s stuck in traffic, ostensibly on the way back from a job interview. As he pulls away and rounds the corner, Nora’s car slides into his old spot. (So it looks like they got that second car after all.) She was tailing him and now she is … also watching the house? Watching him watch the house? Everyone is a watcher now?

Possibly some of you will be into this ending but I’m just going to bravely state for the record that I think it’s rude! I’m not suggesting a series like this needs to dot every “i” and close every “k” with a telltale Dean Brannock loop. But, in addition to SO many potentially interesting threads left dangling, we are left with a non-resolution that doesn’t feel like “oh, what a thoughtfully open-ended piece, how like life itself, are we not all being watched by someone while in turn being someone’s watcher.” Instead, this ending is 100 percent “are you fucking kidding me, I watched this show for nearly seven hours and you’re really just not going to tell me who the Watcher is?”

Throwing a bunch of whackadoo suspects at us is all fun and juicy for a while but a scripted mystery series that doesn’t have a real answer to its central question is just an obnoxious bait-and-switch, arguably an unforgivable sin in these days of too much content. And sure, in real life, the Watcher was never caught. But this show has deviated from the real case in about ten billion ways — would it shock you to learn, for instance, that the real case never involved a fake murder-suicide at the house next door? — so clinging to “well it’s just like in the true story!” is a total copout.

Also … it could’ve just been Darren. The realtor! He made sense! We heard about him in the first episode, which made him fair game, but only saw him once, which meant he wasn’t obvious; he had a motive (commission from the sale, profit from flipping, could’ve been something more personal if his character had been built out). It would have worked as something Karen thought they were in on together until he started terrorizing her after she moved in because he was secretly only in it for himself. And every other bizarro thing could have been the work of the neighbors toward whom Dean and Nora were never neighborly!

But alas my powers as a recapper end here, with kvetching and inviting your comments. What did you think? I’ll be watching (ugh) for your replies.

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