Deception - Season 1 Episode 2 - Recap and Review - Nothing's Free, Little Girl
Recap and review of Deception - Season 1 Episode 2 - Nothing's Free, Little Girl
The pilot of Deception was among the roughest premieres I'd encountered in the 2012-2013 TV season. Almost nothing about it worked. Yet I went back and gave it a rewatch in preparation for tonight's episode, "Nothing's Free, Little Girl". And...well, it still sucked, but I could at least get a better sense of what the show was trying to do. It seemed silly at the time for the show to introduce a potential ally for Joanna (Meagan Good) only to kill him off ten minutes later, but it was all in service of crafting a palpable sense of dread. Now, this sense of dread wasn't really in evidence in any of the other parts of the episode, as the menace of the Bowers family doesn't seem real yet. It just seems anecdotal. However, the idea that the murder of the paparazzo is somehow linked to the death of Vivian Bowers (Bree Williamson) is just enough to get the audience to worry about just what Joanna is getting herself into, and I can appreciate that. Hell, there's a lot I can appreciate about this show: its lavish sets, its elegant photography, and its immensely talented cast. Even the Chinatown-like twist at the end of the premiere, in which we learn that Mia (Ella Rae Peck) isn't Vivian's little sister, but the daughter she had as a teenager, helped keep the pilot from being a total misfire. But much of what was problematic about the pilot remains in evidence in its second episode, from the one-note characterizations to the needlessly elaborate plot. With that in mind, the episode does do a lot of things better than this week, with regards to the story, as it opens up a window of possibilities that could make this show compulsively watchable as a mystery. I'm still willing to give the show leeway. It's early in the season, and I imagine many of the people being presented as likely culprits are merely red herrings, with their own back stories and motivations that will help flesh out their personalities. But man, that is a lot of leeway to give.
Credit: Myles Aronowitz/NBC
So in last week's premiere, FBI agent Will Moreno (Las Alonso) sent his ex-partner/ex-girlfriend Joanna into the belly of the beast, so to speak, in order to find something that can connect the Bowers family to the murder of their sister and daughter, who was about to make public a damaging secret about the family's pharmaceutical company. As Vivian's former best friend, Joanna feels an obligation to uncover the truth, which leads her down the proverbial rabbit hole into the heart of the Bowers empire, landing a job in the company at the insistence of family patriarch Robert (Victor Garber). Now firmly ensconced in the Bowers family circle, Joanna must learn the truth while maintaining her cover backstory (that of an abused wife looking for a fresh start). Joanna, however, runs into considerable opposition from Robert's "too obviously evil to actually be evil" eldest son Edward (Tate Donovan), and his passive-aggressive second wife, Sophia (Katherine LaNasa), neither of whom want her around, and both of whom are suspicious of her presence.
Credit: David Giesbrecht/NBC
We pick up with Will being given three days to find something of worth in the Bowers case, or the investigation will be closed. He puts pressure on Joanna to find something, especially since the coroner is leaning towards declaring Vivian's death an accident. He encourages her to look into Edward, who was once accused of strangling a young woman. Strengthening the likelihood of his involvement is the explosiveness of his temper, as evidenced by his fight with another parent at his kid's soccer game over being called a murderer. Joanna has an unsettling conversation with Edward, who addresses the accusations levied against him about the woman he allegedly strangled, and there's a sense of sarcasm armoring him as a coping mechanism. In many ways, the episode is about coping mechanisms. Take Julian (Wes Brown), for example, who parties his ass off as a means of getting over the twin hardships of loss and scandal surrounding his beloved sister's death. At this point, it wouldn't surprise me to learn that his ardent attempts to score with Joanna is yet another facet of that approach. Joanna represents the last lingering sense of connection Julian has with his sister (well, unless he knows that Mia is actually his niece and not his youngest sister), so it's strangely, almost creepily, in character for him to lavish so much attention on her, going so far to gift Joanna a Mercedes. However, what's most interesting about Julian's self-destructive path is in the vagueness of its motivation: he could be partying to bury the pain of losing his sister, or he could be burying the shame and guilt of having killed her, or knowing who did. There's a variety of directions this story could go, and that's one of the saving graces of the series as a whole, the variety of outcomes to this whodunit.
Credit: David Giesbrecht/NBC
But Joanna has more going on that just Julian's over flirtations, as it's her first day at the family business, and there's intrigue afoot. Joanna overhears a threat from Robert's copy editor, Hannah (Claire Byrne), with whom the Bowers patriarch has been having an affair. She gives him an ultimatum: either she gets a better position within the company, or she goes to the cops and tells them what really happened the night Vivian died. Robert doesn't take her threats seriously, yet Hannah seems intent on following through. To this end, Joanna tries to get to the bottom of the identity of Robert's source in the research unit of the company. The man in question is Ben Preswick (Tom Lipinski), the father of the child Vivian was carrying at the time of her death, with whom she made the sex tape we saw last week (though not the one Mia's classmate confessed to jerking it to this week - it's important to make such distinctions).
Credit: NBC
This is hardly the first revelation about Vivian we discover this week, as Sophia has a flashback to the day when Vivian threatened to tell Mia the truth about her parentage, a flashback spurred by Mia flipping out on her "mother" for getting rid of all of Vivian's personal belongings (Sophia's rationale: she has no intention of living in "The Vivian Bowers Museum"). However, for every bit of Vivian's sexual history that gets fleshed out, we get another kernel of Joanna's, as a flashback reveals that Joanna's mother caught her in bed with Julian. I imagine this is the reason (or one of the reasons), Joanna came to leave the Bowers family, when taken with the reveal last week of how Vivian and Joanna's friendship ended. But Mia is the least of Sophia's problems. Hannah confronts the latest Mrs. Bowers and reveals the affair, which Sophia laughs off. Snapping from the full force of being ignored, Hannah calls Will and tells him she's ready to come clean. But Robert takes care of that, bullying Hannah into silence by having his associate bludgeon her brother to within an inch of his life. Back to the drawing board for Will. And added pressure on Joanna to dig up more substantial evidence.
Credit: NBC
"Nothing's Free, Little Girl" doesn't exactly fix any of the big problems from last week's premiere, but it does hint at a better show somewhere under all this flat characterization and cliche writing. The show can only get stronger as it goes on, and finds its voice as a serialized mystery. Honestly, if they have a compelling solution to the mystery, along with twists and turns that make sense, then 90% of the work will have been done, because I don't know that this is a show that's been sold to the public on its strong, nuanced characterizations. I think people just want a good mystery, well-told, and with a bit of sex and scandal. It doesn't have to be Mad Men or Breaking Bad. Hell, it doesn't even have to be Revenge. If Deception can just be Deception, and embrace all its inherently soapy embellishments while still telling a compelling mystery, it will have succeeded where other shows have failed. And that's really the best endorsement I can give to the show right now.
http://www.springboardplatform.com/mediaplayer/springboard/video/daem008/365/642555/