Big Sky – Monic Ductan

My boyfriend and I have started watching this show together on Tuesday nights. It’s a fun time for us. I’d forgotten how much fun it is to talk about your favorite shows with your friends. In college, I used to watch Felicity together with a friend on the phone while I lay across the single bed in my dorm and she laughed through the receiver into my ear. Fun times.

Anyway, in this episode Grace and the other two captives are able to bang a loose board long enough to allow Grace to squeeze out of the trailer. It was a pretty improbable scene, at least to my boyfriend and me. If Grace could crawl out, then why couldn’t the other two? Anyway, Grace crawls through the loose metal sheeting, and it somehow clamps back tightly together. She cant find the door that the deranged trucker uses to enter and exit the bunker, but she can find a pipe with flowing water in it. She frantically tears up the floor and finds a way into the ground just before Ronald the insane trucker bursts in and dives into the underground pipe in pursuit of her. The ground caves in between the two of them, and Ronald barely makes it out. He can’t tell if Grace has been buried alive or if she managed to crawl through to the other side.

Meanwhile, the other two girls are still trapped inside the metal trailer. Danielle screams frantically after hearing the cave-in.

Ronald confesses to Legarski that Grace is either buried alive underground or else she escaped and could be free on the other side. A peeved and worried Legarski takes off in some sort of fancy four wheeler that has a small storage thingy on the back of it just large enough to transport a body…

By this time, the drama is so intense I’m on the edge of my seat. Go, Grace, go!

Grace manages to climb completely through the underground drainage and out into the woods. She finds a fisherman in a stream and frantically tells him that she was being held captive and that others are still in captivity. Help her, please!

The fisherman looks like he wants to take her to safety, but lo and behold, Legarski spots them and pulls out a nifty crossbow and shoots the fisherman dead right in front of Grace. Wow, this is only episode three and he’s already stacked up two bodies. Grace is horrified, and Legarski, whom Grace doesn’t know and has never seen before until that point, attempts to manipulate her into thinking the fisherman was dangerous, and he even tells her he overheard her use the word “kidnap” or “captive,” and that he thought the fisherman might harm her. Grace doesn’t buy what Legarski is selling, so she shoves a fishhook into his cheek and tries to run away. Halfway up an incline littered with boulders, she’s slowed by the arrow Legarski shoots into her leg. Still, she tries to run, and he responds with an exasperated, “Are you kidding me?!” before piercing her leg with a second arrow. She appears to pass out, and he tosses her on the back of his four-wheeler.

Legarski wraps the fisherman in a plastic bag held together with duct tape. Why does he just happen to have these things on hand? How many folks will this man kill? Certainly, the fisherman’s family will scout that location in a future episode to search for their missing loved one. Legarski throws the fisherman’s body into some green, sulfur-y lake that looks like it belongs in my nightmares. Seriously, the water looks like it’s bubbling, and smoke rises above it like in those pictures you see of witches’ cauldrons.

Meanwhile, Danielle, after hearing the ground cave in and possibly kill Grace, has dried her tears. Rather than trying to squeeze out of the hole Grace climbed out of, Danielle and Jerrie share a heart-to-heart about bigotry. Jerrie admits her parents put her in therapy when she told them she was a girl. When the therapy failed to “cure” Jerrie, her parents put her out of the house when Jerrie was just fourteen years old. Jerrie reveals all of this to Danielle and they squeeze hands rather than try to escape. I appreciated that scene, but it felt like it came at the wrong time. The girls should be trying to jailbreak just then.

The best dialogue of the episode comes from Jerrie, who asks Legarski, “Aren’t you here to help us?” when he carries an injured and duct taped Grace back to the trailer dungeon while clad in his policeman’s uniform.

I’m much less invested in what Cassie and Jenny are doing. All they know so far is that they have a bad hunch about Legarski, especially after he fails to get them a search warrant for the church/cult compound that Cody was en route to on the day of his disappearance. Jenny does visit the compound, a place where young women are courted by much older men. The church security footage shows, of course, that Cody was never on the campus there at all. Jenny and Cassie are no closer to finding Cody than in the last episode. I don’t even care about Cody’s death nearly as much as I do about the kidnapped girls’ fates.

See you next week, Montana peeps.

In this episode, Ronald the-trucker-guy has our three kidnapped females in a big, metal storage trailer underground. He conspires with Legarski, the highway patrol guy, about what to do next. Legarski tells him that they can possibly sell the prostitute simply because he thinks no one will be looking for her, but he doesn’t think they can sell the other two because they look too wholesome and college-bound and that their families and friends will look for them. He turns out to be wrong later in the episode when a waitress at the local diner tells Jenny that she misses her friend Jerrie the prostitute.

Danielle catches on that Jerrie is trans. She flat out asks her if she has a penis. Jerrie confirms that she does. Later, Ronald takes Jerrie out of the metal trailer and forces her to undress and wash herself. He tells her he’ll be sending her elsewhere, which I take to mean he intends to sell her to Canada. However, once he sees her naked he decides not to send her away. I knew she was either trans or intersex in episode one, though I wondered if any of her clients ever caught on to this. Imagine if she were to solicit a man under the guise of being female. Wouldn’t that customer be disappointed to see that she has a penis? Also, I was cool with Ronald not realizing she was trans and only discovering it when he sees her in the shower, especially since she could definitely pass as a female, but I thought the moment where she pulls off her wig was a bit much. Reminds me of those movies and shows where the man in drag always takes his hair off to show that he’s really a guy. Feels unnecessary and silly to me. Hair is not what makes a person look male or female. Her strong jawline is what made me wonder if she was intersex or trans.

Grace and Cassie seem to be the two smart people on this show. Grace tries to conspire with the others to devise a plan to get them out of the trailer, though she loses her temper and head butts Ronald and only makes him angrier. At least she thinks and tries, though. The other thinker is Cassie, the detective that Legarski is sure to point out is “beautiful and black,” which, according to him, makes her a rarity in Montana. Cassie is smart in that she’s intuitive enough to realize something is not quite right about Legarski. He creeps her out and she knows from just a few minutes alone with him that he must be in on the disappearances. Still, smart as Cassie seems, she also makes some silly choices. First, she lets Legarski know that she suspects a long haul trucker might be involved in the disappearances, a detail that immediately puts Legarski on high alert. Cassie also makes the mistake of sitting out in her car to call the office secretary and tell her something isn’t right about Legarski, and she does this instead of just driving the hell outta there. Lucky her, though, Legarski realizes he can’t make her disappear in the way he did Cody, or else people will know for sure he’s in on the disappearances.

Ronald’s relationship with his mother looks crazier and crazier. In this episode, he climbs into bed with her at night because he can’t sleep. This is definitely appropriate behavior for an elementary school kid, but not for a 38-year-old man.

I’m waiting for his mother to realize that Ronald is into something illegal. Does Ronald actually carry any goods in his big truck, or is it only used to transport his kidnapping victims? Does he fail to bring home a regular check? If so, his mother would definitely notice these things.

I think the writers are getting the language wrong at times. Both Ronald and Legarski use “fixing to” at some point in episode two. I’ve never been to Montana, but I’m willing to bet my house that “fixing to” isn’t a common phrase around there. It’s a Southern dialectical phrase, at least I think it is. Perhaps the writers are Southern and trying to make these men sound folksy but are choosing the wrong phrasing at times. “Easy peasy” was a phrase that fit, but not “fixing to.”

There’s some lovely singing throughout the episode, especially at the end when the three captured women sing “Down in the River to Pray,” but the song doesn’t fit the setting. The song reminds me of Appalachia, and I would also associate it with the Southern church hymns I grew up with before I would associate it with Montana. But maybe I’m reading too much into it. Folk songs are folk songs. People around the country probably know that song, whether they’re Southern or not. Still, I love the song, and the cast “sounded” lovely as they lip-synched it.

Tag: Big Sky

Big Sky, Episode 3 (“The Big Rick”)

Big Sky, Episode 2