Big Sky, Episode 8: The End Is Near

This episode picks up right where the previous one left off. Guns drawn, Jenny and Cassie check the Legarskis’ house in search of Ronald. Cassie startles when she sees a life-size cutout of Rick Legarski in an upstairs bedroom. Though Jenny and Cassie appear to be hot on Ronald’s heels, they have no such luck of finding him. Ronald escapes through an upstairs window and the women find only the raised window and a white curtain blowing in the breeze.

I like the actors on this show, but at times the storyline doesn’t live up to the acting. For instance, why is Ronald able to hide in plain sight in this rural Montana town? I’m from a rural town in Georgia, and there’s no way my fellow townsfolk wouldn’t piece together who I am if given a photo of me. Yep, that’s right. Ronald’s picture is featured prominently in the local paper. You mean to tell me no one notices or recognizes him from a drawing that looks exactly like him? Oh, that’s right, a young boy named Erik, possibly age 10-12, recognizes Ronald when he delivers a newspaper to Ronald’s house. First of all, I wasn’t aware that kids had paper routes anymore, though that’s just probably my own ignorance. Secondly, no way would I let my son deliver papers all over town and even out on country backroads. Though I know that depraved men like Ronald exist much more rarely than crime shows would have us believe, I still wouldn’t risk it by letting my son ride around on a bike delivering papers to strangers.

Anyway, young Erik, the only person who recognizes Ronald’s face in the paper, takes Ronald’s picture and then he’s immediately grabbed when Ronald sneaks up on him from behind. Ronald puts Erik in a cage in the basement of the house Ronald shares with his recently murdered mother. In fact, mommy dearest’s corpse is also stored in one corner of this same basement.

Another dumb thing that happens is that Ronald answers his doorbell. Imagine seeing your picture in the paper, knowing the cops are searching for you, and then answering the friggin’ doorbell just like it’s any regular day. The man at the door is Ronald’s mother’s priest. How do we know? He just so happens to be wearing a white collar and carrying a bible. Ronald shouldn’t let this priest into the house. After all, he has a kidnapped boy in the basement who is able to make plenty of noise despite the masking tape on his mouth. And, of course, Ronald should be suspicious that our man of God may have seen him in the newspaper.

Regardless of how risky it all is, Ronald lets the priest into the living room. The man of the cloth tries to counsel Ronald about the “prurient” urges/desires that Ronald’s mother had confided to the priest about Ronald. But Ronald won’t listen to the minister. Instead, Ronald accuses the man of trying to drown him during his baptism years before. Jeez, Ronald. He’s sounding crazier and crazier. Earlier in this episode he even mocked his mother’s voice while cleaning the kitchen. “We keep a clean house,” he said, mimicking his mother’s nagging tone.

Anyway, the priest hears Erik screaming in the basement after Erik notices the mother’s corpse in the corner of the basement. Ronald makes some lame excuse about his dog and how he has to go down to the basement to check on it. Rather than showing the priest out of the house, Ronald leaves the priest in the living room and goes down to the basement. The priest follows him down there and sees the boy in the cage. He tries to sneak back upstairs, but then he’s immediately chased by Ronald. A fight ensues. I felt hopeful that the priest might even get the best of Ronald, but no such luck. All of Ronald’s experience committing violent acts is too much for our priest. Ronald drowns the man in the kitchen dishwater and flings his body down the stairs to the basement. I’m always amazed at the strength of bad guys in shows and movies. Is it really possible for an average-sized man to have the strength to throw a larger man down a flight of stairs, even if that man is already dead?

Before he got kidnapped by Ronald, Erik texted his mother that he recognized the man from the paper, though he doesn’t give more details. His mom goes to the PI office after Erik doesn’t come home on time. Denise calls police, and they piece together that the trucker must be someone on Erik’s paper route. Thus, again, they’re close to catching the culprit.

Cassie sneaks into Legarski’s hospital room to see if he recognizes her. She takes off her mask and hair covering. He looks blankly at her. Later, he asks if he shot her with an arrow. Cassie later tells Jenny that she doesn’t feel that Legarski is running a scam. She seriously believes he doesn’t remember her. I don’t know what to believe. Legarski could be totally faking.

No one wears face coverings on this show, which is set in Helena, and people don’t appear to be socially distancing either. In an earlier episode, the pandemic was mentioned, so I know the show takes place during the present day. Perhaps Montana doesn’t have many Covid cases. Only about half the folks you see here in Tennessee wear masks, but it would definitely be strange to not see anyone wearing them at all.

The episode ends with Erik getting his hands on a staple gun and a taser. He shoots a couple of staples into Ronald’s head and tasers Ronald. Still, the boy is no closer to escaping. Ronald, infuriated, begins to pour gasoline all over the basement. Yikes.

Stay tuned.

February 24, 2021 0

Big Sky, Episode 4: “Unfinished Business”

This episode was a dud compared to episode three. I think it’s the weakest episode of the series thus far. Here’s the important stuff:

–Ronald has a weird moment in which he dumps his cereal on his mother’s head, just like a spoiled toddler. Rather than smack his face, Mama asks him if he has anything to do with the missing girls.

–Rick Legarski hears about the missing girls on the radio as he’s driving. This isn’t the first time he’s heard about them in the media. And. He. Is. Livid. He calls Ronald in a teeth-gritting furor and commands him to meet at the abandoned bar where they do their illegal business. Legarski looks more than a little triggered when Ronald says his mother is suspicious. Legarski goes so far as to reach down for his service weapon, as though he’s considering killing his idiot crime partner. He doesn’t, of course.

–Back in the bunker, the girls are worried about Grace, whose leg looks infected. She’s in pain and has a fever. Ronald stops by and douses the leg with peroxide. Later, Legarski stops by to inject her with some medicine. We’re led to believe that her injury improves and that she’s no longer in danger of dying from infection.

–Cassie goes to the sheriff to ask for help keeping an eye on Legarski. The sheriff calls Legarski in for a private chat. As they talk, Legarski at first tries to sweet talk the sheriff and change the topic to take the focus off himself, and when that doesn’t work he plays the race card. This is something people don’t talk much about. People of color are often accused of playing the card, but white people do it sometimes too. During his race card rant, Legarski says the sheriff is doing a back flip in his rush to investigate him just because Cassie is black and made the complaint. Legarski claims it’s “open season on the badge.” He says anyone who claims blue lives matter is painted as a bigot (which is kinda true in many cases), but rather than gain him any leeway or sympathy from the sheriff, Legarski’s speech just makes him look angry and belligerent.

–Cassie and Jenny go to the truck stop after viewing the parking lot footage from the night Jerrie was kidnapped. Cassie plays lookout while Jenny, dressed as a hooker in over-the-knee boots, goes up to a random trucker and tries to get a DNA sample from some items in his truck. The trucker, who’s already made her scrub herself down with sanitizer and even squirt her mouth with some liquid because he wants him a clean hooker, gets suspicious of Jenny. They end up brawling in the parking lot. She punches him down, and he reaches for his gun just as Cassie jumps out with her gun and shouts him down. It was like a scene from Charlie’s Angels or something.

–Ronald goes to see Merilee, Legarski’s wife, at the quilt shop she runs. He buys a quilt and convinces her to go to an old-fashioned dance hall to meet him. That night, we see Merilee step into the dance hall–which is full of old folks, one of whom is spiking the punch bowl–and lose her courage and bail on him. Ronald chases Merilee out to the parking lot and convinces her to dance. They have a good time, though why they do is still uncertain. He’s pretty boring. Perhaps Merilee is just lonely. She is, after all, married to a psychopath, but then again Ronald is also a psychopath. Does she just happen to attract psychos, or is Ronald deliberately targeting Legarski’s wife for some reason? Not sure where the writers are going with this storyline. I mean, Ronald has to know Merilee is Rick’s wife. How many women named Merilee could possibly live in this small rural town?

–Cassie and Jenny tail Legarski to the place in the woods where the girls are being kept. At one point, they’re standing super close to the bunker and the girls are shouting for help from underground, but Cassie and Jenny can’t hear them.

My fave quote from this episode comes from Merrilee to Ronald after he calls her beautiful while buying a quilt from her:

“Ah, it’s still the same price. We’ve discontinued the flattery discount.”

I’m hoping next week’s episode will be more thrilling.

December 17, 2020 0

Big Sky, Episode 3 (“The Big Rick”)

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.

December 8, 2020 0