About halfway through “Crème Brulée,” Helen makes a connection with Philip over the pleasures of city life you can’t get in a small town like Tivoli. “You shouldn’t have to drive an hour for a decent crème brulée,” she quips. And the titular dessert is a pretty good metaphor for the episode as the surface covering all of “Eyewitness’” secrets is starting to crack.
The headline news this week is that our hero and villain meet for the first time, although Helen doesn’t know she’s shaking hands with the killer she’s hunting, and Ryan has surely rewritten the story in his head to make himself the sympathetic party. With Bella’s death (staged as a suicide) leaving her at loose ends, Ryan clearly thinks he’s got cause to shut down Helen’s investigation for good. But through some old-school police work, Helen makes two key discoveries that change her perception of the crime. Ryan, though, learns something that might help him keep the upper hand.
In the subplots, whatever progress Philip and Lukas made during their night out gets walked back in the light of day as their absence from the mandatory school trip doesn’t go unnoticed. When Gabe’s trying to cover for him sparks a fight between his foster parents, Philip ends up confessing one secret in order to keep another. And paranoid about what people are saying about him/them, Lukas comes up with a cockamamie plan to distract their classmates. Elsewhere, Kamilah and Sita are still trying to clean up their messes, but one of the sisters ends up in even hotter water at the end of the episode.
One aspect of the show I find really interesting is Helen and Philip’s relationship, the wariness with which they approach each other as Helen clearly has doubts about her parenting skills and Philip clearly doesn’t want to betray his mother. So after not sharing any screen time last week, I was happy that they had several nice scenes together in this episode, bonding over city pizza and bantering about their choice of radio station. We also get some information about their pasts (in a surprising flashback and a story told to Gabe, respectively) that illuminates why they’re dealing with what’s going on the way they are. This was also the most I’ve liked Sita’s plotline. Watching her weigh her options regarding all the rocks and hard places she’s caught between – and her choosing one emotionally instead of logically – was surprisingly enjoyable.
You can feast on “Crème Brulée” this Sunday on USA Network. Until then, dig into the comments section with your thoughts and speculations.
