"What would you say to your 13-year-old self right now if you had the chance?"
Part III
Cora is examined by many psychologists and they determine she's fit to stand trial, but when Harry tells one of them about the song and the repeated hits, she says it sounds like PTSD psychosis, which is interesting, to have a possible diagnosis for her, she says the song could make Cora enter a hallucinatory state where she's repeating past events, which means she might have stabbed someone in the past (maybe the later introduced mask man?. And I have to say that moment when they ask her what she would say to her younger self and she says
"run", honestly gave me chills.
Cora has a nightmare of what could happen to Laine without her and it all hits her, so she begs Mason to bring him to see her. She continues to have nightmares about that night, we see some blonde woman urging someone to drug her to "loosen" her up, and someone stepping on her, crushing her chest, which is probably just a metaphor for how she felt, she wakes up screaming and the guards give her a sedative, there we see her arm is scared, they say she was addicted to heroin right around the time she run away. The truth could be that either they made her take some that awful night and she was addicted to it for a while, or something else entirely cause those injuries. When Harry confronts her about them she confirms the heroin story and she begs him not to tell her family.
But he does, and this leads to Mason not taking Laine to see her and telling her he's done with her, which is understandable but this also leads to people, in general, judging her. Harry and his wife continue to work on their marriage, (once again, why are we supposed to care?). They go to a dinner with friends who start talking ill about Cora because she was a drug addict for two months, so he snaps at them telling them they know nothing about what she went through, but seriously he only has himself to blame for making it public before having a chance to investigate further.
Detective Ambrose goes to see Cora's parents, the mom seems badly injured (could that be related somehow to Cora's injuries?). They tell her there was always something wrong with her and she left right around July 4th, one month before Pheobe died. Later he talks to her aunt, who fills in some gaps, she says Cora was missing for two months until she showed up at a detox center, she tried to go back home but her mother refused to take her in when she saw the marks and she called her a whore, so Margaret took her in, she says she knew she was hurting but she never had the courage to ask.
Then, Harry goes to the rehab facility, they say she had barely any trouble getting clean, (was she ever not clean?) and that she looked well taken care of, they said her head wound was already stitched up when she was brought in by someone called Caleb Walker. Harry follows that lead as well, and he talks to the old man who says he found her right by a dumpster, that she looked like a lost soul who wasn't supposed to be there.
In the flashbacks we see a little more of Pheobe and a lot more of the same old horrifying stuff, praying with the knees on hard rice, for a more painful experience, and lots and lots of guilt and blaming. We learn Phoebe was a bit of a perv who talked about their parents screwing and made Cora read her sex magazines, then she let her take the blame for it, which was quite awful but it wasn't her fault Cora broke right away, there's a cute scene where they bond over sins and ill advised prayer of which I wouldn't mind seeing more of, Pheobe apparently was a bit of fresh air in that disgusting house.
"Cora, God doesn't listen."
We finally meet the famous JD, scoring drugs at a bar, no less. Mason stalks him a little bit first, it seems JD uses a cane (which might be a relevant detail), and then he confronts him, JD's surprised Cora didn't tell Mason about him, which is weird and might imply something else entirely happened between them. JD laughs at Mason so he attacks him, which is stupid of course, but luckily they both end up in handcuffs, I'm sure Mason will have no problem getting out of trouble but now JD will be open to interrogation, so I'm looking forward to Harry getting his hands on him.
After seeing an addict's bloody feet, Harry realizes they shoot their hand and feet before their arms end up as bad a Cora's, so to prove his point he makes her show him how she would shoot up, and she has no idea how to do it. Harry suggests maybe she just believed her mother's judgment of her since she remembered nothing of those two months she went missing. This scene is the only thing that didn't convince me, I didn't buy the fact that Cora remembered nothing and was just lying to herself, not that I don't think it's possible, but the resolution, Cora believing Harry so fast, it's all way too simple for something that in real life would be way more complex. I think they should've given that scene a little more time to make her to show her conflicted feelings about shaking the ground she built her life on for five years (maybe they could have taken the time for that from Harry's affair? Seriously, stop trying to make that a thing, it's been nothing but a waste of screen time so far).
We see one last flashback from the time she was missing (because that's officially what it was now), Cora sitting in a bed scratching her arm in a way that could suggest she hurt herself, after two months of being locked up sitting like that, like a nervous tick (maybe that's what the scars were about?). We see a man next to her bed, dressed in maybe a hospital gown and a creepy mask. This is finally getting more interesting, not that it wasn't before, but now I can be sure the result can't be as predictable as I'd thought in the beginning, and that makes me very happy.
So, what did you guys think of the episode? How creepy was that man in the mask? Are you looking forward to Cora recovering some of her memories? I look forward to reading your thoughts.
