Sharp Objects - Ripe - Review: Thrilling

"Someone in this town is hiding something."

It seems Camille was halfway home to St. Louis after throwing Alice's phone out the window but she went back for the phone and back to Wind Gap, looking for the phone on the side of the road might seem like holding on to the past but maybe she's just decided to face it head on this time. When she gets back to the house Amma apologizes, saying she got carried away by the spectacle of it all and the need to impress her friends. Camille is tired of the drama so it looks like she says okay out of pure weariness.

Camille talks to Curry who seems to be on dialysis which continues to scare me for the fate of probably the nicest character in this story. Later, she goes to lunch with her mom’s friends to catch up but mostly to get the gossip around town and this is the best place to go get that. This time, though, none of them seem to have any new leads for Camille, only more comments about who the weirdos in town are, still, they are hilarious so it's worth it.

"What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger."
"Unless it kills you."

We get a little bit more of John Keene in this episode, we learn he was fired from his job at the hog farm over some flyers going around that apparently came from Amma's possy. Later, we see him take care of his distraught mother and he seems so sweet, but then there's a very awkward scene with his girlfriend after which he decides to go for a ride and she finds what looks like a bloodstain on the floor. The fact that she immediately cleans it up with no intention of questioning him about it seems weird and might indicate she already thinks he's guilty and doesn't really care.

Vickery seems to think there’s something people aren’t telling him about Camille, it might be the stay at the clinic, but it seems odd he would be so interested, it could work to discredit her, but nothing else. So the fact that Willis offers to give him everything Camille tells him in exchange for information about the case doesn't look great. The Chief goes over to Adora's house to dissuade her from hosting Calhoun day at her house and he's frostily welcomed by Alan who seems not to like him one bit. Adora plays with Vickery the same way Amma plays with the rest of the world. She even suggests playfully she has the power to remove Vickery a chief if he stops Calhoun day which sounds kind of weird, making such a threat for something so seemingly unimportant. He says one of her daughters is dangerous and the other one is in danger, and though we know what he means, the opposite might be true.

Later, Alan, who appears to have a bite mark on his hand, confronts Adora, he seems to be tired of her ways, her flirting with Vickery and others and ignoring him, her overdramatizing, he reminds her he lost a daughter too and she doesn't have a monopoly on suffering, her first reaction is to overdramatize as always and the second one is to blame her marital problems on Camille, that woman is truly unbelievable.

"Why are you trying to hurt me?"

As promised, Camille takes Richard on the Wind Gap murder tour, she tells him about sordid crimes that were never solved and he answers one question for every crime scene, one of the crime scenes seems to hold a special place for her as she was a part of it, when she was thirteen and already on a path of self-harm and she "let" some boys have their way with her, she refuses to confirm that she was a part of it for fear he would pity her but her response is more than clear, and it seems though she's defensive about what happened she might be looking at some things in her past in a different light.

"It’s about power for someone who feels powerless."

They get to the shed where Natalie and Ann used to play and Willis says he thinks the killed stalked them and watched them play there, that it can't be a coincidence that the only two girls who played there were killed. I have to say it’s so riveting when they stop being so cautious around each other and actually theorize together, I just wish we'd get more of that, there we learn one of Camille's theories was that John Keen had killed Ann and then Bob Nash had killed Natalie for revenge but she seems dissuaded of that now. And of course, they flirt throughout until Camille grabs Richard's hand and puts it down her pants right the in the middle of the woods, next to the shed that encouraged the first time she touched herself.

"Fuck you Wind Gap, look what I can do."

One of the strongest things the show has are the flashbacks, and even though we only see glimpses this time, they are as important and chilling as we could hope. We see moments of the aftermath of Marian’s death, Adora depressed and rejecting Camille over and over again. We see a fragment her as the “lucky” cheerleader on the woods with the football team. And then, we see her go back that same night of her birthday to blow the candles on the cake by herself, only to stop and just stay there, next to the flame. And somehow, though I can't exactly put my finger on why, that was the most heartbreaking moment for me, she just seems so lonely and sad, Sophia Lillis absolutely killed it.

Despite the fact that Camille seems more and more tired of playing along with her mother’s pleasantries she indulges her in listening to her ridiculous rants, perhaps in the hope that something might click for her, that she might understand where her treatment of her comes from, but she might have to be careful with what she wishes for. Adora is drunk and seems to be inserting stories she heard about the dead girls as her own memories of Camille, she even repeats to her the one Bob Nash told her about Ann and the curlers. We have seen images of young Camille with short hair, though, so that's a bit confusing, but it might be just another reminder of how similar she was to the dead girls.

"When I was expecting with you I thought you’d save me, I thought you’d love me and then my mother would love me."

It seems the Preaker women were fucked up all around, Adora says Camille in her defiance always made her feel unfit, like a child, which she apparently was when she got pregnant for the first time. And then she tells Camille that now that she’s back all she can think is that she smells ripe, though it looked like she was heading somewhere else with that sentence. That scene was intense and both actresses were absolutely perfect, there’s surrender in Camille's face right before she caves in and asks her mother what she thinks of her, she’s been years trying to fight her influence, trying to convince herself that it doesn’t matter what she thinks, but she allows herself to be vulnerable right there and all Adora does is go for the jugular and tear her apart.

She tries to write for a while but when she runs out of booze she goes straight to the bar where she coincides with John and they immediately start talking. I wish they’d built it up just a little bit more since they have been taking their time with everything and this just felt a little bit too rushed. He asks her if you ever get over a dead sister and she admits she would like to say yes but she'd be lying. He opens up about his sister theoretically off the record and tells her before they moved from Philadelphia Natalie had gotten mad at a girl for stealing her pencil and she took it back but then she stabbed the girl in the eye. He says Ann and Natalie were the same, that he always thought they would've killed each other if it wasn’t for Amma and he explains to a surprised Camille that the three of them used to play in the shed all the time.

Immediately something clicks for Camille, she goes looking for Amma with a sick look on her face, afraid of what this might entail. Then we get a confusing mix of flashes that could mean a lot of things, Alan goes into Adora’s room, after drinking next to a gun, and it looks a little bit rapey, a group of boys seems to be playing target with Amma's posy and Camille finds Amma dead on the floor of the shed. Some of these definitely have to be a misdirect, because it seems odd they would all happen at the same time and they would suddenly pick up the pace so much in the middle of the season after so much slow build up. In any case, it definitely leaves you hungry for the next episode of this horrifying, mesmerizing story.

"People are getting nervous."

What did you think about the episode? Do you have any theories? Let me know in the comments.