Summary
Harry’s bizarre methods complicate judicial proceedings as Jamie sets out on a violent path of revenge.
This recap of The Sinner season 3, episode 7, “Part VII”, contains spoilers. You can check out our thoughts on the previous episode by clicking these words.
Harry Ambrose has some issues. That’s the impression I got, anyway, from his bizarre hallucinations as he slowly asphyxiates at the beginning of The Sinner’s penultimate episode. He imagines his father locking himself in the bathroom at Thanksgiving dinner and his mother plunging his head into a bowl of cereal and Sonya washing him and that box of his dad’s personal effects leaking all over the table. What a nightmare.
Luckily, Jamie digs him up right on time. Pulling the air hose from the grave and letting Harry slowly suffocate was, apparently, all part of the intended effect; a necessary component in… well, whatever the point of this whole buried alive thing is, which at this point is anyone’s guess.
Back at Harry’s house – getting quite cozy now – the pair of them burn Jamie’s written confession as agreed, and bond over their mutual near-death experiences. The excitement is just too much for Jamie, who confesses to how Nick’s increasingly daring stunts led him to quit school and cut his nutcase friend from his life completely. He also confesses why he let him die. Harry, not quite as fundamentally altered by the ordeal as Jamie suspected, records the whole thing on his phone.
Detective Soto is happy to hear it, in part because it allows them to nail Jamie, and also, one imagines, because it proves Harry wasn’t losing his mind in becoming best friends with this guy. Sonya hears about it all too but is more concerned that Harry might have some lingering PTSD from the experience. He just seems happy that she washed him like a big baby. (Symbolism!)
The Sinner season 3, episode 7 rejoices in the moment when Jamie is arrested by Detective Soto since it occurs at his most smug, believing he has bonded with Harry in such a way that he’s safe from justice, and it happens at his workplace, where he’s even more smug than usual about handing in his notice. He’s manacled and marched away right in front of all the students he has confidently lorded over all throughout his psychological tailspin. It’s a fine moment.
There’s another when Jamie learns that he has been arrested on the strength of Ambrose’s recording. The betrayal – that’s how he sees it, anyway – visibly stings him, and he sits in pouty fury as Ambrose himself tries to explain his reasoning. Jamie, ever the child, spits in his face.
But the victories are short-lived. Once Ambrose learns that Sonya painted a naked Jamie, he accuses her of being intimate with him and they argue. The next time Harry sits across from Jamie it’s in court, where he’s cross-examined and made to look faintly ridiculous. On the grounds of Harry and Jamie’s relationship being bizarre, to say the least, the confession is deemed inadmissible. Jamie goes free.
And Jamie is annoyed. He can’t speak to Leela or his son on Ambrose’s advice. Back at the hotel, Nick’s ghost cuts his hair, which just never bodes well. For once, a character’s DIY haircut looks convincingly terrible. Jamie goes to see Emma and acts all creepy. It’s pretty clear he has some kind of violent retribution planned.
The police, obviously, have their own ideas. Leela wants Jamie to answer for his crimes, and unlike Harry, she has non-weird evidence to help the process along. For one thing, she bagged his blood in the previous episode. She takes that to the cops and says she’d be willing to testify that Jamie confessed to murdering the hipster medium. But they need to find him.
And where is he? Well, golfing. The Sinner season 3, episode 7 ends with Jamie running up behind Harry’s boss and clouting him with a club. His murder spree has begun.
