Summary
“An Unexpected Visit” lands a new character in danger, as a sting turns up few results for the police and they have to turn to a more outside-the-box idea.
Good Morning, Verônica Season 1 Episode 3 begins with exactly what the title suggests, an unexpected visit; Veronica sitting down with Janete to discuss her husband. The dialogue here suggests that perhaps Veronica herself has been in an abusive relationship in the past, but the real meat of the conversation is Janete confessing what Brandao gets up to with the girls he has kidnapped.
She believes being unable to conceive children is just punishment for all the things she has witnessed him doing and, to a lesser extent, enabled him to do. But the extent of her involvement is limited. She’s bound and blindfolded while they travel to his dungeon; she’s in the box while he assaults the girls.
But she’s the one who kidnaps them. She approaches them. And while he claims to let them all go after the fact, Veronica isn’t convinced that’s the case.
Good Morning, Verônica Season 1 Episode 3 Recap
Janete is too scared to turn Brandao in or run away. Nelson, tellingly, is reluctant to help, in part because rape is such a common thing in Brazil and it doesn’t make sense to risk their careers going after a big-shot like Brandao for such a regular crime (wow, it even made me uncomfortable to write that.)
There’s another unexpected visit in this episode, and it’s probably the one it’s named after — Janete’s sister, Janice, arrives without warning. This makes things awkward, to put it mildly, especially when she starts bringing up the absence of any kids at the dinner table and reveals she intends to stay in the house with them.
Janice also reveals that she and Janete’s mother has cancer, in need of very expensive treatments. Brandao offers to help out — what a nice guy!
The next big step in the catfish case, as laid out by Anita, is to set up the purchase of the illicit Polaroids, but the sting goes bad when Lima is made by the suspect. But Anita was outsmarted anyway. The real suspect took a snap of her and paid off this guy to exchange the bags. They’ve blown their chance.
Veronica and Nelson are able to pick up CCTV footage of the guy snapping Anita, which they show to Tania. She identifies him as Felipo, mostly through an involuntary movement, a tic, he makes with his head.
This helps to smarten up the composite image, but that won’t necessarily speed up the process of catching him, and the pressure’s still on. The police’s next idea is to set up a fake Ideal Love account. Nelson is full of praise for Veronica’s ingenuity, and their relationship is getting a bit weird, but Veronica nonetheless returns home to her husband and their new puppy.
Meanwhile, Janice goes roaming in the middle of the night and gets a crash course on Brandao’s religious figurines. This sequence is tense but doesn’t go anywhere — luckily for Janice. But we get our requisite helping of blood in a nightmare that Veronica has about her shower pouring the stuff everywhere — is she becoming a bit unmoored from reality?
Either way, she’s determined to help Janete out, since she feels something of a kinship with her. It’s pretty telling how Nelson’s first assumption is that she might have made the story up to ruin her husband, who it turns out is a local hero after foiling a crime that resulted in his killing five people — “thugs”, though, which qualifies you for heroic status, apparently.
And Janete certainly needs help. Janice tries to get her to leave the house to go out shopping, but she only gets to the street outside, struggling to walk in her cowboy boots, before she has a panic attack and has to go back inside.
It’s smart for “An Unexpected Visit” to show this side of Janete; to give us a sense of her family life and what she might be like were she not tethered to her husband. Janice sees through the facade of their relationship, too. She has seen how afraid she is — of going outside, of being imperfect, of Brandao.
She even got her an extra ticket out of there, but Janete defends her marriage and her happiness as though she’s reading from a script, which in a way she is.
How does Good Morning, Verônica Season 1 Episode 3 end?
As Janice is saying her goodbyes to Janete, though, she gives a little too much away, and Brandao offers to give her a lift to the station — this does not bode well. Predictably, he drives her down an alley and smirks to himself as she tries and fails to get away. She begs and cries, but he pulls a gun on her regardless, though we don’t see him fire it.
Meanwhile, Veronica intercepts Edimara, the next potential maid applicant that would have been swept up by Janete and Brandao. She palms her some cash and tells her to leave, and not to trust anyone. Then she persuades Carvana to go and see Janete with her, to atone for what happened to Marta, if nothing else.
When Brandao returns home, he dissuades Janete from any escape attempt by forcibly cutting her hair, which is where episode 3 ends.
What did you think of Good Morning, Verônica Season 1 Episode 3? Comment below.
