Summary
“Murder, My Sweet” makes it seem unlikely that anyone will get away with anything as we race towards the finale.
This recap of Why Women Kill season 2, episode 8, “Murder, My Sweet”, contains spoilers.
I don’t know about anyone else, but I can’t say I ever expected Alma and Bertram – though the former especially – to get away with killing Carlo and framing Rita for it. Ever since the show has made a point of blowing Alma’s villainy out to cartoonish proportions and casting Rita as something of a sympathetic figure, at least compared to what she was, it seemed fairly obvious the direction we were heading in. But even with all this in mind, I can’t say I necessarily expected Dee to be the source of their downfall. But with her figuratively unearthing the death of Mrs. Yost, it only seems like a matter of time until her body is physically dredged up from Alma’s flowerbed.
Alma actually begins the episode, titled “Murder, My Sweet”, by gloating to Mrs. Yost’s burial site. She’s enjoying being a villain far too much, and that hasty shallow grave was just the beginning. The body count is mounting, and Alma’s solutions to problems are beginning to leap so quickly to outright illegality that even her serial killer husband thinks she has lost it (Bertram has some absolute zingers in Why Women Kill season 2, episode 8, and Nick Frost sells them all brilliantly.)
Offing Isabel is the final straw, really. Not that she was a particularly nice person either – she has already murdered someone and covered it up, was willing to help Rita do the same with Carlo, and was blackmailing the Fillcots with Vern’s photograph. But it still felt like a pretty sudden escalation. Alma didn’t even fret over the matter for a while. Almost as soon as she was threatened, Isabel was dead. All this for a garden club?
It’s not just about the garden club anymore though, is it? Once you dip your toe in the waters of criminality, you must learn to swim quickly. Getting into the garden club is an upside, but each new crime is to cover up the last. That’s the tragedy of it all. All the personal and moral compromises Alma made to get where she wanted to be, and now she’s there she can’t even enjoy it since she’s still accounting for those compromises. It’s never-ending. Until she’s caught, anyway.
And she’ll be caught one way or another. One of the things I liked in Why Women Kill season 2, episode 8 was how Isabel targeting the Fillcots was juxtaposed with Rita debating whether or not to incriminate Isabel as Carlo’s murderer, which led to flashbacks of the first crime they covered up together (he seemed to deserve it). We got a different sense of their dynamic, here; suddenly, Rita was naïve, the good-looking meal ticket that Isabel manipulated. When Rita shacked up with Carlo – thanks to Isabel – she got to live like a lady, even if privately she was a prisoner, and Isabel was forced to earn her way as a maid. You have to imagine Isabel has been fostering resentment over that turn of events for quite some time. With that in mind, it’s easy to see why she wouldn’t entirely trust Rita.
Refreshingly, it’s hard to imagine where all this is going. Yes, it’s obvious that someone – probably Alma, at a minimum – is going to get their comeuppance, but exactly how and when is anyone’s guess. It has been a sharply written mystery all throughout, but with “Murder, My Sweet”, Why Women Kill Season 2 is really racing towards a great payoff.
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