Summary
Stay Close claims another victim as we reach the halfway mark and things seem less clear than ever.
This recap of Stay Close season 1, episode 4 contains spoilers.
As someone who has had more than a few drug habits, I’m not one to endorse heroin. But as Stay Close episode 4 proves, there’s an unusual upside of taking smack, which is a facility for handling rather bizarre encounters. When the police sergeant’s all-singing, all-dancing assassins confront Harry outside of the pet shop, he isn’t as taken by their eccentric flamboyance as most would be. In fact, judging by his face, he considers at least for a moment that he’s imagining them. So, when they corner him, he pushes past and flees, not at all taken in by their disarming smiles and cute outfits. He’s able to round a corner and hop a fence before they can find him, not on time for his meeting with Megan but still, blessedly, alive. At least for now.
Stay Close season 1, episode 4 recap
As it turns out, Broome doesn’t give Megan much choice in meeting with him anyway, since he already recognized her as “Cassie”. She says she won’t speak without Harry being present, though, and so they both go to the pet shop, where they find him safe and sound if a little jittery. Megan, feeling more comfortable, explains to Broome that Stewart was a psychopath whose behavior got more out of control when she found someone new (Ray). She threatened to out their relationship to Stewart’s wife if he didn’t leave her alone. On the night Stewart disappeared, she claims to have gone to the ruins in the woods and found his body covered in blood. She thought he was dead, but didn’t report it in fear of being considered a suspect given their relationship. That was when she fled and started a new life. She hasn’t seen Stewart or Ray since, and she also claims that Ray didn’t know about Stewart’s abuse of her. She also tells Broome about someone seeing Stewart recently — though she keeps Lorraine’s name out of it — and about her discovering the hidden room in the basement of Stewart’s house, and shows Broome the flyer Stewart gave to Jordan to prove that the situation is serious. Broome passes all this on to Erin, who informs him that the blood found at the ruins was Guy’s, not Carlton’s.
Following the meeting, Megan goes to see Lorraine at Vipers and has some brief flashbacks to Ray while staring at his usual seat. She’s clearly still interested in what he’s doing, even if she slides one of his paparazzi-for-hire cards back across the bar when Lorraine presents it. Broome and Erin are also interested in what Ray’s doing. They don’t know he has a photo of Kayleigh with Carlton from the night at Vipers when Guy disappeared, or that he asked Fester to track down the license plate of the car they fled in. But they do ask him what he thinks happened with Cassie and Stewart, and he has another very brief flashback, this one involving lots of blood. He’s not very forthcoming with information that exists outside of his own head, though.
In a bizarrely risky turn of events, Harry goes to see Megan at home and introduces himself to her family, posing as her college Spanish teacher. It’s a nice scene, even if it’s ill-advised, but when Megan drops him back at the pet store and we catch another glimpse of the assassins waiting outside, it takes on slightly more relevance as perhaps Harry’s final scene. There’s a similar sense of melancholy around Broome’s scenes with Lorraine, too. He’s determined to have a more meaningful relationship with her despite her terminal cancer, and while it’s hard to buy into their relationship given it seems to have come out of nowhere, thanks to Erin’s earlier comments about Broome refusing to commit but also refusing to abandon his flings, you do get the sense of a lonely man finally realizing that life is finite.
Harry, then, is predictably accosted by the smiley assassins, who begin to torture him for information regarding his “witness” pertaining to Carlton. Megan, though, discovers he has left his tie at her house and calls his office. The female assassin answers and poses as his secretary, which Megan knows he doesn’t have, so her interest is piqued. She calls Broome asking him to check on Harry when he gets chance, but nothing more.
Meanwhile, Erin puts together that Ray anonymously left the crime scene photographs with the police (she spotted his printer while they were at his place), so she and Broome bring him in for questioning. He confesses to having taken the photographs, and when he took them. Broome reminds him that this is a good opportunity to reveal everything that happened on April 16, but he’s maintaining that he dropped Guy at Vipers but left him there. His flashbacks, though, reveal otherwise, returning once again to the fight he was involved in that night. He claims to have just ambled into the woods after and taken photographs of the ruins. He also confesses to his expensive camera having been stolen. That’s his justification for handing over the photos anonymously — someone was willing to assault him over that photograph of Carlton, so he was hesitant to get too personally involved.
When Broome presses Ray about having potentially seen Stewart Green in the woods, his face tells the whole story. Broome is convinced he’s lying, but he’s not sure about what, or why. Ray immediately goes to see Fester and tells him that the police clearly regard him as a suspect, and he’s worried that they might be right. Because of his blackouts, he has whole periods of time that he can’t remember, in which he can’t recall what he has done. Fester tells him that he turned up there the morning after Cassie disappeared, covered in blood and catatonic, and that he hasn’t been the same since. Fester has also tracked down the license plate. It takes him straight to Kayleigh and Bea, who he starts to follow. They lead him directly back to Megan, who of course he believed was dead. He and Megan lock eyes as the episode ends.
But wait! Some other stuff is also going on. For one thing, Harry is dead — we see him having “overdosed”, which was obviously the most convenient way for the killers to cover up his murder. But did he give anything away before he died? But we also see Broome visit Stewart Green’s house and blag his way into the basement, where he crowbars open the door and discovers a room containing a briefcase full of cash, though admittedly without much of it left, and a name tag identifying the luggage as Stewart’s. It seems he has been hiding out there after all, so his wife must have been complicit. The plot thickens.
You can stream Stay Close season 1, episode 4 exclusively on Netflix.
