Summary
Bad Monkey gets off to a solid start in its two-part premiere but is bogged down a little by a less pacey second episode.
Severed arms, grubby land deals, some light witchcraft, and, yes, a monkey, all feature in the two-part premiere of Apple TV+’s Bad Monkey. Episodes 1 & 2 have a lot going on in two key locations, but luckily we’re on hand to break it all down for you in as digestible a format as possible.
So, here are the main talking points and narrative building blocks you need to be paying attention to.
Andrew Yancy Is Having Professional and Personal Issues
It makes sense, I think, to begin with Andrew Yancy. After all, he’s the show’s main character, deeply ingrained with the core plot — which we’ll get to in a minute — and the conduit for what seems like a totally unrelated subplot involving his twinkly-eyed beau, Bonnie.
So, Yancy is a former Miami PD homicide detective who, in Episode 1 of Bad Monkey, has been suspended for pushing the golf cart of his girlfriend’s husband into the Atlantic Ocean. By the end of Episode 2, he has been fired outright for continuing to investigate a case he was explicitly told not to.
But let’s focus on the girlfriend for a moment. While Yancy clearly has a deeply ingrained sense of right and wrong when it comes to severed arms and the dead men they used to be attached to, he’s a bit more fluid when it comes to sleeping with married women. But Bonnie might represent more than career problems for Yancy.
Towards the end of Episode 2, he meets Johnna Russell of the Oklahoma State Bureau of Investigation, who tells him that Bonnie is Plover Chase, a former English teacher who is wanted for sexually abusing one of her students.
Yancy’s Former Partner Gives Him A Hand
John Ortiz as Rogelio in Bad Monkey | Image via Apple TV+
The above heading is literal. The plot of Bad Monkey is kick-started when a honeymooning husband fishes up a severed arm with its middle finger frozen defiantly upright by rigor mortis. The arm finds its way to Yancy through his old partner, Ro, who for tourism and paperwork’s sake suggests Yancy take it to Miami and make it someone else’s problem.
Assuming this will get him in the good graces of Sheriff Sonny Summers and hopefully reinstated, Yancy attempts this, but Miami’s medical examiner, Rosa, doesn’t want the arm. Instead of feeding the appendage to the gators as Ro suggests, Yancy keeps it in his freezer until Ro turns up again to tell him that a woman wants it returned for a funeral service. As Yancy is now the arm’s official custodian, he agrees to drop it off.
The woman is Eve (like Christmas) Stripling (like stripper). The arm belonged to her husband, Nick, though throughout Bad Monkey Episodes 1 & 2 both Yancy and indeed Rosa become deeply suspicious of her grieving process. As it turns out, she’s in cahoots with a sinister developer named Christopher, who at the end of Episode 1 we see commit a drive-by, killing the show-off deckhand who was aboard Captain Fitzpatrick’s boat when the arm was found, before turning up in the Bahamas.
The Bahamas?
Ronald Peet as Neville [R] and Crystal as Griggs [L] In Bad Monkey | Image via Apple TV+
The eponymous bad monkey happens to be in the Bahamas. His name is Griggs (though he’s played by the female simian thespian Crystal) and is the pet of Neville, a Bahamian fisherman who is due to be displaced by Christopher’s land deal. Out of desperation, he turns to the local “Dragon Queen” to have the man cursed, though such things come at a cost.
The cost increases throughout Bad Monkey Episode 2, with the Dragon Queen demanding more and more money to make the curse work quicker. It’s unclear for now how seriously the show is going to take its more supernatural elements, and it doesn’t seem to have anything especially illuminating to say about Obeah, but the second episode does end with the Dragon Queen’s ominous narration foretelling certain doom, so perhaps there’s something in it after all.
Yancy and Rosa Think Eve Killed Nick
Meredith Hagner as Eve and Rob Delaney as Christopher in Bad Monkey | Image via Apple TV+
The closest thing we have to a theory at the end of the first two episodes is that Nick was killed by Eve to get him out of the way of her plan with Christopher. And there is plenty of evidence to support this.
For one thing, Eve is entirely unconcerned with Nick’s passing. This hasn’t gone unnoticed by Nick’s estranged daughter Caitlin, who is adamant that Eve killed him. It’s she who directs Yancy to the Bahamas, telling him that she overheard a conversation between Eve and Christopher. It’s as good a lead as any.
A better one is when Yancy and Rosa both find themselves investigating Eve’s house at the same time. Thanks to the sudden arrival of some unwanted guests they find blood and bone fragments in the shower, suggesting that Eve might have killed Nick and chopped him up in that very location.
But it seems like there’s plenty more to come from this story, and surely many more twists in the tale. With all these plates spinning in the premiere, something has to come crashing down sooner rather than later, right?
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