Eva Makes A Terrible Mistake In ‘Bad Sisters’ Season 2 Episode 5

“Boom” is about Eva in the same way that “Person of Interest” was about Becka. This is to say that Eva’s problems are foregrounded a little without taking away from anyone else. It’s a simple structure that Bad Sisters is employing in Season 2, but it works in Episode 5 the same way it did in the previous episode. Things are happening, and while most of them are ill-advised, at least there’s some movement in the right direction.

What I can say with a relative degree of confidence is that I have no idea where this season is going, which is good. But I’m also not sure what justification it has for existing. Very little feels like a logical outgrowth of Season 1 and instead has the tinge of a show that is contriving reasons to keep going beyond the point where it makes sense to do so. But I’m open to being surprised by the final three episodes.

First and foremost, let’s briefly go over a couple of things that just happened, since they give “Boom” its shape:

1. It’s important to remember that Becka accidentally mentioned the money Grace withdrew before her death to the police since that justifies Fergal and Houlihan poking their noses in even further.
2. The Garvey sisters have agreed to let Angelica scatter Grace’s ashes, but they’re planning to fill an urn with the remnants of Eva’s hearth.
3. Ian intimidated Angelica into leaving the sisters alone, and there was definitely some sexual chemistry brewing between him and Eva.

These are the key points that develop into a few different plot strands here, some more interesting and believable than others. We’ll start with the police.

Eva Birthistle and Sharon Horgan in Bad Sisters | Image via Apple TV+

I… don’t like Houlihan. She’s a familiar archetype but even if we didn’t know the sisters were guilty of something — however deserved JP’s death and its subsequent cover-up was — she’d still feel like her determination to lock them up borders on obsession. You kind of see it a little bit more obviously in this episode because Fergal is preoccupied with his ex-wife trying to take his daughter to Australia, so Houlihan is left to dwell on the case on her own.

This includes confronting Ian about how he and Grace met since he told them it was online but Eva lets slip it was through Angelica’s grief counselling sessions. Does it matter? Both of these explanations are fairly innocuous. The fact we saw Ian exhibit a bit of threatening behavior in the previous episode — which he confesses to Eva here, seemingly a bit embarrassed by it — is probably supposed to mesh up with this minor deception and make us fear the worst, but I mostly felt like Houlihan was being over-the-top.

Anyway, let’s talk about Angelica instead. If Bad Sisters Season 2 has a villain it’s definitely her, and I think that’s truer in Episode 5 than any of the previous ones, but she’s still not that bad. She’s manipulative and bitter and sinister, sure, but she doesn’t strike me as being capable of anything particularly egregious. The worst thing she does here in “Boom” is send Eva on a wild goose chase looking for Blanaid, whom she has given some money to go shopping without telling anyone.

This happens when Angelica is due to meet Becka, Ursula, and Bibi at the marina to scatter Grace’s ashes at sea, which was her idea. So, it’s obvious everything she’s doing is calculated, and I imagine timing the social services visit to Eva for when she had no idea where Blanaid was is part of that. But when a panicked Eva goes to the police and lets slip that Angelica should be a suspect, it’s easy to see it from the police’s point of view. Is Angelica really that dangerous?

Eva Birthistle, Eve Hewson and Sarah Greene in Bad Sisters | Image via Apple TV+

Her tongue is, certainly. During the boat trip — the boat, by the way, belongs to one of Becka’s flings and might have been financed by gun-running money, which is likely to crop up again later given what happens aboard it — she implies that Eva is after Ian, the same way she was after JP. Of course, we and the other Garveys know that JP raped Eva, so this is a bridge too far. But the fact Angelica ends up in the sea is an accident; a swinging sail knocks her overboard.

Despite Becka’s heroic efforts to save her, Bad Sisters Season 2, Episode 5 ends with Angelica presumably dead, which is bad news considering that Eva had just made her a person of interest to the police and she fell off a boat with possibly illegal ownership and a connection to Becka. It also looks like the sail swings back the other way and hits someone else, but that might have just been an editing trick.

But what I was thinking about at the time was that Angelica is right — there is something going on between Eva and Ian. This has come on just a tad too fast for me, and even though Eva quickly backs out of the inevitable kiss they share towards the end, I feel like she should have nipped things in the bud prior to that. But she has just turned 50 — the sweetest scene in “Boom” is the sisters tearfully singing karaoke in Grace’s honor at a fancy dress surprise party — and we know she’s struggling with it since it comes up multiple times (when she’s looking in the mirror, when she’s explaining the mess to the lady from social services, and so on, and so forth.)

So, if you squint a little, you can kind of see what Eva might see in Ian, and vice versa. But you can also see why it’s totally and utterly wrong and why it’s very likely to blow up in her face sooner rather than later. And I, for one, don’t know if the Garvey sisterhood can really survive a betrayal of that magnitude.

Then again, depending on what happens with Angelica, they might all be in prison by then.

Read More: Bad Sisters Season 2, Episode 6 Recap