Summary
Happy Face gets bogged down in Episode 3, which suffers from pacing issues, but its various negative turns at least effectively depict the strain Melissa is under after going public.
The first two episodes of Happy Face were okay, but suffered from a bit of an identity crisis, and Episode 3, “Was It Worth It?”, doesn’t make the existing problems any better. But it also folds in a new one – a surprisingly languid pace, which is worrying so early in the season.
This isn’t to say that things can’t heat up a little – another Paramount+ series, The Agency, started out dreadfully but ended on a real high note. So, there’s time. But I’m not convinced. This instalment finds Melissa suffering from her newfound stardom and feeling the ripple effects of her dark family history spreading through her husband and children, and also introduces some new characters and angles, including the possibility that it wasn’t Keith Jesperson who raped and murdered Heather. Given the fact that Happy Face is built on the idea of not just proving Keith did it but also exonerating a presumably innocent man in the process, it should feel like a bigger deal.
Before all this, we sit with Melissa’s guilt and awkwardness for a while. Through the introduction of Ashton McBride (Teach Grant), the son of Keith’s final victim, Louise, Melissa is forced to consider the possibility that despite all the trauma in her past, she actually turned out okay. Ashton is a wreck. After losing his mother, his life was completely derailed, and he never recovered. Seeing Melissa milking everything that happened for what he perceives to be her own gain sends him into a tailspin, and he turns up at her house acting like a madman.
Luckily, Melissa at least recognises that Ashton isn’t the restraining order type. He’s a victim, someone whose entire life has been defined by suffering, and while Melissa has had her fair share of trauma – and more to follow! – Ashton’s kind of right about her having done okay for herself. This is perhaps why the extremely awkward dinner at Dr. Greg’s place is so off-putting. She’s treated like an exhibit at a museum, or an animal at the zoo, poked and prodded and patronisingly fawned over. Dr. Greg’s sympathies aren’t genuine, either, since they’re bookended by reminders of how saleable Melissa’s story is.
Keith isn’t thrilled with these developments either, since he’s a murderous pathological narcissist who assumed his eleventh-hour confession to another killing would make him the centre of attention and get him all the book deals. But no such luck. Luckily – for Keith, anyway – he’s absurdly well-connected in the prison and can procure phones from anywhere, even in solitary confinement, which is where he ends up after Melissa reports his initial call to the relevant authorities.
Annaleigh Ashford in Happy Face | Image via Paramount+
In case it wasn’t obvious, Happy Face Episode 3 is about things not going well. And they continue to go terribly for Melissa even on a non-personal level, since she’s contacted by a woman named Barbara who claims to have some smoking-gun evidence in Heather’s case that implicates Elijah, not Keith, as being the truly guilty party.
The evidence is a song written by Elijah in a prison arts program, the lyrics of which could quite easily be interpreted as a confession. Elijah’s behaviour when Melissa and Ivy confront him about this makes him seem even more guilty, even though he claims it was “Heather’s song.” Further testimony from Heather’s mother, implying Elijah was hurting her, only implicates him further.
Eventually, Elijah claims that he had used Heather’s song in the session because he didn’t have one of his own to share, but it scarcely matters given how damning the discovery of something like that would be to his case. With the ball already rolling, and the spotlight already shining, Ivy and Melissa are now faced with an incredibly highly-publicised case that might be complete nonsense. According to Calloway, it wouldn’t be the first time Keith had made outlandish claims to stay in the limelight.
Two further turns towards the end of Happy Face Episode 3 cap off a thoroughly miserable chapter for Melissa. The first is the printing of an op-ed revealing that she had an abortion at the age of 15, the implication being that the murderous apple didn’t fall far from the tree. And the second is the pastor of a church Keith had once visited claiming that he did so accompanied by a little boy. Melissa has a brother, Shane, who was clearly on the road with Keith while he was committing his murders. Was he complicit?
