Summary
Jack begins to unravel at pace in His & Hers Episode 2, while Anna works her own angles on the case. More secrets and connections emerge.
If the first episode of His & Hers was about making Anna look guilty, then Episode 2 is about making Jack look equally suspicious. And this isn’t difficult to do, since we already know he was sleeping with Dahlonega’s first murder victim in forever, on the very night she died. But if there’s a difference between the two, it’s that Anna seems to relish being sinister. The guiltier Jack looks, the less he’s able to keep his head on straight.
The premiere’s revelations make a lot of this episode oddly funny, sometimes in ways I’m not sure are necessarily intentional. This wavering tone is a problem that persists throughout, and we’ll see examples of it later. It’s not a big enough deal to ruin anything, but it’s worth making note of nice and early. Anyway, let’s get on with it.
Unhappily Married
Now we know about Jack’s relationship with Rachel, the investigation takes on a slightly different context; one of him trying to cover up his own involvement, rather than get to the bottom of what happened. And Anna seems a pretty big obstacle to that. He doesn’t yet know that she saw him with Rachel, but he does know that she reported confidential information to the public, despite his asking her not to. When he confronts her about this at her hotel, though, he tells her even more stuff that he shouldn’t, so he isn’t doing himself any favours.
Jack and his partner, Priya, go to speak to Rachel’s husband, Clyde Duffie, with whom she had a fairly open marriage, given that his heart disease isn’t conducive to an active sex life. And Rachel apparently needed one of those. Apparently, she had a thing for having sex in trucks with men she didn’t care about, whom she considered literally and figuratively beneath her, which Jack visibly bristles at. See? Funny!
Duffie has an alibi, since his own home security system – he’s very wealthy – recorded him taking his dog for a walk. It might not stand up to scrutiny, but it’ll do for now. He also reveals that Anna had already visited him that morning and asked who Rachel might have told about the man she was meeting in the woods. The likeliest candidate is her best friend, Helen Wang, the principal of the local elite all-girls school, St. Hilary’s.
Damage Control
While this is going on, Jack is still trying to cover his tracks. He’s avoiding submitting his DNA to the morgue, which should be a simple formality, since he knows that it will match the semen found in Rachel. When Duffie calls Rachel’s phone, which Jack asked him not to do at risk of running the battery down, it turns out to be in his truck; he quickly hides it from Priya. But he does avoid visiting Helen – in case she identifies him, obviously – and starts driving like a maniac, which makes Priya suspicious either way.
Jack tells Priya to look up Duffie’s phone records to see if he was conspiring with anyone after they left – or if he called Rachel’s phone, which Jack already knows he did – and cancels the trace that had been ordered on Rachel’s. Speaking of which, he’s still trying to unlock her phone, but can’t guess the passcode, so that’ll be a problem for later. In the meantime, he swabs Meg’s DNA to submit to the morgue.
If a guy is willing to go this far to cover something up, what else might he be capable of? Worth pondering.
Old Friendship
Meanwhile in His & Hers Episode 2, Anna goes to see Helen. Being back on campus gives her a flashback to her first meeting with Rachel as a teenager; Alice used to clean Rachel’s house, lending a race and class element to the social dynamics at play. Anna and Helen were ostensibly “friends” at school, but there’s no love lost between them in the present day. Helen mentions a twenty-year-old secret that only five of them know about, but that number has been reduced to four following Rachel’s death. What are we betting that this secret is intimately connected to the reduced number of conspirators?
This episode also reveals – or at least gives some indication about – why Anna isolated herself. She lost her daughter. Her way of dealing with the grief was to disappear entirely, not telling anyone where she was going, including Jack, who lost his job in Atlanta due to searching for her. But she neglected everything during that time, including her mother, who is now serving her scrambled eggs with the shells in. She even bags them up for Anna when she rushes out after being summoned by Jim to host the news in Lexy’s sudden, mysterious absence.
Face ID
This second episode ends with a flurry of revelations and developments. First, Priya is looking up the boot prints from the murder scene, one of which clearly matches Jack’s Timberlands. She hasn’t made that connection, but it’s there.
In the meantime, Jack gets access to the morgue by pretending to look for his wedding ring so that he can use Rachel’s dead face to unlock her phone. He deletes all the messages between them – including some saucy pictures; Bernthal always looks so serious – and reads through Rachel’s text chain with Helen, who definitely knew she was seeing him, since Rachel was mocking him sexually. She also seems to have been blackmailing someone referred to as “C”, which it’s safe to assume stands for “Clyde”, her husband.
Worryingly, at that very moment, Helen’s calling the sheriff.
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