Summary
His & Hers finally shows a slightly softer side of Anna in Episode 3, but it isn’t quite enough to alleviate suspicions.
You might be wondering at what point we’re supposed to feel any kind of sympathy for the predicament the leads of His & Hers find themselves in. It’s a pretty tough sell, since neither of them has been shown to possess any redeeming qualities whatsoever thus far, but Episode 3 makes a few feints in this direction. Maybe, just maybe, Anna and Jack – though it seems the former, particularly – might not be quite as bad as we think. Or, at least, maybe they have a reason for being that way.
That second point is predicated on the idea that maybe there are people worse than Anna and Jack, which doesn’t exactly exonerate either of them, but could go some way towards explaining their pathology. Again, this applies especially to Anna, who seems to have more in her past that might make her capable of something drastic in the present.
Has Anna Met Her Match?
Anna’s having more flashbacks this episode. It might be personal bias, since they’re her flashbacks, but in them, she seems to be something of an unwilling participant in teenage Rachel’s sick bullying games. Rachel was clearly the ringleader, there seems little doubt about that, and one student in particular – a larger girl called Catherine – earned her unpleasant attention. Does someone who tricks a girl into drinking her urine deserve to get stabbed forty times twenty years later? There’s a case to be made.
In the present day, Anna is back on the air. Or is she? Despite having raced all the way back to Atlanta and gotten suitably glammed up, Lexy returns moments before she’s due to go live and once again steals her spot. It seems like two can play this game. Lexy obviously engineered her absence in the knowledge that Jim would summon Anna to replace her.
Anna is humiliated, obviously, but the only thing she can do is throw Alice’s shell-filled scrambled eggs at Lexy’s car. Whatever makes you feel better.
Blackmail Material
Jack still has Rachel’s phone in His & Hers Episode 3, and it contains a treasure trove of riches, including videos of Clyde wearing a ball gag while being sexually dominated by Rachel and Helen. That seems like pretty good blackmail material to me!
Jack hasn’t gotten away with his shenanigans, though. Zoe confronts him about swabbing Meg’s DNA and sleeping with Rachel, both of which he has to confess, though he denies killing her. Priya is getting closer to the truth, too, since the morgue employee, Wally, mentions Jack visiting to search for his wedding ring, which Priya has never seen him wear.
She does her job, though, and calls Jack with Duffie’s phone records, which reveal he called Helen after they left his place in Episode 2. Perhaps the sex scandal might have been more threatening to the headmistress of a prestigious all-girls school than to a male businessman? Priya’s toeing the line, but on her evidence wall at home, Jack’s picture is there.
Caught On Camera
While Priya follows Duffie and spots him dumping his gimp suit, Jack wraps plastic bags around his boots – having presumably learned his lesson – and returns to the scene of the crime. He has some flashbacks of his own to that night, which reveal he might have gotten a bit physical with Rachel when she taunted him about Anna.
As it turns out, the woods are bordered by a graveyard which is watched over by a man Jack refers to as Coach Willie. And Willie put up CCTV cameras to dissuade local kids from vandalising the place. That footage clearly shows someone visiting a grave on the night Rachel was murdered. Jack recognises both the person and the grave – it was Anna, visiting their daughter.
As I implied at the top, this is His & Hers trying to build sympathy. If Anna was at her daughter’s grave, how monstrous can she really be? This is slightly reinforced when Frank is called out to attend to another of Alice’s midnight misadventures, and when he gets her home, she pushes him to work harder on winning Anna back. He listens, too, sending her a message saying they need to talk.
But there are other things to do. Priya calls Jack to tell him they’ve got a second body – Helen. And it was Anna who found the body and called it in.
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