Summary
As His & Hers moves confidently into its back half, Episode 4 provides by far the most human drama we’ve yet seen from these characters.
Now we’ve passed the midpoint of His & Hers, things are getting pretty serious. The bodies are piling up, suspicions are mounting, secrets are being revealed, and, crucially, some earnest emotional sentiment is beginning to creep to the forefront. Episode 4 is the first time that Jack and Anna have seemed like human beings who might have once been in love. And that’s new for both of them, even if it doesn’t exonerate them of anything they might have done.
And given Helen is now dead, whoever’s killing their way through Dahlonega is at least twice as guilty as they were before. It could easily be Jack or Anna, and people are starting to notice. As we rocket into the back half of the season, it’s pretty obvious that there’s plenty more miserable stuff to come. You can just feel it in the air.
Helen Is Very Dead
The biggest short-term mystery around Helen’s death isn’t who killed her, but how Anna was the first to discover the body. She claims that Helen called her at the hotel asking to meet, but by the time she arrived, she was dead. All the doors are locked, though, and she called Richard to bring his camera before she bothered to call the authorities. Not exactly normal behaviour, but she’s sticking to her story.
A knife was used in both killings. Like Rachel, Helen had a friendship bracelet wrapped around her tongue. Helen has “Liar” written on her forehead, and her eyes have been sewn up, a messy process causing lots of ocular trauma. Jack is fixated on the bracelet being the link between the victims, since that’s a detail that wasn’t released to the press, but this bracelet looks new, like it was planted.
Both were women connected to Duffie, who remains Jack’s prime suspect, but others are emerging, including Richard. Jack had Priya run a background check on him, and it turns out he broke a woman’s jaw three years prior. But based on Helen’s time of death, she was already dead when Anna apparently received the call, so where did that call originate from?
And we mustn’t forget about Jack himself. Priya is still on his case, and while the evidence she’s turning up against him – cancelling the order for Rachel’s phone records and submitting a wonky DNA sample – only proves things we’ve seen him do, that doesn’t mean he didn’t also do things that we don’t yet know about.
Controlling the Narrative
Anna isn’t exactly trying to keep a low profile in His & Hers Episode 4. In fact, she’s doing the opposite. She goes to the mayor and pushes him to go public with the story – through her and her network – in an effort to control the narrative. The Sheriff sends Jack to represent their office, despite the fact that he thinks it’s a mistake to release information so soon after the murder. But his hands are tied.
The whole thing’s a disaster. Jack doesn’t make a good impression, and Anna deliberately stokes the fires of sensationalism to incense the locals to the extent that a riot breaks out with Zoe in the middle of it. Anna can’t help but crack a smile of satisfaction. She has a particular bee in her bonnet about Zoe, since they’re both privy to something – the secret Helen mentioned in the previous episode – from deep in their pasts.
But Anna’s biggest enemy seems to be coming from outside Dahlonega. Lexy plans to travel from Atlanta to join her in the field, and since Jim loves the coverage so much, he allows it. When Lexy arrives, she immediately stirs up trouble by interviewing Duffie on live TV, where he offers a $50K reward to anyone who can provide any information about what happened to Rachel.
A Bit Of Humanity
As with the previous episode, there’s a clear effort in His & Hers Episode 4 to try and characterise Anna as more sympathetically human than we realised. When she visits Alice after hearing of her latest incident, she has another flashback to her childhood, which implies Rachel was sexually into her and sets up something bad for Catherine, who has been reintegrated into the group. In the present day, she suggests that Alice move to Atlanta with her, where she can be properly looked after, and she also messages Jack back and agrees to talk.
That talk is easily the most emotionally compelling scene of the season thus far. It also reveals what happened to Jack and Anna’s daughter, Charlotte – she died of natural causes while Alice was looking after her. Anna didn’t want to leave her, and Jack persuaded her. They’ve both lived with the guilt, but Anna has also had to live with the resentment she felt for him, for her mother, for the world. But was that justification for abandoning them both completely? This is Bernthal’s obligatory big acting moment, and the first time we’ve been able to imagine these two as a married couple.
To make the point clear, they end up kissing, then having sex in the back of Jack’s truck, just like he and Rachel did. There are deliberate parallels in how the scenes are framed, with Anna looking out of the back window as though she’s staring at someone watching. Perhaps it’s us.
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