Summary
A family-wide psychedelic trip throws the Bowdens into disarray, but also takes the tone of Cape Fear with it, making it unclear whether or not we’re supposed to be laughing.
Viewers have been making fun of Apple TV’s Cape Fear for most of Season 1 thus far, and I’ve been steadfastly defending it. I could acknowledge that some elements didn’t strictly work, but I rejected the idea that the whole thing was soap opera nonsense. Episode 6, “Possum”, makes me look like a bit of an idiot. On the upside, it deviates from what was becoming a predictable formula of Max Cady inexplicably showing up in different scenes, but the downside is that what it does instead is send the entire Bowden family on a psychedelic LSD trip that it isn’t clear whether or not we’re supposed to be laughing at.
What’s more is that even the ostensibly serious scenes of violence have a slightly silly contour to them, albeit for different reasons. I just can’t tell what the takeaways are supposed to be. Javier Bardem’s performance remains chilling and brilliant, but at this point, it’s basically the only thing keeping me tethered to the idea that this is still a good show.
As for Max, he becomes more explicitly threatening in “Possum”, in two timelines. We’re once again treated to monochrome flashbacks to his time in prison, picking up where we left off in Episode 2, with Max having been left for dead by a group of Aryan thugs. It turns out there was another character in the gym at that time, an older man who watched the assault without intervening and took Max’s post-brain surgery vulnerability as an excuse to welcome him into the fold of his Santeria-style religion. Max, compelled by the idea that the belief system could connect him to the dead, particularly his wife and unborn son, bought in.
You’d think this would be it on the Orisha front, but not quite. We return to these flashbacks again later, and learn that Max, despite having seen his wife and grown-up son in his initiation ritual, hadn’t quite embraced the teachings wholesale. He was still consumed by rage and prone to violence, especially when it was tinged with betrayal, which led to him shanking his new guru buddy to death on account of his having sold him out to the Aryans in the first place. At this point, it remains unclear whether Max truly sees himself as some sort of divinely-appointed avenging angel, or if he’s just a garden-variety nutcase looking for a convenient excuse.
These flashbacks are some of the stronger sequences of Cape Fear Episode 6, since they’re played completely straight. Everything else is curiously subject to a tonal wavering that is going to make this hour extremely divisive, which, given the mixed reception thus far, is only going to hurt the show’s long-term legs. But we’ll see how it goes. Despite the more obvious framing of Max as a straight-up villain here, there is a curious early scene to note, when he returns home to some mail including a bunch of photos signed by “C” — which I think we’re to assume is Juliette Lewis’s character — and with a note threatening to tell people what he did to her. Max calls someone to deal with “C” and refers to them as “old man”. Are we to assume this is his father?
Anyway, let’s talk about acid. A good chunk of “Possum” finds the Bowdens, now increasingly focused on their home security and self-defense, accidentally consuming tea spiked with Tom’s microdosing acid stash. This sends them all into a kind of delirious fugue state where they all clash over their lingering issues and anxieties, mostly with each other. There’s still tons of frost — despite the air conditioning not working — between Tom and Anna after Tom was suspended for sexually harassing Lexi. Natalie still thinks Zach is super creepy (and I agree). Both kids are still angry with their parents for whatever it is they know they’re keeping from them, especially since it’s obviously something to do with Max. And so on, and so forth.
These scenes are very strange. They’re supposed to be odd and off-kilter, obviously, but I don’t think they’re supposed to be as funny as I found them, with every cutaway to a stressed Patrick Wilson particularly catching me off guard. There are some serious implications here, such as Anna suddenly being high as a kite after 17 years of sobriety, but they’re not treated seriously, and the playful ambiguity that might stem from not knowing what’s real and what’s imagined isn’t leaned into either. It’s just a lengthy mid-episode stretch of the Bowden family being giggly while the camera surveils them from odd, showy angles.
Eventually, Tom and Anna sober up and decide that enough is enough, resolving to confront Max directly at his home. This ends up being a failure on just about every conceivable level. Max is cooking dinner for himself and Honey, the woman from the bar in the previous episode, and he’s chilling with the Bowdens’ missing cat, Peanut Butter, which he has brazenly renamed. Tom and Anna’s offer to “help” Max falls on deaf ears. He already has a ridiculous amount of money, and they can’t bring his family back to life, which he claims is what he wants. Javier Bardem is utterly superb here in a less arch mode. His suggestion that one of the family — he’s implying Natalie, which tracks given an earlier, lightly flirtatious scene between the two after he caught her drunk, having snuck out of the house — acts as a surrogate for his dead wife’s frozen eggs so that he can restart his family is properly sinister. He says he’s joking, but I’m not sure.
This remains the hook of Cape Fear, in Episode 6 and beyond. When the Bowdens ask Max outright and in all seriousness what he wants, he suggests a public apology where both speak openly and in detail about what they did to him, and then quit practicing law. That bit isn’t a wind-up. He’s being serious there, and Anna and Tom know it, which is probably why the latter chooses that moment to threaten to take matters into his own hands. They want to do anything except admit whatever truth Max is referring to.
The big development of “Possum” comes at the very end, when Anna and Tom return home to find the house on fire. Someone — you can guess who — has ignited a stack of papers and Zach’s severed toe, which is charred and blackened in the middle. Zach is in his room, talking through a hole in his closet that leads to passages between the walls. Tom ventures inside until he falls through the floor and discovers that Nevaeh has been living inside the walls of their home. She’s lurking in the shadows and attacks him in another ridiculous scene, until Tom eventually pins her down. Zach is watching all the while, as creepy as ever. At some point in the scuffle, he disappears, his bare feet tracking a path through spilled red paint that leads outside, into the street, and presumably into Max’s house.
