Summary
Cape Fear introduces some important new characters in “Mongrel” and takes some big narrative swings. It’s much too ridiculous to be taken seriously at this point, but it’s still wildly entertaining.
Given that everyone is starting to feel the same way about Cape Fear having potentially lost its mind completely, the opening of Episode 7 feels like a joke, or at the very least a dare. For once, it picks up exactly where we left off, which was crazy enough to begin with. Anna is straddling Nevaeh, who it turns out has been living in the walls, and Tom is marching over to Max’s house, where a very oddly-behaving Zack has ambled over to the warm embrace of his… father? As if Season 1 hadn’t been weird enough already.
Yes, Zack is now convinced that Max is his father. He just wants to spend some time with him, maybe take a fishing trip, but Tom puts paid to that idea by dragging Max outside and brutalising him in the street in front of bystanders. Zack goes so far as to stab Tom in the back — literally! — to get him off, which is extremely funny, and doesn’t do much for Tom’s ego.
In the aftermath of this, Noa decides that she probably made a mistake inviting Max into the very heart of her organisation. But she also wants to go about exposing him the right way, which doesn’t quite match the Bowdens’ required timeframe. Meanwhile, Ray heads out to track down Juliette Lewis’s character, whose car is registered under the name Val Tierney, who lives in North Carolina, close to where Max grew up. When he meets Val, she explains that she sold the car to Crystal Cady, Max Cady’s sister, which makes their previous interactions all the weirder. She also directs him to where Crystal, if she isn’t institutionalised, might be staying.
We’ll come back to this, since Ray isn’t the only person looking for Crystal. Max is also on the hunt, and thanks to some particularly contrived circumstances, he’s taking Natalie with him. Despite recent events, Natalie is being as recalcitrant as ever. She’s supposed to be under the protection of her biological father, Paul, but he rather dumbly intimates that he might not be her biological father, something that Natalie has already half-suspected thanks to the rumours about Anna and Tom’s relationship potentially predating them “officially” getting together. So, Natalie gets drunk and confronts Anna over the phone about it, then decides to go even more off the rails by opening the door when Max calls by to return Peanut Butter.
Max doesn’t explicitly ask Natalie to go with him, but he doesn’t talk her out of it, either. Plus, the show has this whole thing going on with Max randomly teleporting into scenes and seemingly having intimate knowledge of prior events and character interactions that he feasibly wouldn’t know about, so Max arriving just as Natalie is smarting from a conversation he wasn’t involved in kind of fits the bill. Either way, she decides to accompany him on a “long drive” that he later reveals will take them all the way to North Carolina, where he plans to confront his parents.
Max also takes the opportunity to reel off some of his backstory, though to be fair we’ve figured most of that out already. His psycho dog-raising dad used to keep him in a cage as punishment, and his step-mother did nothing to stop it. Max also reveals some other information, like the fact that Paul apparently wasn’t faithful to Anna, and that he and her were “close”. It’s exactly the kind of thing that Natalie doesn’t need to hear right now, given her own private theories which Max is, obviously, magically privy to. He also almost crashes the car because talking about his past gives him a blinding headache on account of his botched prison craniotomy.
Javier Bardem in Cape Fear Season 1 | Image via Apple TV
Interestingly, Cape Fear Episode 7 introduces us to Max’s awful dad, Robert, who’s played by Ron Perlman in a nice bit of casting. And Max seems to be earnestly terrified of him. The “Mongrel” of the title is apparently Max, which probably explains why Robert and his demented wife, Hester, are much more inclined towards his half-sister, Crystal, refusing to give up her location until Hester does it by accident and Robert slaps her for it. Max gets what he wants either way, though Robert calls ahead to warn Crystal he’s coming. While this is going on, by the way, Natalie is approached by a weird dude named Luke who feeds Robert’s dogs and asks to kiss her by way of greeting, since why not, at this point?
What this means for us is that Max and Natalie arrive at the boat Crystal is living on while Ray is already there snooping through her surveillance photos. By chance, Natalie has fallen into a very deep sleep, and Max has stolen the gun that she stole from Tom’s safe and hid in her bag. So, when Ray spots Natalie and starts drawing attention to himself, Max shoots him dead with Natalie’s gun and disposes of the body, it’s implied in the trunk of his car.
When Natalie wakes up, she’s a little groggy, and decides that now is the best time to confront Max about potentially being her father. The dates work out, and Max basically admits it, claiming he didn’t want to meet her while he was in prison, but reassuring her that he never stopped thinking about her during that time. To prove his point, he baptises her in the waters where he was forcibly baptised. Then he gives her one of her beard hairs for a paternity test and sends her on her way.
Tom and Anna have spent this whole time conspiring. With Zack in an involuntary psych hold, we don’t see anything more of him in “Mongrel”, but we do hear from his doctor that he has been taking copious amounts of scopolamine, a motion sickness drug with the convenient side effect of causing compliance and/or depersonalization in large doses. In other words, Nevaeh seems to have brainwashed him and given him a new personality, which gives Tom an idea. He scoops up all the pill bottles, which surely have her fingerprints all over them, and suggests planting them in Max’s house and calling in an anonymous tip.
Anna co-signs this plan, but doesn’t think they should break in themselves. Instead, they enlist Anna’s estranged father, Brandon, who embarassingly assumes she wants to reconcile after all his hard work in cleaning up his act. No such luck, though. For the small price of a monthly bonding dinner with Anna, he agrees to plant the drugs, and the episode ends with the Bowdens making the call, not realising they’re going to inadvertently tie Natalie to Ray’s murder.
