Summary
In its penultimate episode, Cape Fear tones a lot of its melodrama right down, dialling the insanity back a few notches to deliver some key revelations and build legitimate suspense.
What’s going on with Cape Fear? I don’t mean literally, either, since we’re pretty well beyond that point. Throughout Season 1, I’ve resigned myself to making fun of it, to meeting it on its own terms as a high camp melodrama designed to be entertaining first and coherent a very distant second. But Episode 9, “The Scar”, plays things pretty straight. The performances are dialled down. The revelations make sense. For the most part it’s a legitimate thriller, with only the occasional moment of abject lunacy. Are we supposed to be taking this seriously now?
I’m as surprised as you are. The previous episode was bonkers, and ended by landing three out of four members of the Bowden family in facilities of one kind or another. It had chopped-up bodies in coolers and Ted Levine acting high as a kite. “The Scar”, meanwhile, is a fairly taut little dramatic exercise as Max turns the screws on his victims, and a few puzzle pieces are slotted into place ahead of the finale. We finally know who killed his wife and unborn child, and why, and it wasn’t him! But his being innocent of the crime he was imprisoned for doesn’t make him any less of a psychopath, as we’ll see.
Consider his approach with Tom, for instance. He’s now in jail, which Max visits him to gloat about. But even in those walls, he’s still reachable. Max tells him that one of his friends will be leaving a gift in his cell, and that it will be his salvation, and it turns out to be a noose fashioned from bedsheets. Max’s plan is clear. He tells Tom that his children will be safe if he simply takes his own life. He has provided the carrot and the stick. The rest can take care of itself.
Tom resists, obviously. He gets angry; he refuses to accept it. But when he calls the psychiatric facility where Zack is being held and is told that his son has escaped with the help of an accomplice, moments after Max called to brag about knowing exactly where Zack was located, the penny drops. He has no way out. He doesn’t attempt to take his own life in this episode, but it’s very strongly implied that he might.
Natalie isn’t safe in jail either, especially since she’s imprisoned alongside Nevaeh, who is under very specific instructions from Max — relayed via a burner phone — to find out through Natalie where Anna is, and then to murder Natalie for good measure. We learn in this episode that Max expressly told Nevaeh to break into the Bowden house, spike the tea with acid, and seduce Zack. However, Nevaeh seducing Natalie was apparently her own decision, and that proves to be an in. Natalie, having witnessed Nevaeh on the phone earlier, jumps Nevaeh in her cell, but the confrontation turns intimate. Their pillow talk is what confirms Max was pulling the strings all along (not that we needed it confirming, but you know what I mean).
The liaison gives Natalie a chance to snatch something — I think the burner phone — from Nevaeh’s bible, right before she’s bailed out by Noa with extremely fortuitous timing. Speaking of Noa, she’s one of the few people who has been able to stand up to Max and live to talk about it, but mostly because he gets a message giving him the information he was trying to extract from her (notably, where Anna, the only free Bowden, is) right before he goes too far.
And thus Cape Fear Episode 9 brings us to Anna. She is, of course, in Cape Fear itself, trying to track down Crystal Cady. Robert Cady isn’t much help, predictably, so she stops into a local bar to ask around. With the genie already out of the lamp as far as her alcoholism is concerned, she has a few whiskeys, and then a few more, and eventually wakes up on Crystal’s boat. Even though Crystal has been floating in and out of events throughout Season 1, “The Scar” is the first time that Juliette Lewis — yet again, as in Over Your Dead Body, playing a lunatic — has had much to do.
And she’s useful! She takes Anna to Amy Brancato’s trailer, where Anna finds some telling photographs that essentially put the remaining puzzle pieces together. By noting a necklace in the shape of a key, a toddler with a giant scar down his side, and friendly photos of Crystal and Amy together, Anna is able to figure out the true sequence of events. Crystal Delilah Cady was the “Lila” who Max admitted to seducing and abusing. He got her pregnant, and then he started playing house with Melissa, so Crystal flipped out and killed Melissa. Her son, who she supposedly gave up for adoption, turns out to be Luke, the weirdo who offered to kiss Natalie when she visited the Cady property with Max. Max has been innocent the whole time!
Juliette tries to lure Anna into the bowels of the boat by offering her a USB drive full of recordings of Max talking Amy into killing herself, but Anna sees through the ruse and locks Crystal in the hold instead. However, Robert and Luke arrive to free Crystal and lock up Anna. Anna finds the USB drive and a chemical spray that she uses to free herself, and then drops the bombshell about Luke’s parentage to cause enough of a distraction to escape, albeit after being stabbed through the hand by Crystal. Max, having been tipped off by Crystal, finally arrives to see the carnage unfolding, which is where “The Scar” ends.
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