Quick Take: Ringer, "She's Ruining Everything"
In which Bridget tries to get out, but her family pulls her back in.
Review: Ringer, "She's Ruining Everything"
(S0102) This was quite possibly the most improved second episode of all time! Did anyone else get the creeping suspicion that Hitchcock was in the writer's room?
Last week, Bridget kills a thug in self-defense, a thug sent by the real Siobhan to help her disappear into anonymity like Elvis or 2pac. This week, Bridget has to figure out what to do with that quickly rotting corpse.
I loved seeing Bridget pick up the electric saw at the beginning of the episode. For me, that moment really captured the essence of Bridget's problem. On the most literal level, she has to figure out how to get this corpse out of her life before it causes her major harm. This dead body forces Bridget to lie and skirt the people around her, the people who are quickly becoming her friends and family. She can't go to the cops for fear of being exposed and she doesn't have the means to take care of the problem herself.
On a metaphoric level, Bridget's got to get another corpse out of her life — the corpse of her dead sister. It similarly forces her to lie and skirt her developing friends and family. This corpse also represents her fear of exposure and signifies a greater problem than she can deal with by herself. The metaphor gets very "thinny" (to borrow a term from Stephen King) at the investor's party, where Bridget must balance the burden of both corpses at once.
It's as if everything that can go wrong at the party does! A fat man sits on the ancient crate the corpse is hidden inside. A spot of blood seeps through the wood. The dead man's cell phone goes off. Bridget/Siobhan's husband Andrew is being seduced by his partner. Her ex-lover Henry is looking for answers. A room full of potential investors expects the Siobhan they've come to know while FBI agent Victor Machado is expecting Bridget. The tension was palpable!
That said, I wouldn't exactly say this episode had me on the edge of my seat. It was good — and way better than last week — but it wasn't superb. The actors all did great and the dialogue was pretty sturdy, but there were a few too many tense moments and not enough drama surrounding any of them. For instance, there didn't need to be so many twists at the investor's party. Just one sustained problem—like the leaking blood, for instance—could have sustained the scene. And sticking to the increasing intensity of that one problem would probably have caused much more emotion to boil out of viewers, particularly if Bridget's interpersonal problems were more directly linked to the rising tension of that singular arc.
This lots-and-lots-of-threads issue seems to be what the writers are going for on broader levels of storytelling as well, so I won't fault them for that aesthetic. In fact, if they continue to so quickly learn what works and what doesn't, they may just lead us right into the most wonderfully intricate drama on TV.
If this week's cliffhangers are any indication (including the disappearance of that problematic body), they might just do it.
I was very very close to writing off Ringer during the pilot episode, but I'm glad I stuck with it as by the end I was at least hooked enough to keep watching. A lot of had to do with Sarah Michelle Gellar, who by necessity was in just about every scene (perhaps every scene?) and was really good as Bridget.
I can't help thinking that high quality shows such as Dexter and Breaking Bad are finally starting to train better shows on the broadcast nets. I'm talking about Bridget needing to deal with the dead body here -- that's something that you would see very little of until recently as shows wouldn't "expect" the audience to remember that something actually happened in the previous episode that must be dealt with in the current one. And indeed this kind of "loose end" is both true to life (if you don't want the cops to find out you offed someone... you gotta handle biz) and becomes an intriguing reason to keep watching.
Absolutely. This show is most definitely a product of the times. With any luck, this indicates that we're at the beginning of the golden age of television, not the end.
I've got a theory about the lifecycle of mediums and how the newest medium defines, informs, and forces the innovation of the previous medium. Consider that the real golden age of the novel began with radio's rise to popularity and that the golden age of radio was during television's rise. Now we've got the internet to look forward to, but the sweet golden nectar of TV to enjoy.
Sounds like awesome grist for a series of posts :-)