Harper’s Island – Crackle

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Okay, seriously, why is this being labeled as a “mystery” event?  This is a slasher movie, plain and simple.  The only mystery about it is that no one knows who it is yet, but it’s not exactly like an 11-hour episode of Clue.

So this week was more intrigue, mayhem, and horrible murders, exactly as promised.

Abby, obviously unable to sleep after that newspaper clipping about her mom, goes jogging in the early morning and runs into Jimmy the fisherman and his hot-headed friend Shane deer-hunting.  She freaks out over it and they lose the deer.  She goes on about her merry, and when they get back to Shane’s truck there is a dead deer on the hood with “psycho” written in its blood across the windshield.

Trish, the bride, has a secret meeting with Hunter who tries to convince her to give him another chance.  She tells him to leave and barely makes it back to the bed and breakfast in time to help Henry send everyone out on the scavenger hunt they have arranged.  Henry shows her the text he just got from Uncle Marty about having “met a wild one” and not coming back till the wedding.  Disappearance #1 resolved.  Henry goes down to the dock and invites Jimmy and Shane to the bonfire that night, for old time’s sake and as a gesture that he has no hard feelings for whatever trouble his brother had started the night before.

Abby’s team is to start at The Cannery, with some bar trivia about Henry and Trish.  The hapless Cal, who was tricked into leaving Chloe’s team by one of the groomsmen, sets off through the woods to meet up with her team across the island.  Instead he is caught in a snare trap and swept off his feet to dangle helplessly from a tree for the rest of the episode.

Abby gets into a conversation with a girl from her high school class whose mother was also killed by Wakefield.  She claims to still see Wakefield around, not in dreams.

After this Abby’s team calls it quits and goes back to the B&B (except, obviously, Cal, who is indisposed).  Abby runs into Henry trying to clean up his bathroom after he finds a deer’s head in it.  Abby confronts Jimmy to ask if Shane had done it, and Jimmy tells her about the bloody message on their windshield.  So, no, then.

JD, Henry’s tattooed recovering-suicidal brother hooks up with the girl Abby ran into at the bar, over whom he had gotten into the fight with Shane the evening before.

One of the groomsmen comes across Cal in the woods and tells him he’ll come back for him, that he needs more than himself to get him down.

The reverend who is to perform the church service and be part of the scavenger hunt is caught in another hanging trap just outside his church–but someone was lying in wait for him and cut off his head.  Bounce, bounce, roll, and is this still on a network?  Awesome!

Trish tells her friend Lucy (part of Abby’s team of quitters) that Hunter is there, and Lucy encourages her to tell her father.  Hunter is bad news, she insists, and reminds Trish why she stopped seeing him and started seeing a good guy like Henry.  Trish goes to her father, only to find him already with Hunter.  We see that her father had been reminding Hunter of his deadline–that Trish is getting married in 4 days so he better step up that whole seduction game of his.  He convinces Trish that what she overheard was him telling Hunter to get off the island because Trish was being married in 4 days.

The girl who’d hooked up with JD is found dead by one of her friends (another local girl, not part of the wedding group).  She was hung in her own house–but we know there’s no way it was a suicide.

At the bonfire that night, Henry punches Shane when he walks up, convinced Shane had left the deer head for him or Trish to find.  Abby and Trish are horrified, but Jimmy and Shane leave without too much protest.

Chloe finally realizes Cal is missing.  The groomsman remembers he’d left him there and a group goes out after him.  He’s still alive (although this stretched credulity for me, since I believe it only takes a short time of being upside down to be fatal, but I’ll let it slide for the sake of dramatic irony), and they attribute the trap to one a local hunter had set for big game.  Perhaps this one even was, since no one jumped out of the woods to cut off Cal’s head, and he was hanging there for hours, not just minutes like the reverend had been.

Lucy’s little dog runs away from the group, and she follows him into the woods, only to stumble into a pit trap.  Unlike Cal, she is not fortunate enough to have run into a local hunting trap:  the killer dumps gasoline on her from above and then lights her on fire.  Guess it was a BBQ and not just a bonfire…

So this episode featured not just one but three new deaths.  It seems pretty clear the characters are going to have to wake up pretty soon to the fact that something creepy is going on–but not quite yet.  For now they are all still fair game…

…and the hunt is on.