Harper’s Island – Ka-Blam

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Week 3 of Harper’s Island.  This episode honestly felt like an hour of filler.  There wasn’t much advancement of plot, nor was there a lot of action.  Mostly it was just a bunch of talking and the audience waiting for someone on the island to realize that something weird was going on (didn’t happen yet).  I think rather than trying to hit the events in order of appearance, for this episode it will make more sense simply to discuss the different threads one by one.

On the Kelly died/was it murder or suicide/Shane is unstable plotline:  Abby tells J.D. that Kelly had died, and he seems surprised and upset by this.  He goes out walking, and Shane’s truck comes up behind him and hits him.  The sheriff goes to talk to Shane, since he had been Kelly’s ex and was known for getting into bar fights and stuff.  He says he had nothing to do with it and is genuinely upset about her death.  The sheriff leaves, and Shane takes J.D. out of the tool chest in the back of his truck.  Abby thinks Shane might have had something to do with Kelly’s death, so she goes to talk to him.  She finds him in his workshed with J.D. strung up from a rafter and barely managing to stay balanced on his chair while Shane taunts him about killing Kelly.  Since, obviously, Shane believes J.D. had something to do with it.  Abby starts talking to Shane about what Kelly had been saying about seeing John Wakefield everywhere, that maybe she had been right and he was still around.  Shane is talked down enough for the sheriff to bust in and get cuffs on him before he can take his knife to J.D. or knock the chair away or anything.  The sheriff puts Shane in custody, but Abby tells him she doesn’t think he had anything to do with Kelly’s death.

The sheriff goes back to Kelly’s house after this, when the coroner calls him to say the red covering Kelly’s eyes was not blood but red ink.  The sheriff finds a little bear with jewel red eyes left on Kelly’s mantel, and next to it is a newspaper clipping about himself…and the eyes have been colored in red.

On the minor character development plotline:  the groomsman who had forgotten to go back and get Cal for most of the day keeps flirting with Chloe and wondering why she’s going out with Cal.  He and Chloe go for their spa treatments together, and she recommends the honey body mask.  He agrees, only to have Cal burst in and toss feathers all over his sticky body in retaliation for the day before.  Also the groomsmen prove themselves to be less manly than Abby, what with their drinking mimosas the whole episode and spending so much time gossiping about Cal and Chloe.

No one misses the bridesmaid who got burnt to a crisp the night before, which I find a little bit hard to believe, that no one even wondered if she was feeling sick or something.  I guess the idea is that in a big house party situation, everyone assumes that the people not with their group are with another group, but still…surely they’d have noticed when she wasn’t at the big cocktail party/dinner that night for thank you toasts to Trish’s dad.  Right?  Maybe the aftermath of the party comes next episode.

And, finally, on the Hunter Jennings in Wedding Crashers plotline:  Hunter sneaks into the lingerie shop where Trish is buying her wedding-night naughties.  She tells him that her father told her the “truth,” that he had asked Hunter to leave and that Hunter had better get his ass off the island.  Hunter, shocked at this betrayal, confronts her father who says that Trish had seen them together and he had to say something like that.  Hunter offers a new deal–he’ll leave the island that day for $50,000, or he’ll tell Trish the truth.  Her father basically dares him to try.

In the meantime, Henry receives a note from one of the island’s other hotels that Hunter Jennings had checked in.  He comes in person to see him, playing the “thanks for keeping track of my overflow guests” line to the hotel clerk, whom he had apparently asked to call him if someone by that name checked in.  He gets into Hunter’s room on the pretext of leaving him a welcome gift and finds his travel itinerary–with the billing clearly to Trish’s father.  (Her father is obviously not the evil mastermind he thinks, if he leaves that kind of paper trail.)  Henry then sends a note to Trish in Hunter’s handwriting to meet him “to work this out” but at the last second Trish decides not to go.  Whatever her intention had been, whether it was telling Hunter off or falling into his arms, she saved her marriage by not going at all, since it was Henry waiting for her and not Hunter at all.

At the cocktail party that night Hunter shows his face just long enough for Trish’s dad to nod yes, that he’ll pay the money, and then meet him down on the dock with a check.  Hunter gets into his motorboat, on the floorboard of which is Uncle Marty’s bag with its cash and its handgun.  The boat’s motor dies, and when Hunter goes to the back to open the compartment, he gets a shotgun in the face for his trouble.  Death #6 for the island.

Now it’s just a matter of time before all the expendable characters have been killed off, and somebody has to start figuring out that there’s some seriously creepy business going on….