Harper’s Island – Seep

Just a quick recap this week to get us up to speed before tonight’s episode, which will be number 10 of 13–so still probably not quite up to the big butchery sure to come at the end.

Let’s see, last week we left all the principle characters split up into 2 groups, the ones looking for Madison, who had been kidnapped by the killer and was being held as ransom against everyone else’s continuing presence on the island, and the ones with the sheriff who had just gotten a spike through his thigh and then nearly gotten burned alive in the shack in the woods.

Abby and Jimmy and Cal and Chloe take the sheriff to the clinic so Cal, the doctor, can patch him up.  After he’s stabilized and sedated (or at least sleeping naturally), Abby and Jimmy go back to the Candlewick to recon with everyone else and help look for Madison.  Cal and Chloe take a get it on break since she gets turned on by things like surgery and serial killers.  When they’re done, he goes to check on the sheriff only to find the IV of blood dripping onto the floor and the sheriff gone.  Strange, but not disturbing…or is it?

At the Candlewick, Shae (irresponsible and selfish mother of Madison) tells her stepmother off when she tries to offer comfort.  Can’t blame Shae on that one, I wouldn’t want comfort from the woman who is my age who married my dad and then cheated on him with my husband.  But I can blame her for being such a bitch about not letting anyone leave.  Practical Groomsman was right that they should just cut their losses–in my opinion, everyone who dies from here on out is her fault because if she hadn’t insisted all of them stay, none of them would have fallen victim to the Demon Barber of Gravel Street. 

Someone pulls up to the inn blaring loud music–Shane!  He’s there to beat up JD, and can’t quite believe he’s dead so he hangs around antagonizing everyone, just to make sure he doesn’t turn up.  When Abby and Jimmy get back, she looks at the pages of Wakefield’s journal that had been in JD’s pocket that Henry retreived; they are all about how Sarah had his child.  Abby realizes that she is most likely Wakefield’s kid, since she was the only child her mother ever bore.  This freaks everyone out except for Jimmy and Henry, as Practical Groomsman and Shane both jump to the conclusion that she had something to do with the murders–either directly or indirectly, if her coming back set Wakefield or his copy-cat off again. 

About this time someone wonders Where’s Beth?  I wondered, Who’s Beth?  Turns out she was Expendable Bridesmaid Number 2.  The two groomsmen, Abby, Jimmy, and Henry set off to look for her and find what looks like blood in one of the pantry rooms.  They follow it to a wall, behind which they discover a tunnel.  According to the owner, the Candlewick was built during Prohibition but she had no idea there were tunnels.  But someone did…because the blood trail continues through them. 

The teams split up into Groomsmen, and Abby, Jimmy, Henry when the tunnel splits.  The groomsmen find Beth’s body in a narrow tunnel that the larger one could miraculously squirm through whereas both Skinny Henry and Lanky Jimmy claim they can’t when they reach a similar (in fact, identical) hole.  In reality they’re just not as dimwitted–they know a trap when they see one.  Abby apparently doesn’t, however, because she crawls in, only to have a metal grate clank down behind her.  Now, if this were me, I would make one of the guys wait with me while the other went for tools to cut through it, and sit with my flashlight and shotgun pointing into the tunnel.  But not Illogical Abby.  She just goes forward into the yard by yard concrete maze.  She comes out eventually into another big tunnel, but hears someone coming and scrambles back in.  Something grabs her feet and creates that awesome dragging her backward clip we’ve been waiting for all season, but she kicks it enough times to escape and squirm through the tunnels some more.  Then she comes out in a little room where Madison is sleeping the peaceful sleep of the oblivious.  The two of them find an upward tunnel and climb up it, but can’t shift the grate to get out.  D’oh!

Back at the Candlewick, Trish realizes her sister is missing.  In Shae’s room is a card from their psychic reading, about a tower, and she realizes Shae must have gone to see the psychic.  So when neither her stepmother nor Shane will go with her, she steals Shane’s truck (since apparently no one bothered to take the keys out of it) and goes after her sister.  She finds her, and the two of them fortuitously drive right over the very grate Madison and Abby are trying to escape from.  With a mother’s intuition, Shae looks back at exactly the right moment to see the first light of dawn glancing of her daughter’s pasty little hand. 

Madison is saved!  And back at the Candlewick, everyone reunited and resigned to the loss of Beth–right now it is a zero sum game on Shae’s conscience, I suppose, since Madison is now not dead–little Madison finally asks Abby the important question:  “Did you like the game?  He told me you would like the game.”  “Who told you?  The man who took you?”  “Yes.  Your dad, Abby.  The sheriff.”

Say…what?  The sheriff?  It kind of makes sense, if you think maybe his board wasn’t about a Wakefield copy-cat he was tracking but rather an homage to his own swath of practice murders….

But of course this could all just be another twist and jumping of the shark…we’ll find out tonight.

But the wicked stepmother won’t.  Shane goes to wake her up from where she’s sleeping on a couch, only to poke her and dislodge her from the gardening shears jabbed into her back through the couch and cause all the blood to run out.  I’m not so sure that one was the real killer, though, since it seems to me Shae would have had slightly more motive and the brains to assume it would get blamed on the murderer….

Either way, guess we’ll find out soon enough!