Photo: Darko Sikman/Hulu
Hurt people hurt people. If you’re a fan of the film Hustlers, an Oprah Winfrey acolyte, or a student of self-help books, you may have heard this phrase before. It’s pretty self-explanatory: People who have unresolved psychic pain from relationships with others tend to send that negativity outward. We all do this to varying degrees. On bad days, you might get snippy with a friend or significant other, or you might be short with a person in the service industry. Or, sometimes, the exorcism of demons comes in a totally different package.
The sixth episode of Under the Bridge, titled “In Water They Sink As the Same,” is very interested in the ripple effects of unresolved psychic pain. It opens with a way-back flashback to 1982. We peek in on Cam, Rebecca, and Gabe on the day he died. Even though she’s Gabe’s younger sister, Rebecca is relentlessly nasty to Gabe. In the few short moments that we know him, Gabe is painted as a sensitive kid who’s something of an outcast in his own peer group. Cam — probably also an outcast due to her Native heritage and the fact that her dad is the chief of police (and a total ass-bag) — is his buddy, though.
As Rebecca puts some cookies in the oven, Cam and Gabe arrive at the house. They’re getting ready to go to a dance, but Gabe isn’t so sure he wants to go. Rebecca is much more concerned about spending some time alone behind closed doors with her crush, Cam, than she is about her fragile brother, and so she whisks Cam away to try on one of her dresses. Unless she’s got a closetful of magical-Traveling-Pants-like garments, I don’t think any of her stuff is going to fit Cam — there are two years and about four inches of difference between them — but hey, it’s an excuse to get naked in front of each other. But Gabe keeps trying to come in. He needs help with his tie and he wants support from his friend. Rebecca shouts at him, calling him a loser, and he leaves the house. Minutes later, a helicopter flies over, and two small boys come to the door. “He fell,” they say.
The addition of the cookie timer to this sequence is kind of absurd — cookies only take about 15 minutes to bake — but it serves to underscore how everything can change in a matter of minutes. Rebecca lashed out at Gabe, causing a chain of events that led to his untimely death. Whether or not Gabe’s drowning was intentional or not is left ambiguous, possibly because Rebecca blames herself for the incident either way. Was it her fault? Technically, no. But she feels responsible all the same.
So, when she starts to bond with Warren, she doesn’t want to let him go. When they wake up on the floor of the Crip lair, she encourages him to come with her, scooping him up like a lost puppy. She takes him home, feeds him breakfast, and makes him into a mini-Gabe, complete with the suit he was trying on the day that he died. Throughout this process, Warren gets comfortable enough with Rebecca to share the rest of his story. Well, some of it. He tells her that he was there when Kelly drowned Reena and that he did kick her once. Rebecca wants to believe, and she wants to save this kid’s life as repentance for killing Gabe. The two share the mutual feeling of taking rage out on people who don’t deserve it — only in Rebecca’s case, she hurled insults at her older brother, and in Warren’s case, he helped Kelly murder a girl he didn’t even know.
Aside from exorcising some pent-up rage, Warren’s motive is unclear, but the fact that his life is in chaos has been firmly established. His parents have both abandoned him, and the only person he has in his life is his girlfriend, Samara. Rebecca can see this, and she can also see that Warren’s lack of adult support might just allow Kelly Ellard to get away with murder. She calls Cam and begs her to listen, invoking what seems to be general knowledge that Cam’s dad is a grade-A asshole, saying, “Your dad is not going to do it the right way, Cam. He’s going to go for the easy target. Warren has nothing. If you arrest Warren, Kelly’s going to get away with this.”
And, honestly, Kelly definitely thinks that she’s going to get away with it. She makes her mom bring her and Jo and Dusty to the grocery store to get snacks for after the dance (a.k.a. food for the trip to Mexico, a.k.a. poison to kill Dusty), and she flies through the aisles like a carefree bat out of hell. They bump into Suman and her son, and Kelly tries to put on a show for them. She expresses her regret at Reena’s death and says she wishes she could have stopped it. Suman already knows that Kelly was part of the beating, so Kelly should have really just cut the shit and kept her mouth shut. But Kelly can’t help herself; she somehow thinks she’s invincible.
Somehow, Kelly and Jo convince themselves that as long as they kill Dusty, they’ll be in the clear. They’re completely forgetting about, um, all the other kids involved in the beating? And all the kids who have heard the gossip that Kelly seems so eager to spread? What about them, geniuses? Yet they’re only focused on Dusty. They catch a break when a regretful Dusty shows up to take pictures at Kelly’s house and she’s already drunk. As far as Dusty knows, the girls are going to pretend to go to the dance and just drive south with a trunk full o’ snacks instead. Jo and Kelly have other plans. What follows is a tense sequence in which Jo’s gangsta ethic is pushed to its limit. She encourages Dusty to drink out of the bottle with the poison in it, but then Dusty’s body does her a solid by immediately throwing it up. Undeterred, Jo brings them to the train tracks.
This scene is absolutely brutal. In a hypervicious example of bullying culture, Jo and Kelly rally around their distraught and intoxicated friend, urging her to kill herself. They tell her how terrible her life is, how she would be better just ending it, and how easy it would be. Dusty takes the bait and walks into the path of an oncoming train, but at the very last minute, Jo can’t stand by and let it happen. As the train barrels down on them, she yanks Dusty off the tracks, and Kelly glares at her with the fire of a thousand suns. Kelly killed for Jo, but Jo wouldn’t (or couldn’t) kill for Kelly.
It turns out that Dusty should have been the least of Kelly’s worries. As Cam and her dad canvass the school dance, they find Samara. At this point, the dad only has eyes for Warren. (Rebecca was right!) But as Samara starts to talk, it becomes chillingly clear that both Kelly and Warren took part in Reena’s murder. She shares that Kelly made Reena take off her Steve Madden boots and that Warren helped Kelly drag Reena’s body into the water. Despite being terrified, Samara is compliant throughout this process, and she seems to even surprise herself when she remembers the true implications of what Warren told her.
Again, why Warren — by all accounts a sweet, polite kid — would take part in such horror is beyond the scope of comprehension. It feels like he doesn’t even understand it himself. But he’s ready to take responsibility for his actions. He heads down to the dance, knowing that he’s going to get arrested, but he shares a moment with Samara before Cam closes in on him. He apologizes to her, and they get to embrace one final time. It’s a singular moment of love in an episode that’s otherwise devoted to people callously throwing one another under the bus to ensure their own success in the investigation. And it’s heartbreaking to watch.
Warren is loaded into the cop car, and the red and blue lights bathe his unmoving face as they take him away. The needle drop here is apt and haunting. As the car drives past the bridge, Elliot Smith’s “Between the Bars” begins playing, his whisper-soft voice entreating the listener to consider “the potential you’ll see, that you’ll never be.” Just as Rebecca predicted, this impulsive mistake is set to ruin Warren’s life forever.
The focus lingers on Warren just long enough for us to wonder when Kelly is going to be arrested. Unlike Warren’s devastating arrest, the Schadenfreude part of my brain was very much looking forward to watching her get taken away in handcuffs. Finally, she does. As they drive back from the train tracks, Kelly and Jo get stopped by the police and taken into custody, screaming and crying. The cops find Dusty, too. All of these lives, gone in an instant.
The kicker? Reena’s boots are found in Kelly’s closet, with her parents looking on in horror.
• Titled “In Water They Sink As the Same,” this episode also focuses on the idea of revenge. The quote is taken from the South Korean film Oldboy, and the full quote is, “Be it a rock or a grain of sand, in water they sink as the same.” Any act of vengeance can bring a person down, it doesn’t matter what the motive is. The road to Reena’s murder was paved with an act of revenge. That revenge led to more revenge, which led to murder. So, when Suman deduces that Kelly did, indeed, kill her daughter, she and Raj head out to exact revenge. Yet, when they realize that they’re just perpetuating the cycle, they resign themselves to grief and head home.
• Suman and Raj probably just would have caught up with Susan at the Ellards’ house anyway. I hate Susan. She hasn’t been onscreen much, but I hate her for enabling her sociopath daughter’s behavior and for being so terrible to the Virks. She literally ushers the girls away from Suman at the store! Does she know Kelly did it? Methinks yes.
• That perv comment that Rebecca makes to Gabe when he’s trying to come in her room while Cam is changing is eerily similar to the comment Jo made when Manjit was hanging out with the girls at the ill-fated dinner. Mean Girl recognize Mean Girl.
• Book Club Corner: Samara’s real-life counterpart didn’t get a chance to say good-bye to Warren before he was arrested. She tried, but her friend’s father prevented her from running to the cop car as they were taking him away. This episode tries to rectify that by rewriting history a bit, allowing the two young lovers a sweet, suspended moment in time before everything descends into chaos.
