Death by a thousand cuts. Max Cady (Javier Bardem) has already compared his (allegedly) undeserved prison sentence to this form of piecemeal torture. He may have actually committed it, if indeed he’s responsible for severing a certain teenager’s toe. But after this episode of Cape Fear, it’s apparent that Anna (Amy Adams) and Tom Bowden’s (Patrick Wilson) happy family is under lethal threat, and death by a thousand cuts is how they’re in danger of being taken out.
For example, the campaign of terrorism-through-being-annoying against them continues. One morning, Tom is in the middle of a zoom call with his client Catherine (Wynn Everett), a wealthy, battered woman who killed her husband, and his gorgeous colleague Lexi (Margarita Levieva). I mean, you don’t have to take my word for it on the “gorgeous” thing: Tom himself is creeping up, and perhaps over, the edge of an affair with the woman.
Anyway, Tom is wearing a jacket and tie with no pants for the call, so he’s unprepared when his daughter sees a pair of strangers (Ethan Embry and Sunny Mabrey) in the backyard, drinking beer and getting ready to use the pool. When Tom grabs one of his many guns to confront them, they say “Tommy” invited them to “his house” to party. Even after he blusters about “taking them apart,” it takes Tom reaching for his waistband and using the phrase “stand your ground” before the two dirtbags are willing to depart. Tom pumps some serious iron to work off the stress.
Later, Tom’s strolling up the walk to the house when he steps in dog poop. The Bowdens don’t have a dog — only Chekov’s cat, who Max befriends in this episode, most likely to the cat’s eventual regret — but Max does, and naturally Tom’s suspicious. But the glitches that screw up their picture frames and security cameras alike are still in effect, and Tom can’t see who brought the dog into their yard. Nor can he make out what Max hands Zack (Joe Anders) when the two chat in the driveway one day.
Max makes nice with both the Bowdens’ pet and their troubled son when he shows up at their house one morning to do some more plausibly deniable microaggression, and take a road trip with Anna. You can thank Anna’s oblivious partner and friend Noa (CCH Pounder) for that one: Max has requested that Anna serve as his attorney during settlement negotiations with the private prison company held responsible for absent or complicit guards during his assault inside, and Noa — who’s unaware she’s on a show called Cape Fear — thinks this is a terrific idea. The PR will be great, and so will the 40% cut of the settlement.
To her credit, Anna goes HAM in there. Max, a tenacious seeming sort, accepts the offer on the table no questions asked, and gets visibly irritated with Anna when she halts the handshake phase to demand further concessions. That irritation disappears when he realizes she’s gonna get everything she wants for him and more, though. However he feels about her, he recognizes she’s a hell of a lawyer. He compares her to a pitbull, and from a man who spent part of his childhood in a dog cage, that comparison carries a lot of weight.
But when Anna, Max, and the two-person news crew led by mouthy, nosy Tabitha (Anna Baryshnikov) get stuck in a motel due to inclement weather prior to their return, Tabitha’s extremely loud sex with her cameraman Dustin (Daniel Di Amante) drives them both to a diner for refuge. There, Max gently but insistently asks Anna what happened to turn her from a true believer in his innocence, as she was in the early days of his case, into someone who, well, looked at him differently, and wound up cutting the “deal” that sent him to prison for life.
Anna denies that such a change ever happened, which is bullshit, as Max points out. But she insists that she was simply in over her head, and apologizes for the bad advice she gave him. Max thanks her, and that’s the end of the show! Isn’t that nice?
Even if Max really did accept Anna’s apology and simply move on with his life, there are other rogue actors at work. After cloning Zack’s phone with the help of her exonerated client turned private investigator Ray (the great Jamie Hector), Anna tracks down and confronts the mysterious girl he’s been chatting with online. Her name is Neveah (Malia Pyles), she appears to be homeless, and Anna straight-up threatens to have her arrested by her cop contacts unless she agrees never to speak to Zack again.
But that doesn’t stop this young go-getter, no sir! After a drone takes a suggestively framed video of Natalie (Lily Collias) doing yoga in the Bowdens’ backyard and blasts it out to all her frenemies at a pool party as if it came from Natalie herself, who should swoop in to defang the bullies but Neveah. Incredible timing, Neveah! What are the odds?
Telling Natalie her name is Amber, the mystery girl gives her some molly and basically diagnoses her whole deal. Natalie feels she doesn’t deserve the things she has, like she owes a debt for them, and she tries to pay it off by excelling academically and athletically at the cost of becoming invisible. The only way to win this game, “Amber” says, is not to play — regrettable advice to give a teenager who no doubt has college applications in her near future, and no doubt the parental expectations that come with them.
They also make out, because Natalie’s been iced out by her homophobic bestie Callie (Dot Cloud). “She’s not as straight as she thinks she is,” she jokes with “Amber,” who immediately gets to work replacing her. “Amber” is running a textbook, drug-fueled lovebombing campaign on a broken-hearted girl. Of course they made out.
In other illicit Bowden romance news, Tom kisses Lexi after inviting her over to work. (Come on, Tom. Come on.) They’re buzzed off her booze, snuck into the house because Anna is sober. They’re also high off Tom’s tincture, which I assume is a microdose of psilocybin, and which Zack sees them take. Finally, they kiss, though a phone call from Anna breaks it up. (For now.) The Bowdens make love when she gets back, lovingly filmed as a terrifying negative image. The visual metaphor is about as subtle as Bernard Herrmann’s theme music.
Don’t get the impression that Tom and Natalie are the only ones with new women in their lives. Max Cady menaces some poor would-be groupie named Wendy (Kate Bond), who flirts with him in the park as he eats ice cream and pays the price. Grinning and cooing, he talks about taking her out to a cabin on Cape Fear River and threatens to choke her to death. Then he smears his ice cream on her cheek, licks it, and walks off with a surly, “Nice to meet ya.”
But the menacer gets menaced when his own home is broken into by the hooded, masked, sunglasses-wearing women we’ve seen several times, most recently knocking at Anna’s motel door thinking it was Max’s. In the video she leaves him, she takes off her disguise to reveal she’s none other than Cape Fear alumna Juliette Lewis. Now that’s how you stunt cast.
What comes next is even more surprising than the actor involved. Singing a repetitive song the only lyrics of which appear to be “What do they know about love” and “Jingling the dog’s collar would be fine,” she drives him to physically destroy his television and the table beneath it in order to silence her. The dog collar she leaves as a gift triggers a split-second memory of his time in his father’s dog cage. “Oh noooooooo,” he wails, a shocking display of vulnerability that leaves even his incongruously adorable slobbery dog at a loss. The poor critter has no idea what’s going on, and thrillingly, neither do we. [Editor’s note: Lewis’s character is singing the Butthole Surfers’s “Jingle of a Dog Collar.”]
Perhaps to a fault. We’re already trying to figure out Max Cady’s deal — I mean, we’ve all got the gist, but the specifics of what he’s up to and how he’ll pull it off are complete unknowns — when suddenly the show dumps not one but two mystery women on us in the same episode. Who are they? What are their connections to Max? Are they Max-level dangerous? Meanwhile, who did cut off Zack’s toe? What drug is Tom taking and why is it a big secret from Anna? What is the shocking truth Tom and Anna are trying to keep Max from uncovering about their conduct? What happened to make Anna get sober? What’s going to happen to the cat? That’s a whole lot of known unknowns.
And at the rate this show has gone, I think it’s safe to assume there are even more unknown unknowns out there — mysteries we can’t even see coming from where we are in the season. I mean, could you have predicted Juliette Lewis would show up as some kind of singing psychopath prior to the final ninety seconds of this episode? I couldn’t! And yet it seems like it will be pretty important to the whole of the show. No doubt there will be many such cases going forward. Compared to the concision of the films, these extra plotlines feel, well, extra.
But that’s kind of the deal with this incarnation of Cape Fear. This isn’t a family with one secret, but many. And this isn’t a man with one method of extracting vengeance, but a wide range, from teaching Zack how to properly slice a tomato (“like a guillotine”) to placing Anna’s organization in his debt. As Neveah — excuse me, Amber — would tell Natalie, all debts must be paid. Death by a thousand cuts.
Sean T. Collins (@seantcollins.com on Bluesky and theseantcollins on Patreon) has written about television for The New York Times, Vulture, Rolling Stone, and elsewhere. He is the author of Pain Don’t Hurt: Meditations on Road House. He lives with his family on Long Island.
