![]() ![]() Were you?” - the actor is really showing something solid, which I admittedly didn’t anticipate.) What about Kenny? Uncle Billy? You never truly know what families are like - not from the outside as a bystander, and not from the inside, where perspectives and opinions can vary from person to person. (The little sardonic grin Peters slides into after he says to Deacon Mark, “I was beginning to think you were avoiding me. Is it Deacon Mark? Colin, working on the case without Mare, certainly seems to be leaning that way since he was tipped off that Mark ended up in Easttown after parents of a 14-year-old girl at his last parish accused him of sexual misconduct. Let’s try another one: Who is DJ’s father? It’s not Frank or Dylan, both of whom test negative. Teenage girls are fucking sneaky,” is she thinking of whatever the two of them used to get up to? And was any of it remotely close to what Erin was forced into doing: joining an online escort service under the fake name Jasmine so she could pay for DJ’s ear surgery, which neither Kenny nor Dylan wanted to pay for? Whatever bond Mare and Lori have might be the most important relationship in the former’s life. And sex with Richard doesn’t count sex isn’t always the same as intimacy. Is resting her head on Lori’s shoulder the only gesture of physical affection we see Mare make toward someone else? Drew doesn’t count she loves that kid maybe too much. We see a chastened Mare from the very beginning of “Poor Sisyphus.” She stalls on telling Helen and Siobhan about what she did to Carrie and that she’s since been suspended she gratefully accepts Lori’s “No, I won’t let you” when Mare asks whether her best friend is ready to give up on her, too. What does that diversion mean? That at least on some level, Mare still has the ability to feel shame. ![]() “Right now I just want to drink these beers and talk about finding these girls, if that’s okay,” she says to Colin when he asks her why she’s suspended. If so, would that somehow make her more equipped to catch another bad person? Also maybe. Does that make her entirely a bad person? Maybe. I’m not surprised that Mare, now sidelined from the job because she planted heroin on her grandson’s mother, is still working the case and still trying to figure out what happened to Erin - and, as we now know, what is still happening to Katie Bailey and now Missy Sager (Sasha Frolova). ![]() Is all of this some level of copaganda, because it suggests that a pure desire for justice is the cause of this martyr-like behavior? Sure! No argument from me! But I think the best TV shows or movies of this genre show how the system corrupts, how bureaucracy stalls justice, and how an entrenched kind of power makes for selective morality. They can’t trust anyone, because they’re so committed to the job. They can’t hold down relationships, because they’re so committed to the job. Their obsessiveness pushes them away from people, because they’re so committed to the job. Think of what Wendell Pierce’s Bunk Moreland told McNulty, more than once: “You’re no good for people.” These are figures tortured by the fact that all the good they do - catch a bad guy, lock him up, get some drugs off the street, solve a murder - can’t undo the bad that has already been done. There are so many sad detectives, from Matthew Rhys’s Perry Mason to Matthew McConaughey’s Rust Cohle to Olivia Colman’s Ellie Miller to Morgan Freeman’s William Somerset to Dominic West’s Jimmy McNulty. I bring up Sisyphus not just because this fourth episode of Mare of Easttown is titled “Poor Sisyphus,” but because this mythical figure, and the sort of existential inevitability he represents, comes up often in pop culture about detectives. Finding beauty in tedium might be the only way to keep oneself sane. One must imagine Sisyphus happy,” Camus wrote. ![]() The struggle itself toward the heights is enough to fill a man’s heart. “Each atom of that stone, each mineral flake of that night-filled mountain, in itself, forms a world. His god was that boulder, his existence was pushing it upward, and his purpose was chasing after it whenever it rolled down, and starting his task again. With his focus only on the task at hand, Camus theorized, Sisyphus had no time for the gods, no time for larger questions about his own existence, no theories about the purpose of life. In his 1942 essay “The Myth of Sisyphus,” philosopher Albert Camus wrote of Sisyphus’s eternal, cyclical task of pushing a boulder up a mountain, watching it roll down, and then starting again, with a kind of resigned, begrudging acceptance. ![]()
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