S01.E04: Christina's World

[izabella]

Is it because it's a cat that it seems understandable that abusing and mutilating a cat is brushed under the rug?  Would it seem just as understandable if it were the neighbor's beloved dog?  Or if he had amputed a leg?  Most people see pets as family members, so unless this entire family is psychopathic, I would have expected more reaction.

[ghoulina]

Yea, and actually, the fact that there was just a funeral and a murder investigation launched wouldn't make me more likely to brush the cat mutilation aside. If anything, it would make me MORE likely to take getting him some help seriously. I would think he wasn't dealing with death very well, and needed to express himself in a better way. 

[iMonrey]

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Cam is REALLY upset about that stupid creepy doll. Cut a cats tail off? Wacky! Tries to lock his cousin in a cage? Kids will be kids! Make a creepy doll? That kid is DERANGED! DERANGED damn it! 

Agreed - Cam's reaction to the Tooth Doll was disproportionate to the cat-maiming but oddly enough both he and the therapist were more alarmed by that stupid doll than anything else. I don't know - I guess the writers just meant for the doll to be scarier than it turned out to be.

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Maybe the cat lady is the killer.  Or maybe the cat is.

I briefly toyed with the possibility the neighbor lady could be SBK, but it doesn't really fit with Madeline killing her husband to keep him silent. If she's willing to let the gardener take the fall (assuming she did that) why would she care about the neighbor lady? The problem with killing off Papa Hawthorne in the pilot is that I'm likely to forget about him and focus on the remaining characters, but his death is sort of telling, plot-wise. If he wasn't the killer himself he at least knew who it was and Madeline didn't want him to tell. 

Unless that whole thing turns out to be a red herring and she silenced her husband for something entirely different. 

[Guest]

I don't think it's understandable that he mutilated the cat.  I just think of all the silly stuff these dramas ask to swallow each week, a junkie dad who scolded him and sent him to a therapist and didn't ground him or beat him isn't THAT unbelievable in 2016.  Cam is still trying to get him help.  The show is throwing up all kinds of barriers to that happening.  Probably just to keep the eeriness happening, since SBK isn't killing.

Not to mention that Chatwin's acting makes him seem kind of "who gives a shit" about everything, which I'm not sure is entirely the intention of the writers.  Though it could be.  I don't think even two sons as weird as Cam and Garret would be as rude as they were to Maddie in that "give us $4000, and now I'll just take your wine" scene, so soon after those two deaths.   Jeez, they didn't even say thank you.  Mitch didn't leave money to Garrett, anyway.  Maddie doesn't owe him anything.  

Edited July 18, 2016 by Guest

[Sandman]

It's funny -- I immediately thought that Maddie was lying in the scene with the "reading of the will" (because, well, nobody actually ... did that) in saying that Mitch left everything to her. I wondered if she capitulated to Garrett's demand for "money that Dad left me" out of a glimmer of guilt.

I am beginning to think that I'm wrong and that Jack really is a budding serial killer after all; but if he is, he's just the flowering of the third generation of entitled and (barely) functional crazypants-ness that is the Hawthorne family tree. I mean, is there one of them who isn't off the beam somehow? Maddie's icy and controlling, Tessa is equally obsessed with control, as well as morbidly self-pitying, Cam seems to be barely holding on to rationality (and his objection to the Polly-Grip Dolly seems to be almost more because it offends his artistic sensibilities than anything else), Garrett seems to be channelling Ted Bundy (I think the actor bears a spooky resemblance to Mark Harmon circa The Stranger Beside Me) and Alison is just an emotionless monster of ambition.

Edited July 22, 2016 by Sandman