S01.E13: Spiral

[Lisin]

As the mysterious cracks spread throughout Haven at an increasing rate, a mysterious criminal returns to Haven and Audrey discovers the secrets of her past and her mother's.

[wanderingstar]

I think it's time for me to sit down and watch this ep again. It's my fave of the series, and I haven't watched it in ages.

[Tabbyclaw]

Ending the season with our first discovery that, whatever flaws this show may have, it does killer finales. My first experience with the show came in the form of a full-series binge between seasons two and three, and even stopping here just because I'd said I was only going to watch to the end of the season that day was torture. My sympathies to all the first-run fans who had to wait through the entire hiatus.

 

This one's such a "Where do I even start" episode. Audrey is still reeling from last episode's revelation when Duke hits her up for help with Tattoo Guy. Except it turns out that Tattoo Guy could be one of any number of people, and this particular guy isn't him. But he is Nathan's biological father. And now Nathan's father and his dad are both dead. And just when everyone is starting to maybe get a handle on all of that insanity, here comes someone else claiming to be Audrey. I'd say "It's a good thing one of them owns a bar," but when do they have time to drink it all away? And is there actually enough alcohol in the world?

 

Trivia: Someone leaked Emily Rose a copy of the script before she was supposed to have it, and the writers couldn't understand why she was so freaked out about it. It hadn't ocurred to them that "Here's a new character who is apparently your character" sounds a lot like "You're being replaced and we haven't gotten around to telling you yet."

[Shanna Marie]

I finally got around to this one, and it remains one of my favorites. I'm not sure my jaw came off the floor for the whole episode on first viewing. One thing I like is that there are so many great scenes between characters. I love the way Audrey handles Nathan throughout -- she'd been in her own cupcake funk, but the moment she learns that Max might be related to him, she starts being very protective of him. She's giving him space and being gentle with him and shielding him from others, but then asserts herself with him when he needs it. I love their scene at the end because they're both apologizing. He's come out of his haze enough to recognize what she was doing, but she's able to recognize just how messed-up things for him, so she doesn't hold his anger against him. It's really lovely.

 

I go back and forth in trying to decide if Max knew all along that Nathan was his son. On the one hand, Nathan was the last person he tracked down, and he didn't do so until apparently he met with the Rev, and you'd think if he got out of prison eager to see his long-lost son, that would have been the first person he went to, even if he was just stalking and watching from a distance. I've wondered if he might have thought it could have been Duke, since he went there early, and Duke and Nathan are about the same age. It was like he was testing Duke and sizing him up. But on the other hand, when he talked to Vince, Vince went right to knowing he was talking about Garland when talking about the one who took everything away from him, so it seems like Vince assumed he knew. Though I suppose it's possible that Vince was talking about Garland having taken everything from Max, but not necessarily saying anything about Garland having kept what he took.

 

I have some other big-picture thoughts I'll take to All Seasons.

[Tabbyclaw]

I'm not sure Max could have not known. We don't know when he went to jail the first time, but we know he was out at such a time as to be a suspect in the Colorado Kid murder when Nathan was seven, and it would have been easy to track down his wife/girlfriend and discover that she'd taken up with Garland.

[Shanna Marie]

I'm not sure Max could have not known. We don't know when he went to jail the first time, but we know he was out at such a time as to be a suspect in the Colorado Kid murder when Nathan was seven, and it would have been easy to track down his wife/girlfriend and discover that she'd taken up with Garland.

But she would have been dead by then because she apparently died around the time Nathan was five. So if there was some identity doctoring, if Max only came to town during 1983, he wouldn't have run into her to know who Garland was married to, and if Nathan didn't remember him at all, Nathan likely would have grown up enough to be unrecognizable.

 

Though this will likely remain one of the big unanswered mysteries of this series. I keep waiting for Nathan's adoption to turn out to be significant because it's such a big, crazy thing to not matter at all, and yet it's hardly ever mentioned.

[Tabbyclaw]

But she would have been dead by then because she apparently died around the time Nathan was five.

 

Do we have anything other than speculation to support that theory, though? It's certainly my headcanon, and there's the line in The Trial Of Audrey Parker about Nathan not having listened to his dad since he was six years old, but as far as I can tell we're still just inferring it as a likely scenario.

[Shanna Marie]

There's a line in "The Trial of Audrey Parker" when they mention something about Nathan's mother having been dead for 30 years, and at that time he'd have likely been around 34-35, which leaves him 4-5 at her death. However, given this show's really wonky and ever-shifting timelines and the tendency to round off numbers, there's a lot of leeway. Nathan's mother's death falls in a grey area in which she could have been dead when Max was in town and she could have still been alive. And there's the possibility that the mother Nathan knew wasn't his birth mother. Garland could have been upset about what was done to Nathan's mom whether or not he ended up with her. He and his wife could have taken Nathan in, and then she was the mom who died. I think that's a more remote possibility, though, since Dave talked about Garland bringing up Nathan the best he could after his mom died, and you'd think he'd have phrased it differently if that had been Garland's wife and not Nathan's birth mother.

 

At any rate, they've left themselves a lot of wiggle room to do just about anything without directly contradicting many established facts.

 

I do think it's weird that if Max knew all along, and he came to town specifically to find his long-lost son, he waited so long to find Nathan. Even if he wasn't looking for his son out of any kind of love, wouldn't it have been even more torture for Garland to know that he was talking to Nathan? He talked to just about everyone in town, allowing everyone to have their guard up, before he came anywhere near Nathan. It seems like it would have been far more effective to let Garland see him with Nathan or to drop a hint about how well Garland's boy had grown up. It's weird that he didn't even seem to hint at Garland having his son when they first met up. Instead, the focus seemed to be entirely on the murder case and his parole. He definitely blamed Garland for the loss of his family, but whether he knew what became of them is another one of those things that could go either way.