The quality of any Cape Fear adaptation rests in large part on the strength of its central villain—and I’m not pleased to report that with each new episode, this version of Max Cady gets a little less interesting. Javier Bardem is still in fine form, conveying whatever emotion the script asks of him, but the character is beginning to wear out his welcome. Behavior that was once unsettling now just comes across as kind of irritating, especially because most of the ambiguity in his motivations is gone. It’s only becoming clearer and clearer: This miniseries did not need ten episodes.
“Mongrel” starts at the tail end of the Nevaeh confrontation from last week, following up a weak cliffhanger with a predictable aftermath. Nevaeh goes to jail and denies her father’s involvement in her various shenanigans, including living in the Bowdens’ walls and slowly brainwashing Zack with the use of scopolamine. Major doses of the motion sickness drug can lead to depersonalization and exacerbate preexisting issues like Zack’s depression, so Nevaeh and Max Cady were able to convince him he’s Cady’s son. After stabbing his real dad, Zack is placed on involuntary psych hold, potentially stuck in permanent psychosis.
Most of the Anna and Tom scenes in this episode deal with their pain over potentially losing their son, a fear that ties into Tom’s undealt-with grief over his brother’s death. It’s appropriate to linger on the weight of these dark turns, I suppose, but it’s also hard to feel anything when I never even got to know the “normal” Zack, a character whose only backstory involved leaking a girl’s nudes. Besides, we’ve had enough of the Bowdens playing defense, reacting to Cady’s effortless manipulations and licking their wounds. It’s seven episodes into the show, and we’re more than ready to see them play offense.
That does start happening in this episode, to be fair. Tom is the first to suggest bending the law this time, though Anna eventually gets on board: They’ll implicate Cady in Nevaeh’s crimes by planting some of her leftover scopolamine vials at his house, then leaving an anonymous tip about a large quantity of narcotics. They even have the perfect guy to pull off the drop: Anna’s estranged father, who’s even more scared of losing his family forever than going back to prison. Brandon Devereaux is an underdeveloped character in a show full of them, but Ted Levine brings some much-needed gravitas and a believable desperation to his scenes.
So stuff is happening, yes. But it’s hard to believe Anna’s Crimestoppers tip will have much of an effect when the Bowdens have been so painfully outmatched this entire season. Similarly, there’s no element of catharsis when Tom beats the shit out of Cady early in the episode, because we immediately see the people with cameras and know that this is yet another provocation that will just make Tom look worse and Cady look better. Cady’s grin over the title credits is just annoying, because it’s so obvious.
Most of these same issues come up in this week’s overlong road trip subplot, a storyline that takes up a lot of screen time but doesn’t actually offer much insight, character development, or plot movement. For one, Natalie’s search for the truth about her biological father continues here with little progress, only more ambiguity: Paul doesn’t know for sure he’s her dad, and there was never a paternity test, so it could be him or Tom or maybe Max Cady himself. He and Anna got “close” early in their relationship, when they thought his wife had left him. According to him, everything changed when her body was found in October 2008, nine months before Nat’s birth.
Seeing Cady and Nat connect on this impromptu road trip should be riveting and eerie. But their conversations about her parents remain so vague, as does the reasoning for her eventual baptism at Bluff’s Point on the Cape Fear River. (They said the title, y’all!) Maybe Cady is indeed Nat’s father, but the show hasn’t done the work to make us want her to form a healthier and happier relationship with her family.
As a vehicle for Max Cady lore, this road trip also comes up lacking—or maybe I just reject the idea of “Max Cady lore” altogether. What a shocker that this abusive psychopath grew up with a mean dad who kept him in a cage like his dogs! What a shocker that his mother died in Spain and his stepmom never wanted him! Ron Perlman chews the scenery, and perhaps there’s some novelty in meeting a character who can actually get under Cady’s skin just by taunting him with dog commands, but it all feels pretty obvious. If anything, it’s surprising Cady doesn’t kill his parents right then and there.
But he does murder someone in this episode: Ray, who’s on a parallel journey tracking down Cady’s masked stalker. We learn that Crystal is Max’s half-sister, an unnerving reveal given the way they’ve treated each other in past episodes, but she doesn’t actually appear in the episode. She’s still a bit of a cipher characterized solely by her obsessiveness and instability, a description that applies to a few different characters on this show. And speaking of ciphers, Ray himself never became much of a character, either, even during his investigation in this episode. He has always seemed like easy cannon fodder for Cady.
So another supporting character falls at Max Cady’s hands, and another major character (Nat, who provided the murder weapon) gets set up to take the blame. With three episodes left, Cape Fear is really tightening the screws on its “heroes”: Tom could go to jail for assaulting Cady, Nat could go to jail for killing Ray, and Anna could go to jail for killing Faith, a character who still somehow remains unmentioned by either the police or Anna herself. The show has been carefully setting up these arcs to escalate in parallel, but it’s mostly just boring to watch play out. Let’s hope seeing the Bowdens on the offense will yield more satisfying results.
Stray observations
- • Nat pepper-spraying Nevaeh in the eyes was probably the best moment of this episode.
- • It’s nice to see Noa actually believing the Bowdens, but she’s also such a flat side character.
- • The legendary Patrick Fischler plays the psychiatrist who explains Zack’s situation to his parents. It’s a tiny role, but hopefully he’ll get to show up again during Zack’s recovery.
- • Not sure what to make of Luke, the creepy guy who takes care of Robert Cady’s dogs and tries to hit on Nat, but okay.
- • When Ray calls to inform Anna that Crystal Cady was the one following her, Anna remembers that Cady’s sister was institutionalized during the time of his trial. Wouldn’t that have been pertinent information earlier? In fact, shouldn’t she be looking into Robert Cady and somehow trying to use him, too?
- • For people who are supposedly monitoring their kids’ location constantly, these Bowdens sure are missing a lot of Nat’s various adventures, aren’t they? It’s pretty pathetic that they didn’t catch her traveling to North Carolina.
Keep scrolling for more great stories.