Last week, I touched on the formula that Cape Fear has adopted over its first seven episodes. Again and again, Max Cady and his daughter have provoked the Bowdens into making bigger and bigger mistakes, and they’ve fallen into every possible trap with an almost gleeful stupidity. Anna and Tom have endangered their law careers, for one, repeatedly getting caught on camera in public confrontations that make them look bad. They’ve also potentially lost one son to permanent psychosis, as we see from his continual struggle to identify with any personality other than Cady’s imagined son. And their overall negligence led their daughter to seek guidance from a psychopathic murderer. The show isn’t actively dull, but watching Anna and Tom completely fail to gain any possible ground against this villain has become narratively stale.
To be fair, “Los Tiempos De Dios Son Perfectos” does break a bit from past episodes. When it opens, Anna and Tom are enjoying a brief period of peace, sneering foolishly at Cady as the cops take him in. Unfortunately, that serenity does not last long. Nat finds Ray’s dismembered body in a cooler at the bottom of the pool, and the fallout of that discovery takes up the bulk of the episode.
Much of this goes as you’d expect. Everything here is set up to make Tom look bad, including the missing Glock that he tosses because three rounds are missing and he knows it could be the murder weapon. It’s refreshing that Noa continues to believe them and even beats herself up for “letting the wolf in,” but the same isn’t true for Detective Grayson, who isn’t at all swayed by (or even particularly interested in) the photos on Ray’s iCloud. He’s fixated on how suspicious this is all starting to look for the Bowdens, between Grayson’s receipt for a registered Glock and the recent report from the trespasser Tom beat up at the bar. Anna insists there isn’t enough to arrest Tom for murder, but it happens anyway shortly thereafter—largely thanks to Tom getting exposed for the Cady possession frame job, which Anna’s dad is happy to verify on the local news.
The personal element of this should be more interesting than the actual machinations leading to Tom’s arrest. Even now, though, the show is playing too coy to really commit to the domestic drama. Once again, Cady says something to Tom that suggests a prior affair between him and Anna; once again, Tom questions her about it, this time while she visits him in jail as his attorney, but doesn’t get any concrete answers. (There’s also the convenient photo of Cady kissing Anna earlier this season, of course.) Anna’s behavior here is particularly frustrating: She says she doesn’t know if Nat is Cady’s daughter, but doesn’t make any attempt to elaborate, and then for some reason Tom cuts her off and tells her to leave. It’s a frustratingly unproductive and contrived conversation.
At least we get a bit of clarification soon after, when Anna finally opens up to her daughter about some of the specifics of what went down 17 years ago. Back when she was engaged to Paul and blacking out on the regular, she cheated on him multiple times. One night, she got drinks with Cady, and they may have slept together; she doesn’t remember what happened, but it’s very possible they had sex. Of course, this would’ve been assault, given that Anna couldn’t consent in that state of mind, and Nat reassures her that it wouldn’t be her fault if Cady did get her pregnant.
I’m not sure this story answers enough of our questions to truly satisfy, especially coming this late into the season. As a heart-to-heart between a mother and daughter who have failed to connect this whole time, though, it’s a really solid moment. And the added context helps motivate Nat’s more drastic actions to come. In fact, the show sets it up a little too obviously when Anna drunkenly tells her daughter that either they die or Cady dies.
Everything related to Natalie in this episode is an overall improvement, even if the bar was very low. It’s just nice to see her eventually on the same general page as her parents for once, in a different mode from her usual snark and angst. She starts off the episode in a state of shock and guilt, denying that she ever opened the gun safe—then Tom gets accused, and she’s forced to come clean about the whole trip to North Carolina. I enjoy how “Los Tiempos” tracks Nat’s much-delayed realization that Cady is a complete bullshit artist: She seems open to believing him when he denies killing Ray, but she doesn’t believe her parents would go so far as to kill Ray to frame Cady. Nat’s jailhouse visit doesn’t bring any new insights, really, but it does allow for a neat bit of emotional terrorism when she relishes in pointing out that Cady used and discarded Nevaeh. Sisters can be so vicious to each other, can’t they?
Nat has taken matters into her own hands since the beginning, an inclination she inherited from her mom. So it doesn’t feel all that unbelievable that she’d come to his house with a gun and get taunted into shooting him, even if she’s fully aware of how dangerous and stupid it is. More frustrating is how cleanly this rash move—not to mention Anna later sneaking into Cady’s hospital room and almost choking him—fits into the show’s established formula.
We’re trained now to anticipate most of the major beats of this story, no matter the familiarity with previous adaptations. We know, for example, that the ploy to plant drugs in Cady’s home won’t leave much of a mark. Similarly, there’s never any doubt that Cady will survive the encounter with Nat, even if we hear that he was supposedly lucky to be alive. This is just the latest, largest escalation of Cady’s method of taking hits publicly to get the Bowdens in trouble. The more Cady is hurting, the more it serves his own narrative.
There are only two episodes left of Cape Fear now, which means it’s time for Anna to pull off some moves of her own down at Cape Fear River. It feels like there are only a couple possible narrative directions here: Either Anna will ultimately best Max Cady and save her family by overcoming her demons and openly acknowledging her past mistakes, or she’ll fall into yet another trap and put her family in a position from which they can never come back. Perhaps killing Cady isn’t the end of it; in fact, that could be his final move, calculated for maximum damage to the Bowdens’ reputation. While that ending might work on a thematic level, what I crave more than anything now is a real taste of revenge against this once-ambiguous, increasingly ridiculous man. At this point, I care more about the villain losing than the “heroes” winning.
Stray observations
- • Am I missing something with my repeated complaints about the lack of acknowledgment of Faith’s death? I know Anna has a lot going on, but it’s bizarre that we haven’t seen her reflect on that incident or look into the police investigation that should be happening. Why has the show seemingly dropped this thread entirely?
- • I assume Zack will recover eventually, and that his doctor is right about him going out of dissociation. I doubt the show is willing to commit to the darkness of keeping him in that state forever. That said, Tom and Anna still managed to be in good spirits for a while this week despite their son’s condition.
- • Cady’s new restaurant is already almost ready to go?
- • Picking up on my “Max Cady got annoying” thread last week, I’m sick of seeing his smug smiles now whenever he pulls off another trick. Ditto his over-the-top explanations of his evil plans. We get it: Tearing the Bowden family apart is all he wanted in the first place.
- • I’m not totally sure Brandon is tracking for me as a character, even if Ted Levine is doing a good job. He wants a chance to get to know his grandkids, but he’s also relapsing, but he also wants $100,000 to leave town, but he’s also speaking on the record about how his daughter persuaded him to frame Cady?
- • Nat’s final interaction with her mom is pretty badass: “What happened?” “I missed.”
- • With Nat in youth detention, I suppose she’ll have a final faceoff with Neveah while their respective parents face off on the outside.
Keep scrolling for more great stories.