Early this year, a San Diego woman named Kathy Rowe was sentenced to five years of probation and location monitoring after being found guilty of a plot to torment a husband and wife she didn’t know. The couple snapped up the house Rowe had decided was her dream home, so she waged a campaign of retaliation. She started out relatively innocently with prank magazine subscriptions and fake online listings claiming the house was still for sale. She gradually escalated to Craigslist casual sex ads designed to dupe a strange man into coming to the house to rape the homeowner as part of a consensual non-consent fantasy. Friends and neighbors described Rowe the way most people describe most other people, as a kind soul who doesn’t seem capable of acts so heinous.
Rowe’s story dovetails with many of Finding Carter’s central themes. There’s the errant but hard-to-shake notion that people can be easily categorized as good or bad, rational or irrational, sane or crazy. Lori became the villain of Finding Carter within the first 15 minutes of the show, and since then, it’s been difficult to tell exactly where on the sanity spectrum Lori falls. That’s not a slight; it’s actually one of the most effective dynamics of Finding Carter. The shadowy depiction of Lori forces the audience into the same confused, bewildered state as Carter. In the opening scenes of the pilot, the audience sees Lori, the doting mother-as-BFF, and it has to keep trying to reconcile that with the increasingly insane, erratic behavior she’s displayed. The first two episodes of the season have been about helping the audience, via Carter, better understand how the drastically different sides of Lori are related. Good luck trying to fully grasp Lori’s thought process at this point, but in “Shut Up And Drive,” it becomes easier to grok. Like Rowe, Lori is obsessed.
Bird refers to it as idée fixe, though she uses the term to define Carter’s obsession with figuring out who was on the other end of the line during Lori’s cryptic phone call at the beginning of “Love The Way You Lie.” But there’s obsession to go around in this show, though Lori is hogging up the bulk of it. The reveal at the end of “Shut Up And Drive” reveals why: Lori and David had a fling while he and Elizabeth were going through an especially rough patch, and he said he would leave Elizabeth for her. At least, that’s Lori’s version of events, which still sounds like a 10-pound bag of cuckoo, but Lori’s line of reasoning isn’t as full of gaps as it once was. Lori was fixated on the children she decided still belonged to her biologically, and after an affair with their birth father, however casual it may have been, she saw that encounter as the first steps toward her rightful place in the family.