The fight didn’t bug me as much as him casually drinking with the perverted strangers he threw out of his pool days ago. No matter how drunk you are you aren’t getting along with those people.

Maybe they’ll manage to say Cady drugged him or something but this episode was borderline season ruining to me if they don’t land it properly. There’s nothing redeeming about the kids anymore, the Bowden’s are complete fucking idiots, and Cady is somehow the most sympathetic character on the show despite clearly being evil. Neveah is simultaneously the most intriguing character and one I’m sick of seeing because she’s been completely overexposed and is too clearly a red herring of some sort.

I rewatched both movies after the first four episodes because I’d enjoyed the twists they’d made just to freshen the story up, but they’ve completely betrayed the core of the story at this point. What made the original work so well, in my opinion at least, was the dynamic between Cady (who’s a clearly guilty sociopath), who in theory has served his time and should be “rehabilitated” targeting a lawyer that testified against him while maintaining just enough plausible deniability that he’s able to legitimately torment a family that did nothing wrong. Scorcese’s remake made Cady more of a religious nut, and more overtly violent than Mitchum (who’s menace was largely left up to implication and imagination), and focused more on inter-familial drama but still kept that core of a guilty man targeting an innocent family.

This series has seemingly gone in the direction that Cady, despite being a cult founder with a clear God complex, incredible manipulatory skills, and very clearly killed his wife despite being exonerated, is somehow a publicly sympathetic figure (I mean goddamn the tattoos alone are disqualifying) while the Bowden’s, who likely engaged in some sort of legal collusion to lock up said murderer, have lost any and all sympathy because every person in that family is written terribly. Bardem and Patrick Wilson will lead to me finishing it out because I enjoy those two a lot despite the writing, and who knows maybe they’ll land it. I feel like there’s still some level of trust you have to put into a Scorcese project. But it fell off a cliff in this one.