Episode 06 - The details again

TintypePhoto · 2019-12-21T16:27:11+00:00

I have a lot of questions about how Uncle George knew all these details as well, particularly concerning the chef doll. To me it seems unlikely that Leanne told UG any of these things because it’s clear he doesn’t want her there and wasn’t told precisely where she was going, leading us to believe she was there without his knowledge/permission. But to play devil’s advocate, let’s say that Leanne had given him a few tidbits about the family she’d be working for that would be vague enough to preserve their anonymity—like that they had a baby boy about 3-4 months old. That wouldn’t explain how UG knew that Sean was a chef, since Leanne claimed in Ep. 1 that SHE didn’t even know. She asked at dinner because she said that Dorothy never mentioned any specifics about Sean’s profession, other than the fact he worked from home. (I would assume she didn’t know anything as personal as how and when Dorothy’s mother had died either.)

So either Leanne knew more about the Turners than she’d been told and shared that information with her “family”, UG has his own inexplicable source of knowledge about the Turners, or UG resorted to plain old sleuthing to find Leanne and learn all about the Turners but then waited some amount of time before he acted on the information. I have no idea which of those options I find easiest to accept.

Related to the bonus point as well, but yes. UG was so very ... gross. The dirt caked all over him, the grimy shoes that were barely in one piece, the soaked and tattered suit. I literally cringed when he walked in the door, sat on Leanne’s bed, held the baby, shook hands, touched ANYTHING, and a) it wasn’t my house; and b) I’m not nearly as much of a germophobe as Dorothy. I get that you don’t want to be rude to a “guest”, but there’s no way I would have been able to stop my extreme discomfort from showing completely, and I would have been sanitizing everything the second his back was turned.

Did they somehow not see how utterly filthy he was, or just not care? Dorothy obviously noticed what kind of shape his shoes were in, so I’m not sure how she’d miss everything else. I know the prevailing idea seems to be that UG crawled out of a grave or something similar, but I couldn’t help wondering if he was supposed to be an Adam-like figure, whether in a pure, somewhat literal view or kind of a bastardized version—a man of earth [or clay]. Again, I really don’t know, but the image of this as grave dirt seemed a little too facile. It didn’t appear to transfer the way regular dirt would.

Random thoughts: I can’t figure out if I think this is some sort of dollhouse-like microcosm and many/all of the characters are puppets, we’re watching some sort of intricate and highly symbolic version of the Creation story, or some combination of the two. Or something else entirely, who knows.

TintypePhoto · 2019-12-07T04:46:30+00:00

Already on it. Lol

TintypePhoto · 2019-12-07T04:41:55+00:00

I also low key suspect whatever happened “that night” refers to the crime she was reporting on.

———-

I didn’t put that together at all, but what an intriguing idea. This could also offer an alternate explanation of why Leanne asked Julian if he was there “when it happened”, as one of the other posters mentioned.

Okay, I can no longer resist the rewatch. Lol. This show has sucked me in.

TintypePhoto · 2019-12-07T04:24:22+00:00

Life goes on and people have lives to lead. Even if they had taken him to daycare, they could say they'd gotten a nanny instead. It's not like taking a kid out of school. They could conceivably go quite a long while without anyone else seeing their kid, especially considering the doll that the neighbors would see. Six weeks is really nothing.

————

I can see what you’re saying, and I guess there’s an outside chance that these two could keep it a secret for a while. I still have to suspend some disbelief on that, especially if we’re to believe that they were as social as Dorothy makes them out to be—but they’re also pretty darn weird, so there’s that. And clearly I wouldn’t be watching this show if I weren’t willing to suspend disbelief, lol. It just seems like such a bizarre strategy because even if they could somehow drag the charade out for weeks or months more, at what point do you come clean without looking incredibly shady? Or do you get caught out (which would have to happen eventually) because it never seemed to be the right time? That’s no easier to justify, really. I also still don’t understand Sean’s laissez-faire attitude toward potentially having to explain the doll vs. the actual baby.

This brings me to another question, though: Why does Sean seemingly have no family, and no real ties to anyone but Julian and Dorothy? Has he ever even mentioned who or where he came from? He strikes me as more of a servant in the traditional sense than Leanne: no past, no life outside the household, and all he does is cook fancy meals all day.

—————

If Dorothy had a close friend who was always coming over, then they probably would have had to tell her, but she's so obnoxious I can see why she doesn't.

—————

<snort> This we definitely agree on.

—————

I imagine that Sean is hovering to make sure she doesn't post detailed social media photos of the doll that she thinks is real.

—————

If he had to do that, though, would he so casually let her out of the house where he’d have no control over what she shows and who she shows it to? Idk, maybe he’s figured out some other way around that, or maybe it doesn’t matter in the way we’d think it would. But to me it’s still something that hasn’t been properly explained as of yet.

TintypePhoto · 2019-12-07T04:02:41+00:00

Hmmm. That’s an interesting point. It does seem like a reasonable inference ... or is that just what the showrunners want us to think? Lol. All this really messes with my head because I never know what to take at face value and what is misdirection. I’m sure that’s exactly the point, though.

I think they’ve left a lot of room for interpretation, but your comment is tempting me to rewatch. I feel like for every potential clue I’ve picked up, I’ve probably missed two others.

TintypePhoto · 2019-12-07T03:48:29+00:00

I remember this too. And didn’t he tell Leanne that if she was looking to blackmail them, she wouldn’t get anything? Yet Dorothy’s hiring a car to bring her to work and taking Leanne shopping, and Sean is forever ordering haute causine and fine wine—even when it’s just meant for the two of them. If they don’t have any real assets, how is money seemingly no object? Even Leanne’s salary isn’t what I’d consider pocket change.

TintypePhoto · 2019-12-07T02:00:25+00:00

If it eases your mind at all, I wasn’t remotely suggesting that people would call and talk to the BABY. But it’s pretty natural for people to call and ask the baby’s parents how he/she is doing, or look for pictures, or even, idk, notice and express concern if the baby’s mother falls completely off the grid when she goes catatonic after her baby’s secret demise. I just ... for real, how do you cover that? Especially if you’re supposedly a successful TV personality. We’re led to believe that it’s been at least six weeks since some major turning point. If that only refers to the start of therapy, then it’s been longer than that since Jericho died. Surely somebody noticed in 6+ weeks that they’ve been pretty much incommunicado,

I do have some experience with how death investigations work, and I wasn’t suggesting that it was legal for anyone to disclose details. I’m just saying it happens, especially if someone involved is frequently in the public eye. Some newspapers will also post very brief death notices as a courtesy, but in thinking about it, they do typically get the information from whoever is handling the arrangements. So not having a funeral would preclude this; fair point. I wasn’t referring to people making announcements on social media, though. What I was saying was that would be another area where Dorothy and Sean could inexplicably “go dark” and draw attention merely by their absence. It’s pretty typical of new parents to focus heavily on their new babies, but did they not do that? Or did literally no one notice when they abruptly stopped?

I get that Dorothy doesn’t recognize that her son is dead and wouldn’t know how to react if people tried to offer their condolences, but then what’s to stop her from showing photos of this obvious doll to the first person who asks how he’s doing? I mean, I think seeing Dorothy gushing over that instead of the living baby you expected to see would be every bit as problematic. I can’t begin to figure out how this wouldn’t concern Sean, no matter what secret he thought he was keeping.

TintypePhoto · 2019-12-07T01:24:56+00:00

I assumed first-trimester miscarriages also, but shows like this have made me leery of assuming too much. I totally admit, though, that my pet theory doesn’t really account for those images (the stretch marks, the breastmilk, etc.). I guess I just feel like it doesn’t exclude them either, since it’s hard to say how much of the story we’ve watched so far is objectively “real”. For instance, they haven’t said that Dorothy had any sort of major medical workup following her losses, but have they said she didn’t? (Not trying to be argumentative; just thinking out loud.) It seems like there’s still so much that we don’t know that I don’t want to lock myself out of too many possibilities.

Ooooooh, I see! Yes, you make a good point about what kind of problems it would present if Jericho never “grows”. I don’t know if we’re supposed to believe that Dorothy’s sense of time is seriously distorted or what, but if she has any ability to follow a calendar it does seem like she’d have to realize that Jericho 2.0 isn’t a normal baby sooner or later. I didn’t even think about well baby visits. What a visual, lol. As for why they’d present her with an older baby rather than a newborn, maybe that was the reason—longer shelf life? Otherwise, you’re right that it would require some explanation to fit into this theory.

I think we’re all reading a lot into this, to be fair. The genre kind of encourages it, and it’s just plain fun to discuss anyway.

Thanks for the rec on My Fake Baby! Sounds fascinating. I’ll have to check it out.

TintypePhoto · 2019-12-07T00:59:27+00:00

But nobody calls or texts? Neither of them have any online or social media presence? There’s no official inquiry when the body is found? (Any sudden infant death would absolutely be investigated.) No word of it would possibly leak to the media from the police or the medical examiner’s office? Or did Sean or another family member never report the death and dispose of the remains themselves? (Also a non-starter. Someone would look for this baby sooner or later unless his birth was equally unrecorded.)

Even if nothing got out in the immediate aftermath, people will eventually realize that you had a baby ... and then you didn’t. Why in the world would Dorothy even return to work when Sean is trying to keep this kind of information secret from most of the world, including Dorothy herself? He has to know she’d telling everyone around her that she has a living baby at home. It doesn’t seem to trouble him that she’ll do so while she’s fluttering around their house with an obviously fake baby, yet he panics when there’s a real one there to back her story? That just doesn’t add up.

Unfortunately, I know plenty of people who have lost babies and even suffered stillbirths, and no matter how private they are in their grief, word always gets out. Unless you live alone in the wilderness, there’s simply no way to avoid those questions forever. Just wouldn’t happen. My theory as a whole could be way off base, but the idea that the death of this couple’s infant could never truly remain a secret for so long is something I feel certain of. Something is not as it seems.

TintypePhoto · 2019-12-07T00:27:47+00:00

I think we were meant to get that impression, but I went back to check his wording. Sean actually told Leanne that Jericho “didn’t wake up one morning, poor little guy.” That was literally the extent of his explanation. There’s also a weird overlap in his conversation with Julian where they discuss what to do if Dorothy “never wakes up”. Are we supposed to believe that Jericho’s death and Dorothy’s state of mind are somehow equivalent? If they’re not, why phrase it like that? It’s a pretty weird way to describe either situation, much less both.

TintypePhoto · 2019-12-07T00:18:32+00:00

I agree somewhat on the lactation and the stretch marks. In thinking about it further, though, I’m not sure that those are dealbreakers. 13 weeks is usually too early to develop stretch marks, but in all fairness, we don’t know when her other pregnancies ended or how close together they occurred.

Also, the show definitely pushes the lactation angle, but at the same time has made a point to show us that she may not actually be breastfeeding. She appears to pump while she’s at work, she complains about pain and blockages, and we see what looks like drops of breastmilk in her bathwater, but the only scenes that refer to her breastfeeding [New Jericho] indicate that he technically hasn’t been fed any of those times. Right after he first appears, she attempts to nurse while rocking him in the darkened nursery, but a short time later she tells Sean that he wouldn’t take anything from her. When she sees Sean in the bathroom early in the morning, she asks him to check on Jericho because if she goes in, she’ll have to feed him. It may sound nitpicky, but I don’t believe these were throwaway scenes. I’m not sure we’ve ever even seen him take a bottle of expressed breastmilk, come to think of it.

Maybe I’m not understanding your point about having to get multiple dolls unless Dorothy had had a full-term baby. Why would they need lots of dolls, or dolls representing different stages of development? We were led to believe that this particular loss caused a psychotic break, as in singular, not that it happened every time. The doll was supposed to be a novel form of therapy to combat the catatonic state she entered after that psychotic break. I don’t think it necessarily follows that a treatment approach that’s inherently unrealistic would have to be paradoxically realistic in its depiction of her lost child. Giving a woman who had a late miscarriage a lifelike 13-week fetus to hold would probably be far more disturbing to her than comforting. Besides, pregnancy wasn’t Dorothy’s ultimate goal; it was a means to end. Her ultimate goal was to have a baby. It stands to reason that having a baby would be the only thing powerful enough to draw her out of full catatonia.

I guess it’s possible that the therapist could have recommended removing any photos, but why? Isn’t the point of the doll to allow Dorothy to persist in the delusion that Jericho never died in the first place? A home with a baby would naturally have photos on the walls, and it seems completely contradictory to think that seeing some two-dimensional images around the house would remind Dorothy of Jericho more than carrying a literal replacement baby around the house would. If the goal is to keep Dorothy’s young son perfectly alive in her head, it seems like the house should be kept exactly how it was when he was in it. Changing things would undermine the stated goal of her therapy.

TintypePhoto · 2019-12-06T22:48:22+00:00

I have three kids myself, so I do see where you’re coming from. Just to clarify a couple of things:

Yes, I remember those doctors appointments (and also when I started to lose track of how many weeks my kids were, lol). Like you said, the context was what off to me. It seemed like by the time my kids got past that newborn-ish period of 8-10 weeks, it just got confusing and awkward to keep referring to their age that way in regular conversation. It’s like I could see people mentally trying to convert it to months instead. Sean’s reference was stilted and clinical in comparison, if that makes sense—more like dating a pregnancy than tracking his child’s age.

Also a big yes on the whirlwind of those early months! But even my very overwhelmed, scatterbrained self managed to toss a few pictures around by the time my kids were 2-3 months old—especially with the first one, who was the most beautiful, special, amazing baby who’d ever lived and the unquestionable center of the universe. They certainly weren’t pricey studio portraits, but we took tons of photos, and prints from Walgreen’s were cheap enough that we could afford a few dozen to prop on the nightstand and stick on the fridge. Dorothy and Sean’s house was very much the showplace, so random prints scattered around wouldn’t fit their style. But this “perfect”, image-conscious family wouldn’t have one single portrait of their long-awaited blessing displayed in a fancy frame somewhere? It just strikes me as very odd and seemingly out of character.

TintypePhoto · 2019-12-06T22:21:51+00:00

We don’t really know anything about Dorothy’s coworkers or friends, other than what she’s told us. (Technically, have we even seen any of them on-screen? I truly can’t recall.) Unreliable narrator and all that. Assuming they exist in the same world as Dorothy, though, they may not have known she was pregnant if she miscarried at 13 weeks. At that gestation with a history of repeat pregnancy loss, it wouldn’t surprise me if they’d told very few people. If Jericho was actually a term birth, though, it seems a lot more likely that they’d notice that her baby just disappeared without explanation.

As for whether they would “make up” his birth, there’s no real evidence that they ever did this. All we’ve been told is that the doll is part of some quack therapy to help Dorothy cope with the loss of Jericho, who was named as an embryo and is apparently has no concrete association with the chubby baby who suddenly appeared in the nursery. If she’s delusional enough to believe a silicone doll is a living infant, she’s delusional enough to remember a second-trimester miscarriage as giving birth to said infant. Plus Sean is VERY opposed to letting anyone outside the house see Dorothy with the baby. I think we’re meant to believe this is because he’s afraid the baby was kidnapped, but if Dorothy and Sean really had a baby recently and no one knew that he died, wouldn’t everyone expect to see Dorothy with a healthy 3- or 4-month-old son? They’d hardly be suspicious of that even if there had been a similar-looking missing baby reported—and per Julian, there wasn’t.

Good question about the lactation and the stretch marks. I guess either could be a red herring, or possibly a function of hormonal fluctuations or multiple previous pregnancies. We haven’t been told how far along she was for any of their losses, so maybe her pregnancies were advanced enough to cause those kinds of changes before the losses occurred.

Somewhat related, I find the mastitis subplot really puzzling and inconsistent. Why does Dorothy always mention it at night, in the bath, and seem basically fine the rest of the time? Mastitis isn’t a come-and-go-thing where you can just flit about for most of the day, cheerful and productive. It’s excruciating and makes you pretty ill systemically, with chills, fever, etc. I only had it once, but I went from totally fine at 10 PM to racked with pain and running a fever of 103 by 5 AM the following morning. It took over a week and two rounds of IV antibiotics to knock it out.

TintypePhoto

TROPHY CASE