Mare of Easttown Week 7

Mare Sheehan’s great strength in Easttown is that she knows everybody. Nobody but Mare could have followed the Ross brothers to the lake cabin and show up just in time to prevent a murder and/or suicide. Nobody but Mare could have discovered Ryan killed Erin since Mare had a personal history with the man whose security cameras caught the kid stealing the gun. Mare used her insider status to her advantage.

 

But there’s a definite cost to being an insider and knowing everybody. An outsider detective like Colin Zabel would not have felt the emotional toll it took to question and prosecute the people of Easttown. Mare paid an emotional price when she questioned John, when she took Ryan into custody, and when she temporarily lost a longtime friendship with Lori. You could see in her weary eyes how much it affected her.

 

I was right for a few minutes when I pegged John as the killer, who was trying to frame Billy for it. So I was all proud of myself because I never see anything coming. But no, although John is DJ’s father, he was actually trying to take the fall for his son for killing Erin. Lori knew and lied to her friend about it. I don’t know if I can judge Lori because I don’t know what the hell I would do in that situation.

 

Lori understandably erupts at Mare. What a great performance by Julianne Nicholson. Why couldn’t Mare let this go, Lori cries? Now Lori has lost her family, like so many in Easttown. But she has gained a son as she’s apparently adopted DJ at the request of John. (Having gone through the adoption process, I have some questions about this. I don’t know how it is in Pennsylvania but when we fostered our son before adopting him, we couldn’t even get him a haircut without permission. He did have periodic surgeries, but our case worker had to authorize those so there was some red tape and delays. It seemed like Lori just filled out a form for DJ’s ear surgery and told the hospital she was the parent, when in reality, they would definitely have known who she was ahead of time and that she was coming, and they would have had to wait for authorization. I guess Lori could have already adopted him, in which case there’s less red tape, but I really doubt she finalized that fast.)

 

There were a lot of twists in the resolution of the murder mystery and I’m sure opinions will vary. For me, the best part of Mare of Easttown was not the whodunnit—it was the character studies, the examination of all these people and their deep bonds of family and friendship and how those bonds can both sustain and damage people. I live for that kind of thing on TV so that was what affected me most, not the murder mystery. The killer could have been Maggie Simpson and I would still have loved this show; the murder mystery was of secondary interest to me. Some people thought the writer killed Erin but that would have made no sense to me. He lifted right out of the story. The murderer had to be an insider to give the show some emotional resonance. If it had been the writer, the show would have been just another murder mystery when they were going for something deeper.

 

With the question of the murderer resolved, we had plenty of time left in the hour and with that, Mare of Easttown became something more transcendent. It focuses on forgiveness, both forgiving others and forgiving yourself. Helen long ago forgave herself for her husband’s suicide but still bursts into tears over pizza because she knows Mare hasn’t forgiven herself for her son’s suicide. At a (curiously packed in ordinary time) Mass, the priest tells the parish although Easttown is seeing brighter days, not everybody has come back from the darkness yet.

 

“They’ll tell you they’re not deserving of your mercy,” he says. “Don’t let them.”

 

And Mare knows her longtime friend Lori will need forgiveness. So she doesn’t give up but after months of one-way communications, goes to her house. Lori crumbles into tears and Mare cradles her on the kitchen floor like a Pietà. At the very end, the perfect image: Mare summons the courage to go to the attic, where she found her son’s body, and maybe, maybe, start to forgive herself. This was very powerful.

 

I watched Mare of Easttown expecting to make some Delco accent jokes but found something much more profound about family and friends and the ties that bind people.