So many people sat down to watch the Mare of Easttown season finale that WarnerMedia's streaming service broke and went offline for 25 minutes. As we discovered in the Slack channel this morning, half of the Stranger's staffers counted ourselves among the group of viewers anxiously waiting to find out who murdurd that jagoff's durdur in a small town east of Philadelphia. While none of us had tons to say about the crime drama's surprising.
The actor’s turn as a detective struggling with her personal demons is absolutely stunning, in a murder-mystery that keeps us guessing right till the very end
The Killing was a show that understood
Twin Peaks better than most, yet still succumbed to the same troubles, and
Mare
The Killing and
Mare crib from Frost and Lynch extensively: the victims’ connection to sex work, a serial killer or kidnapper that’s targeting girls, and a town reeling from tragedy.
Mare borrows the small-town aesthetic and familial sexual abuse from
Twin Peaks, while
The Killing takes the ambient score and a casino on the outskirts of town. Both shows wear their influence on their sleeves yet miss the lessons from the decline of the original run of Lynch and Frost’s series: Solving the mystery, be it too soon or at all, kills the momentum.
Buckle up hogie lovers: Will Kate Winslet s detective track down the killer in time?
Credit: HBO
Grab a cheesesteak, crack open another Rolling Rock and get that vape stick going – we have a whole heap of Mare of Easttown theories to sift through. The penultimate episode of the superb Kate Winslet crime drama left us on a cliffhanger, with Winslet’s frumpy heroine Mare Sheehan hotfooting it to a secluded fishing spot to apprehend the man she believes murdered teenage mom Erin McMenamin.
The drama, however, has delighted in wrongfooting us so far and there are still many questions left unanswered, not least: who is the real father of Erin’s infant son, DJ? And what became of the murder weapon (which, lest we forget, was an old police-issue handgun, the like of which was used by Mare’s father…)?