Saturday, April 7, 2012

Ringer 1.17: "What We Have is Worth the Pain"

“Never send a love-sick school boy to do a man’s job.”
-Olivia

Lots of crazy things definitely happened in this episode of “Ringer.” I would say that the plot deepened more than it moved forward, though. Things got much, much more twisted in every sense. We know more about what Catherine has done and what Andrew has done. Oh and Bridget’s new bodyguard knows her true identity too. Henry and Siobhan are still scheming, this time with the explicit goal of killing Bridget. Just plain craziness. I’m glad, however, that it seems like the events of this episode will finally clear the air between Andrew and Bridget. Or at least the air will be cleared as much as it can be while Andrew still doesn’t know Bridget’s true identity. At least we aren’t wondering if Andrew wants to kill “Siobhan” anymore. His actions at the end of the episode make that pretty clear, I think. Unless they want to pull another crazy twist on us at the end of the season, which is entirely possible with this show.

The episode opens with another Siobhan and Henry phone call. Henry is giving Siobhan the news that Tyler is dead. He claims he followed Bridget when she returned to the SoHo Diamond and saw the dead body. Siobhan is convinced that Andrew and Olivia are behind the murder. We see a flashback which might explain why Siobhan is so suspicious and so hateful towards Andrew. The flashback is to Siobhan revealing to Andrew that she knows about the Ponzi scheme. Andrew threatens to kill Siobhan if she tells anyone. It turns out that the threat is what Henry heard on the recording from the safe deposit box. Siobhan explains that after she was threatened, she started seeing a hit man following her. She’s pretty sure it was Andrew trying to kill her. So it makes sense that when it appears “Siobhan” is pressing the Ponzi scheme issue again, he’d be ready to kill again.

Andrew and Olivia are at the office discussing the information leak situation, and Olivia is taking a look at the infamous flash drive. It turns out that the flash drive she recovered was a fake. It is completely useless. Andrew wonders if Malcolm might have the real flash drive, but Olivia says he didn’t go into the right files to access the information they are trying to recover. Plus he didn’t know about Tyler. Then Olivia does realize how Malcolm might have found out about Tyler. Through “Siobhan.” They think Malcolm and “Siobhan” may have been working together to compromise Martin/Charles. Olivia tells Andrew that he needs to deal with “Siobhan” “severely.” Back at the apartment, Andrew confronts Bridget about her potential attempts to bring down Martin/Charles, but she manages to push her way out of the apartment. Back at her hotel, she tells her bodyguard, Solomon, that she’s afraid Andrew will send the hit man after her again. Andrew and Olivia later have a fight over the situation. Olivia doesn’t think Andrew was tough enough on “Siobhan.” As Olivia leaves, Juliet appears. Juliet begs Andrew to fix things with Siobhan. She thinks they need Siobhan to be better people and a functional family again.

Out in Wyoming, Victor stops by Bodaway’s club to gloat about finally having a case against him again. Victor is about to fly to New York City to pick up Malcolm, who is supposed to be under the protection of other FBI agents. I know Bodaway killed Victor’s stripper with a heart of gold girlfriend and everything, but taunting Bodaway seems like a terribly bad idea. Clearly Bodaway was tipped off that there was a major breakthrough in the case and perhaps a new witness. Once he gets to New York, Victor finds out that Malcolm is missing, and he and the New York FBI folks start trying to investigate the disappearance. They don’t find much of anything useful, but they do find that Malcolm’s latest employer was Martin/Charles. This leads Victor to pay a visit to Andrew and Olivia. Andrew lies to Victor and says that the last time he saw Malcolm was when Malcolm was fired from Martin/Charles. We know better that Andrew was just visiting Malcolm at his hotel not long before the disappearance.

Meanwhile, Bridget and Solomon are on their own “Let’s Find Malcolm” hunt. Bridget remembers the tracking app Malcolm gave her, and she tries to use that to locate his phone, and hopefully him. Bridget and Solomon follow the signal from Malcolm’s phone to an area of what look like really bombed out houses. It’s very seedy- a crack den basically. After some harrowing encounters with the locals, Bridget and Solomon do find Malcolm’s phone. But it’s not with Malcolm. It’s with a guy who says he found the phone in a dumpster. Next stop on the tour is Malcolm’s hotel. Bridget and Solomon use a distraction to find the discs on which the hotel’s security footage is stored. They want to watch the footage to see who was in Malcolm’s room at the time of the disappearance. Bridget is understandably very upset when she watches the footage and sees Andrew on it at just about the right time.

Juliet goes to visit Catherine at Catherine’s hotel (are all these people staying at the same hotel, or just indistinguishable different swanky Manhattan hotels?), and as she’s waiting for the elevator, she meets a kind of gross guy named Cash. Juliet thinks he’s ridiculously hot, though, of course. He thinks she’s “awesome.” This romance clearly seems to have a future. Cash has an odd tattoo on one of his forearms that seems to use a lot of Masonic symbolism. He also has skinned knuckles on one of his hands. He claims that happened when his boss pissed him off and he punched a wall. Juliet goes up to Catherine’s hotel room completely smitten. Catherine herself is quite pleased to hear about Andrew and “Siobhan’s” marital troubles. Because she’s an evil ice queen.

Victor goes to Malcolm’s hotel and requests the surveillance footage from the front desk clerk. The clerk says that the footage went missing. Victor asks if anyone else had stopped by asking for surveillance footage, and the clerk confirms that yes, someone did stop by. And he was British. The clerk was obviously referring to Andrew, and Victor knows that. I guess Andrew freaked out at the possibility that his lies might be revealed to Victor. At her own hotel, Bridget is still reeling from seeing Andrew on the surveillance video. And Solomon chooses that moment to reveal that he has figured out her true identity. It started when he saw Bridget reading something on her phone while in the car, because the real Siobhan gets car sick easily. That made him suspicious enough that he ran “Siobhan’s” fingerprints and discovered she was actually Bridget.

Henry gets a knock on his door, and it’s a surprise visit from Siobhan. For someone whose assets have been frozen, Siobhan certainly jets back and forth between Paris and New York quite a bit. Henry is tired of being kept in the dark, and he demands that Siobhan tell him the whole truth. First he wants to know if she slept with Tyler, and Siobhan admits that yes, she did. She quickly follows it up with talking about how she really needed the information about Martin/Charles that Tyler had access to. Then Henry wants to know why Siobhan is so intent on killing Bridget. Siobhan then tells him about how Bridget “killed” her son. We know from the last episode that isn’t quite true. She begs Henry to let her go ahead with her plan to kill Bridget because her life has been so miserable and she “deserves” happiness.

Bridget and Solomon come to an understanding. Solomon isn’t going to reveal Bridget’s identity because right now he’s getting paid quite well, and without a “Siobhan” around, he doesn’t get paid. Bridget almost immediately gets what appears to be a text from Henry. It says that Henry wants to meet her about Tyler. This leads Bridget and Solomon to wait around at the apartment for a while, thinking Henry is going to show up. Siobhan takes advantage of this to try to blow up Bridget and Andrew’s relationship. She approaches Andrew and screams at him about how he’s a criminal and she wants nothing to do with him. Olivia hears this from the next room, and she ends up skipping town before things completely implode at Martin/Charles.

Meanwhile, Juliet meets up with Tessa, who is now out of the hospital, at a coffee shop. Juliet is chatting with Cash online and giggling quite a bit, so of course Tessa wants to know about Juliet’s new boy. Juliet pulls up a picture of Cash, and Tessa completely freaks out. It turns out that Cash was her attacker. Tessa runs off, still really upset about what she saw. Juliet decides to run to Catherine with this new huge problem. While explaining what happened, though, she notices a hole in the hotel room wall and remembers Cash talking about punching a hole in his boss’ wall. She realizes that it wasn’t Mr. Carpenter who ordered the hit on Tessa. It was her own mother. Catherine desperately tries to get Juliet to stay with her by saying Cash is a threat and he’s after the rest of the money, but Juliet leaves anyway, saying, for good measure, that she wishes Siobhan was her mom.

Siobhan returns to Henry, and poor clueless Bridget is still waiting around for Henry. Then Bridget gets a text from Malcolm saying to meet him at the loft. For some reason Bridget decides to believe this text too. Before she can leave, though, she runs into Juliet. Juliet is really upset, but she says that “Siobhan” should go help Malcolm. They agree to have a girls’ weekend at a beach house once things calm down a bit. At the loft, Solomon goes up some stairs to check that the roof access is secure, and while Bridget is waiting, Andrew appears. He tells “Siobhan” he wants her back, and she’s beginning to give in when an unidentified person fires a gun. Victor arrives at the loft just as this is going down. He rushes to the scene where he encounters Solomon, who claims somebody knocked him out. I’m not sure whether we should believe him or not. When Victor gets into the room where the shooting happened, Andrew is on the ground. He was shot when he jumped in front of the bullet that was meant for Bridget.

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