Cape Fear Recap: Product of Misconduct

Cape Fear
Mongrel
Season 1 Episode 6
Editor’s Rating ★★★★
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Early in this week’s episode of Cape Fear, Natalie Bowden has been sent away from the latest mortal threat to the Bowden family and asked to spend some time with Paul, the vaguely smarmy man that she’s long been told is her biological father. The emergence of Max Cady has confronted her with unsettling possibilities about the relationship between her mother, Anna, and her stepfather, Tom, whose romance around the trial may or may not have resulted in a plea deal that proved extremely unfavorable to Cady, Anna’s client. Beyond the ethical horror of such a pact between the prosecution and the defense, Anna’s pregnancy during the trial makes it only natural to believe that Tom might be her real father. So Natalie asks Paul straight up, and the best he can manage is, “I think you’re mine.” A paternity test must have seemed like a Pandora’s box that nobody wanted to crack open.

Still frustrated by getting the runaround, Natalie goes home and continues to press for answers, asking her mother, “Am I basically the product of your misconduct, and you had to lie to me as you lied to everybody else?” The answer to that question turns out to be more complicated than she could have imagined, and Anna certainly isn’t inclined to provide it. But the phrase “the product of your misconduct” gives this episode — and the series itself — a powerful running theme. Where Martin Scorsese’s 1991 Cape Fear converted the 1962 version into a biblically loaded tale of sin and redemption, the TV Cape Fear has become a show about inheritance, which here is like a curse that’s passed along to the younger generations. When you’re the product of misconduct, you can be indelibly poisoned by it.

Picking up right where the last episode left off, the pointedly titled “Mongrel” dives into the chaotic aftermath of the Bowdens’ discovery that Nevaeh had been living in the walls of their house. Though Natalie and her parents have not finished making egregious mistakes, they’re now on the same page about Nevaeh, who’s defiantly nasty even when Anna pulls a gun from the safe and points it at her head until the police arrive. For Natalie to be the one to tame Nevaeh with a can of Mace seems to indicate that the scales have fallen from her eyes, but the Bowden children still find room to defy their parents. Across the street, Zack has not only taken refuge with Cady but is fully under his spell, having made what we learn is a medically induced transition into being his son. This leads to another unfortunate confrontation with a Bowden parent, as Tom drags Cady into the street and beats him up in full view of lookie-loos with phone cameras. When you pair that footage with the viral clip of Anna pushing Nevaeh into traffic outside the movie theater, it doesn’t bode well for the Bowdens in the court of public opinion. 

In the wake of all this psychosis and violence, Cape Fear once again asks the audience to accept some highly questionable decision-making from Natalie, who opts to disable her location services and hit the road with Cady for some unknown destination. Delivering Peanut Butter the cat as a kind of peace offering, Cady convinces Natalie that he had nothing to do with Nevaeh, whom he dismisses as a troubled girl who’s obsessed with him and needs help. Still furious at her mother, Natalie tentatively chooses to believe Cady but takes a gun along just in case, which turns out to be another lamentable decision. When Blue Öyster Cult’s “Don’t Fear the Reaper” plays on Cady’s car stereo, it’s a sign that the narrative gods are laughing.

Yet the journey they take to Cady’s home turf near Cape Fear River in North Carolina draws them closer in thematically significant ways even before the revelation that Cady is a third option for Natalie’s paternity test. In a harrowing window in Cady’s family dysfunction, we meet his abusive father, played by Ron Perlman, who’s older and less physically imposing than Cady but still has the power to reduce him to a cowering child. (“You train a dog right,” Cady’s father tells him, “it will never forget its master.”) At this point in the episode, we’ve been treated to another major revelation that Juliette Lewis’s wild card of a character is his mentally unwell sister, Crystal, and Cady is trying to track her down. His efforts backfire horribly — his father, we learn, is in close communication with Crystal — but the scene is more important for poking at Cady’s surprising vulnerability. For once, he doesn’t seem in control. 

The episode then establishes a strong parallel between Cady’s traumatic family history and Anna’s own fraught relationship with her father, who’s played by Ted Levine, an actor best known for his role as the serial killer Jame Gumb (a.k.a. “Buffalo Bill”) in The Silence of the Lambs. Though her father has moved to Savannah in the faint hope of reviving his relationship with her and his grandchildren, Anna has wisely kept her distance from him, given his criminal past and his as-yet-unarticulated failings as a parent. But after discovering that Cady and Nevaeh had been using a drug on Zack to brainwash him, Anna opts to fight fire with fire by planting drugs in Cady’s house and placing an anonymous call to CrimeStoppers. Her father has the motivation and sleazeball expertise to do the planting, but the negotiation brings a toxic presence back into her life.

As Cape Fear approaches the closing few episodes, the past and present are getting more tightly entangled, as Anna and Cady are both condemned to pass the poisoned fruit of their upbringings along to the younger generation. It is obvious now that the two had enough in common to make an affair plausible, and Anna’s current fight-fire-with-fire strategy doesn’t put much of a moral distance between them … or at least it wouldn’t if Cady didn’t drug Anna’s daughter and shoot Ray Rawlins three times in the chest with one of the Bowden family handguns. Cady had injected some narcotic into a Georgia peach to knock Natalie out ahead of his confrontation with Crystal on the houseboat, but Ray snooping around on the Bowdens’s behalf led to this deadly improvisation. It’s hard to tell if Ray senses that he’s doomed in the moments before Cady pulls the gun on him, but his final words to Cady about “letting go” of the pain and loss that he’s experienced tie up the episode nicely. By not letting go of the past, Cady and the Bowdens have committed themselves to more pain and loss, and committed Natalie, Zack, and Nevaeh to it, too. The currents of Cape Fear River threaten to drag them under in more ways than one.

Weeping Willows

• Incredible for Noa Toussaint to finally get to a place where she realizes Max Cady may not be the best representative for her organization, despite her top attorney freaking out in her office about his release. CCH Pounder using a salty phrase like “this motherfucker’s balls deep in the organization” is a throwback to her turn on the edgiest of edgy cop shows, The Shield.

• The question of whether large doses of the anti-motion-sickness drug scopolamine, referred to as “Devil’s Breath,” can incapacitate or “zombify” victims is murky to say the least, but it has a wild history, as this Guardian article details.

• RIP Ray. You were by far the least deranged character on the show. 

• Cady’s head injury from prison, exacerbated by Tom whomping him in the street, will be worth monitoring. He owes Natalie his life for keeping them on the road when a “glitch” incapacitates him, and it seems likely that it will flare up again at an inopportune time. Chekhov’s metal plate. 

• Cady “baptizing” Natalie as his daughter makes him two-for-two in claiming Anna and Tom’s children as his own. An impressive achievement, but it wouldn’t be possible without the Bowdens completely dropping the ball as parents. A real team victory.