Cape Fear Recap: Strange Bedfellows

Cape Fear
Pierced
Season 1 Episode 4
Editor’s Rating ★★★★
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In the two-screen versions of Cape Fear, Max Cady’s slow-burning revenge scheme against a lawyer and his family involves small acts of aggression and harassment before he finally goes for the throat. Having entered prison as a sub-literate yokel, he proved to be such an autodidact that when he reentered society nearly 20 years later, he seemed ready to crush the LSAT. (De Niro’s Cady: “I learned to read during my stretch. First, Spot Goes to the Farm. Then Runaway Bunny. Then law books, mostly.”) Cady was never going to beat his adversary in court, but he understood enough about the law to tap-dance around it, eventually getting to a point where he coaxes his former counselor into crossing the line and landing in legal trouble. He even kills the family dog without opening himself to a trespassing charge.

No doubt the Cady of this Cape Fear has the intelligence to try the same tactics, but one of the major ways the TV adaptation has distinguished itself from the movies — and has, finally, gotten itself into a groove — is that Cady has worked to ingratiate himself with the Bowdens. He hails from the “keep your friends close, keep your enemies closer” school of screen villainy, and he’s spent the last couple of episodes inserting himself into Anna’s life, especially. While Tom and Anna’s likely unethical treatment of Cady’s case provides the motive here just as it did in the ’91 version, Anna can’t separate herself so easily from her colleagues at work, who see Cady as a high-profile exoneree who can help them free more wrongly convicted inmates.

The show set the table for the Ruben Ramirez case in a previous episode, when Cady returned to Tarwater prison for a conversation with Ruben that has now allowed him to get his hooks into Anna even deeper. After receiving news that Ruben has lost his appeal and seems resigned to his fate, Anna naturally springs into action in a last-ditch effort to persuade the governor of his innocence. She pays a visit to a snake-loving ex-con named Smiley, who can confirm that Ruben wasn’t at a party where a woman was murdered, but Smiley sniffs out her motives and puts a terrifying end to her inquiry. That leaves Cady to come to the rescue, with a conspiratorial wink to Anna that she won’t want to see how he gets the information he needs from Smiley. 

Anna’s reliance on Cady to win the case compromises her to such an extent that she can’t fully push him away when he plants an unsolicited kiss on her lips. Yet there’s something deeper and more personally incriminating, too, about this sequence of events, because it chips away at Anna’s ethical standing. For her to look away while Cady does some untold nasty business to Smiley suggests that she’s malleable when it comes to the law. She’s willing to win at any cost, which suggests that she’s the same person now who might have folded on her obligations to Cady when he was her client. The key lines in the episode come from Cady when he’s talking about dealing with a guy like Smiley: “You’re persuasive, Anna, but for some people, it’s not enough to persuade. You have to compel.” She’s up for some dirty business. 

But let’s not bury the lede any longer! The sinister Nevaeh Valentine has been operating in the shadows, persuading and compelling both the Bowden teenagers, and now Ray has discovered that she might be Cady’s daughter, the product of an inappropriate prison house affair. We knew already that the language Nevaeh had been using as “AngelX” in text messages with Zack had been echoed by Cady, and now there’s evidence of a secret conspiracy between the two at work. (The plotting is starting to resemble some of the later seasons of Dexter, when he wasn’t alone in instigating deadly mayhem, but I digress.) It’s a potent twist to be sure, but it also bolsters the episode and the series itself, because the attack on the Bowden family feels more cohesive and insinuating. A larger plan is afoot.

Cape Fear strains credulity a little by making Natalie too easy a mark. She is not Juliette Lewis in the Martin Scorsese version, who was younger and more naive, and more naturally inclined to defy her parents. Natalie’s devolution from an easy “good girl” type who plays soccer and does well in school to a pouty rebel who bails impulsively on practice, allows Nevaeh to pierce her nipple in a skeevy house, and breaks into her friend’s house for sex and snacks seems too dramatically out of character. But the calculation here — and it’s a solid-enough one — is that romantic attention is too powerful an elixir for an inexperienced teenager like Natalie to resist. She’s lost in a fog of perfume and pot smoke.

Zack is another story, because he’s starting from a position of extreme vulnerability. His mental health problems, deepened by the continued fallout over a mistake he made with his ex-girlfriend Sophia, which has gotten him kicked out of school and put him in a funk that his parents have found impenetrable. Cape Fear adds to the pulpiness by connecting Zack’s emotional tumult to his father’s past, which is clouded by a brother’s suicide that he refuses to acknowledge, even if it might help his son. Suicide hangs over the episode menacingly — and perhaps exploitatively, despite the trigger warning at the beginning — but it draws Tom and Zack closer together while Nevaeh’s intervention is that much more dangerous.

A scene where Zack tries to apologize to Sophia at the art show makes it clear enough that she’s warming to his desperate entreaties, at least enough to let us know that the “Sophia” who calls him later on his cell phone is an imposter. The one hope for the Bowdens is that Ray’s scoop on Nevaeh’s true identity may give them the drop on her and Cady, and maybe convince the kids that they’re smitten with a girl who means them harm. On the other hand, they may hate their parents enough to blow them off regardless. 

Weeping Willows

• Concerned about the long-term status of Natalie’s pierced nipple. Not a sterile environment for the procedure, and I imagine most professionals would warn against any horny shenanigans in the immediate aftermath. High probability of infection here. 

• The scene where Cady confronts Ray at his car echoes both the Cape Fear movies, except in the movies, Cady reaches through the lawyer’s open window and takes his car keys in order to bring his message across. Whatever the case, it’s significant that Ray is the first person outside the Bowdens to recognize that Cady is a threat, and Cady seems to know it.

• Not sure why there’s a classic movie playing at a studio art show or how that movie might be pertinent to the events of Cape Fear, but the movie is Shadow of a Doubt, and you should see it if you haven’t. It’s one of Alfred Hitchcock’s best.

• Zack gets angry at his dad for disrupting his therapeutic technique, but you’re a deeply depressed kid who’s just experienced a terrible rejection, and you’re floating in the pool with your clothes on, you should expect to be “rescued” in that situation. 

• Cady’s confrontation with a used car salesman underlines his infidelity and psychosis, but potentially lost in the background is the presence of a guy with a camera phone taping the whole confrontation. I suspect that footage will surface later.