East of Eden Series-Premiere Recap: Meet the Trasks

East of Eden
Brothers
Season 1 Episode 1
Editor’s Rating ★★★★

Hello! TV critic Roxana Hadadi here. I’ll be recapping East of Eden for you. It’s a change in format and tone from my usual Top Chef and Project Runway recap beats, but I’m very excited for this jaunt to the Salinas Valley. And while I carry this John Steinbeck novel in my bones after reading it as a teen and falling for a romanticized, idealistic version of California thanks to Steinbeck’s works, the Red Hot Chili Peppers, and Francesca Lia Block’s Weetzie Bat series, I’m going to keep most of my “What would Steinbeck think about all this?” theorizing to the bottom of these recaps. Whether you’re a reader or a nonreader, we’re going on this ride together.

But as we get started, I think it’s important to establish that East of Eden is a sprawling consideration of myriad themes and concepts, most of which are introduced in the premiere episode “Brothers,” written by series creator and co-showrunner Zoe Kazan. (Jeb Stuart is the other co-showrunner, and they’re tackling Lonesome Dove together next.) East of Eden is a tome obsessed with guilt, sin, ambition, race, the land as healing and capitalism as putrefying, the nature of fate and the question of free will, and the role money and inheritance play in either our corruption or our cleansing. It’s a lot! In fact, it’s so much that Kazan’s grandfather Elia, when he adapted the novel with writer Paul Osborn into their 1955 film, chopped off the first half of the book. Thankfully, getting seven episodes to play with, this limited series is giving us more of the story. Is it a little frustrating that “Brothers” begins with the typical Netflix trick of a shocking situation paired with a flashback? Sure. But centering a nearly dead Cathy Ames (Florence Pugh) is Kazan’s entire intention with this project, and snagging us with the image of her bloody body crawling toward the Trasks’ farmhouse is a tip of the hand toward where East of Eden is going. “Evil is not always apparent at first glance … It is at the heart of our oldest stories. The sinful woman who eats from the tree. The jealous boy who kills his brother,” Cathy says in a bit of metatextual narration that points to the religious figures Eve, Cain, and Abel, who inspired Steinbeck. “Everyone is normal to himself. And to a monster, the norm must seem … monstrous.”

Which one of these characters is a monster? How about all of them? Cathy’s narration suggests it’ll be her, and look, that’s why you cast an actress like Pugh; you’re going to get layers. But then there’s also the bickering between brothers Adam (Christopher Abbott) and Charles (Mike Faist), the former of whom carries Cathy into their home and the latter of whom suggests not that they get a doctor but the sheriff. The duo’s combative vibe is there from the jump, with Adam’s softness and protectiveness toward Cathy and Charles’s reflexive suspicion and concern, and it’s a smart move for the episode to then jump back 25 years to show us how the Trasks got this way. 

Say “hello” to noted physical-media collector and Carrie Coon’s husband Tracy Letts! In 1874 Connecticut, Union Army war hero Cyrus Trask, who lost his leg in service, treats his sons like they’re rivals, a dynamic that will reverberate for decades. Elder son Adam was born to Cyrus’s first wife (who drowned herself in a puddle of rainwater because Cyrus is that terrible), and younger son Charles is the product of Cyrus’s current marriage to a woman who seems to only exist in the background because Cyrus takes up all the air in every room. I think Letts is a little old to be playing this role, but I understand why the series would go with him. He’s so good at a specific form of pomposity and casual cruelty with which he pits his sons against each other. Which of Cyrus’s sons is actually his favorite? Each thinks it’s the other. As boys, Adam gets some shine because he gives his father a puppy for his birthday, compared with Charles’s knife; as teens, Charles is the better shot and hunter and earns Cyrus’s respect with his willingness to kill to survive. And since the boys have been raised in an environment where they’re never sure of themselves and never doing anything because they want to, they’re restless, listless. Their father is their god, and everything is for him, and as a result, neither Charles nor Adam defines themselves as individuals. They see themselves as not-Adam and not-Charles, and Cyrus has inflicted on them a deep wound.

Another deep wound: The boys get slotted into lives they don’t want because their father decides their futures. Cyrus, who is appointed to Washington, D.C., to work with veterans, insists Adam serve in the cavalry, while Charles stays behind to run the family farm. “It’s a pity there’s no great war for you to join. But these Indian campaigns will give you ample opportunity to prove yourself,” Cyrus says to Adam in the tone of a man who absolutely does not think non-white people are people, and then he says another awful thing: “To put Charles in an army would be to lose things which in him must be chained down.” Cyrus senses in Charles the desperate desire of a second son to prove himself, and that proves prescient when Charles, furious about always being second-best, nearly beats Adam to death as they walk home from a brothel. Charles’s drive, ambition, and fury are what Cyrus wants for Adam, and he intends Adam’s time in the military to turn him into the firstborn he yearns for. Letts’s half-amused, half-surprised delivery of “Adam, don’t you see? I love you better … Why else would I have given myself the trouble of hurting you?” is enough to make me hate Cyrus Trask forever, but the series cements that loathing by giving us the Adam-involved slaughter of a Native village.

Was Adam just following orders, or is following orders in and of itself a choice? East of Eden argues the latter when Adam goes to see Cyrus, now an even more important government official, in 1899. Like on 30 Rock when Jack told Liz that Kenneth has a bright future because he’s a white man with hair, Cyrus plans for Adam to follow him into a government position. It doesn’t matter that he doesn’t have any experience: “I can make men and destroy men,” Cyrus brags. But what he doesn’t expect is for Adam to bow out of all this, to return to the army he hates just to get away from his father and opt out of continued competition with Charles, who has turned the farm into a profitable enterprise. Adam is quiet-quitting his family, and he doesn’t return until years later, in 1899, after years spent riding the rails and trying to get over all the killing he engaged in. And here, the episode’s perspective — which has mostly favored Adam in his adulthood — shifts. Their separation has hurt Charles all these years, and he writes Adam a confessional letter about how “all that remains is a great aching, a great emptiness” in their relationship, one that “feels like something isn’t finished, like a job left undone … I fear Father damned us to the wrong fates.” Kudos to Kazan for this gorgeous, evocative dialogue; this is about the point of the episode when I started crying and didn’t stop.

In their youth, the boys used to whisper in the bed they shared together about being free, and now, they are: Cyrus Trask is dead. When Adam returns to Connecticut, it’s not because of Charles’s letter asking him to “come home, brother” (Adam never received it) but something else. The physical Trask farm isn’t home, of course. Neither is Cyrus, who Charles learned was a fraud: He was discharged four months into service after injuring his leg, wasn’t a hero in any battles, and stole the $100,000 he bequeathed to his sons. Somehow he lived a lie that no one caught up with, but his money is now theirs — and surprisingly, it’s Adam who wants to use it, who doesn’t care where it came from and who believes it will fund his exodus to California. Charles was home, the reason Adam returned. But now there’s money on the line, and Adam can imagine a future for himself across the country and a chance to start again — something Charles, tethered so much to this land, simply can’t do. 

During this conversation, Adam and Charles hear a creaking sound on the porch that ends up being Cathy with her head bashed in and gain another diversion point in their relationship. Charles wants to turn her away. Adam brings her in. And in the episode’s final minutes, Cathy’s narration returns as a sort of affirmation, a promise to herself to grow “smaller and smaller, so small no one can find you” — but not to disappear. Between these two men, the one thing she’ll never do is disappear.

California Dreams

• It looks like this adaptation is sloughing off the novel’s parallel story about the Hamilton family and Steinbeck’s self-insertion, which is fine. Please tell me if you disagree! 

• Shout out to actors Gus Turner and Tom Sweet, who play young and teen Charles, and Asher Whitehead and Costa D’Angelo, who play young and teen Adam. Some really solid casting there in evoking, but not mimicking, either Faist or Abbott. 

• Unfortunately, Faist’s pitched-down voice as Charles, and his vulnerability and obvious pain while writing that letter, inspired in me a Faist problem that Challengers did not. (He’s solid in The Bikeriders, too.)

• Also, about that letter: In the book, Adam receives it and Steinbeck breaks my heart: “Adam saved it for a time, and whenever he read it again it gave him a chill, and he didn’t know why.” 

• The episode’s most beautiful image, thanks to director Garth Davis and cinematographer Stuart Dryburgh: Charles climbing into the grave he dug for his mother. 

• The episode’s best montage, a tool I’m sure this series will rely on to get through chunks of the book: Adam and Charles getting used to each other as brothers by cleaning the house, cooking meals, and dumping water into an outside bathtub for each other. Charles cutting Adam’s hair? Come on! 

• Clock this for later: Adam is the romantic brother, Charles is the more sexually driven brother, and whether they had a biological mom around definitely had something to do with this. Also note what Charles says to Adam about their relationship with their father: “I’m worse than a woman; I’m a fool.”