Then I could swear Dee Dee replies “Don’t hurt me sweetpea,” though that could be either me or Gypsy hallucinating. “Goodnight, Mom,” Gypsy manages in response, one last time. Even so, neither the rote nature of the routine nor her exhaustion from her physical ailments and sleeping pills prevents Dee Dee from picking up that something is bothering her daughter. Gypsy lies in bed with her mother, running through the say-goodnight script she’s performed thousands of times about the Spanish moss, the ghosts, the stars, the angels, and the way they’ll protect one another. That’s kept offscreen, a decision that roots us in Gypsy’s experience of the crime, not Nick’s.
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The night in question unfolds in a nightmarish series of long takes, dreadful silences, and grueling closeups, strengthened by both the psychological acuity with which the show depicts its co-conspirators and the mordant humor that naturally accompanies their poorly executed plan.
The Act waits until the penultimate segment of the season to finally flash back and show us why.
Since the murder, Gypsy has been stricken with disorienting flashes of the painting of a lighthouse mounted above the bathtub in the house she and Dee Dee shared. The princess has gone right back into her tower, and the prince is now stuck in one of his own.Īs for towers…well, now we come to it. In the end he’s led away, confused and saddened. Nick, however, is just some doofus who did the deed because he was hot for her. Thanks to medical records obtained by Gypsy’s estranged father - a much younger man whose painful attempt to rebuild the memories he and Gypsy shared prior to Dee Dee’s complete takeover of her life is backbreakingly sad for them both - Gypsy’s able to establish a semi-self-defense argument for resisting her mother’s abuse. To the extent that the legal process depicted in the episode has a climax, it’s the severing of the trials of Gypsy and her initial co-defendant Nick. When a fellow inmate harangues Gypsy for making more than the one phone call to which she’s entitled (her communication with her old friends Lacey and Mel are strained at best), that inmate’s face is kept out of focus, like there’s a screen between Gypsy and the other prisoners, something that keeps them apart even when there’s just a couple of feet between them. When her father comes to visit, they’re even all alone in the visiting room for some reason. We see her stuck all the way at the bottom of the frame and dwarfed by the gigantic white wall of the prison common room in which she makes phone calls. But working off a script by co-creators Michelle Dean and Nick Antosca and staff writer Lisa Long, director Steven Piet continuously frames Gypsy in isolation as well. On a plot level that’s obvious enough: She’s incarcerated, goes to court, gets sentenced, and goes to prison. Gypsy’s imprisonment, her ongoing sense of being trapped no matter what she does and no matter where she is, is the guiding principle of the episode. By freeing them, Gypsy has unwittingly sentenced them to death.Ī literal sentencing awaits, but that’s not even the half of it. These two small domesticated rodents stand about as much chance of surviving out there on their own as the other two life forms who emerge from that house on that night. After the murder, as Nick and Gypsy prepare for their farcical flight to freedom in Wisconsin, Gypsy grabs her two pet guinea pigs and sets them free on the lawn outside the pink Blanchard house. The second takes place on that fateful night, which we see in flashback near the end of the episode. They’re sleeping under the open sky, in the great outdoors, yet Dee Dee is forging a crucial link in the chains that will stay wrapped around her daughter until the night she herself is killed. This is the night when the Blanchards’ bedtime routine begins: Dee Dee comforting Gypsy, who’s spooked by the Spanish moss swaying from the branches above them as they lie in the grass, telling her that the stars are angels who will protect them, just as they will protect each other. The first is the flashback to 1997 that opens the episode. But despite the foregone-conclusion resolution of this true-crime drama, there are two scenes of actual freedom here, by my count, and each serves to drive that terrible irony deeper into your brain. This is, after all, the episode where Gypsy and Nick are imprisoned for the murder of Dee Dee Blanchard - Gypsy for ten years and Nick for life. The final episode of The Act is titled “Free,” and the irony is hard to miss.
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