"Paul Levinson's It's Real Life is a page-turning exploration into that multiverse known as rock and roll. But it is much more than a marvelous adventure narrated by a master storyteller...it is also an exquisite meditation on the very nature of alternate history." -- Jack Dann, The Fiction Writer's Guide to Alternate History

Sunday, November 15, 2020

The Undoing 1.4: Three Great Scenes with Sutherland


Well, The Undoing checked in with another great episode -- 1.4 -- on HBO tonight.  And we still have really no better idea of who killed Elena.

I mean, the end, and this is not much of a spoiler, points a little more to Grace, assuming that's who Jonathan meant went he told Connie Chung that he had lost someone he loved.  There's maybe a chance that he meant losing Grace, but if not, if that meant he deeply loved Elena, and he lost her, when Grace killed her ... well, that still doesn't mean that she did.  Didn't the police cam show her walking away from the murder scene, before Elena was killed?

So that still leaves us with a paucity of plausible suspects.  I still think there's an outside chance that Donald Sutherland's character Franklin -- Grace's father -- did it.  He has a pent up fury inside him, and Sutherland played him powerfully tonight, in more than one scene.  I think my favorite was his conversation with Jonathan.  In addition to Franklin's words, he looked like he was close to spitting in his errant son-in-law's face.  A close second was Franklin confessing to Grace how unfaithful he had been to his wife her mother.  And a third scene, Franklin and that "putz" Connaver, head of Reardon, was a fine piece of work, too.

As it's been all along, The Undoing is teeming with great acting.  Hugh Grant put in some excellent scenes tonight, too.  And all of this is still wrapped tight as a drum as to who did the deed.  Anyone else?  It's almost certainly not Henry, and not Sylvia, either.  Though she's likely the other woman Jonathan was having an affair with, so that increases her chances, at least a little.

When you can't find a suspect, one sometimes fruitful move is to go back to the first one -- in this case, Jonathan -- but the combination of the character and actor still has me pretty much convinced it's not him, either.

See you here next week.

See also The Undoing 1.1: A Murder, A Missing Person, and NYC Bustling in the Snow ... The Undoing 1.2-3: A Dearth of Likely Suspects

 




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