The Undoing Finale: Hiding in Plain Sight

So the ending of The Undoing turned out to be one grand hiding in plain site situation: Jonathan, who had been the first suspect, and whom so much of the previous narrative suggested was too obvious to be the killer -- and with more than a few plausible other suspects around, not convincing but not implausible --turns out to be the killer, after all.

My wife thought it was Jonathan.  She kept coming back to why did he leave town if he wasn't reeling from the killing.  But I bought his argument that he was traumatized by coming back and finding the bludgeoned body.  That was close to the truth.  Jonathan did try to leave after smacking Elena against a wall.  And Elena ran after him with the anvil, and Jonathan took it from her and killed her.  So Jonathan's story was close to the truth, except he left out the all-important fact that he killed her.

Although this ending was somewhat surprising, since Jonathan was presented as the obvious suspect, wrongly accused, I have to say that hinging the surprise in a story on a murderer's convincing performance of innocence, in pretty much scene after scene, is not my favorite ending to a whodunnit.  Maybe I don't get out enough in the world, but I find it a little hard to believe that Jonathan, any murderer, could have been so cool, upset, and convincing.

And one other nitpack: I thought that Haley, who had been shown as nothing but brilliant and tough up until that final court scene, got rolled over a little too easily.  Wouldn't someone of her calibre had a least a few tricks up her sleeve when things started going so badly in the courtroom?

But all in all, a riveting little series, with tour de force performances by everyone, down to and especially in that last harrowing gambit on the road with father and son.

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 ... The Undoing 1.4: Three Great Scenes with Sutherland ... The Undoing 1.5: The Algorithm, the Waiter, and the ...

 

The Undoing 1.5: The Algorithm, the Waiter, and the ...

Well, those two elements -- the algorithm and the waiter - were by no means the most important features of The Undoing 1.5, just on HBO, but I didn't want to give away the main thing, actually two main things, in the title, and the algorithm and the waiter were nice touches.  Finding that Jonathan's attorney uses Amazon-level algorithms to get the crucial characteristics of the jurors, that was cool.  (And Haley's one outstanding lawyer, isn't she?)  And the waiter constantly interrupting the meal that Jonathan, Grace, and Henry were trying to have in the restaurant -- that was a metaphor for this whole series, being interrupted by all kinds of things, so that after five episodes, we still can't be sure whodunnit.

And that restaurant scene did lead to the two biggest developments in this episode.  First, Jonathan at age fourteen was responsible for his little four-year-old sister's death, because he didn't keep a watchful eye on her.  Jonathan's mother says he never felt any guilt for that -- which leads Grace's friend Sylvia to tell her that means Jonathan's a sociopath.  But Jonathan sure expressed some powerful guilt in the restaurant to Grace about his sister's death, to the point that she comforted him.

But before the hour was out, Grace discovered another suspect.  Henry.  That hammer or anvil or whatever exactly that was could, I suppose, have been wielded by Henry to bludgeon Elena.  We earlier learned that Henry knew about Jonathan and Elena - he saw the way they were relating to each other in front of the school -- so there's your motive,  right?  I suppose Haley would be happy to have another suspect to throw at the jury, but Grace is horrified.  And you know what?  I still think it's not Henry, either.  A little too soon, for one, with another episode (the finale) next week.  And, what kind of psycho would Henry have to be to be so relatively calm after commiting for such a brutal murder?

So ... we'll find out next week (though my wife says all we may see is Jonathan acquitted, and never know who did it).  But I'm thinking we will find out and ... the killer was Elena's husband Fernando.

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 ... The Undoing 1.4: Three Great Scenes with Sutherland

 

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

 

The Undoing 1.2-3: A Dearth of Likely Suspects

Catching up with two episodes of The Undoing on HBO, because I've been focusing on the election.  But now that America has pulled back from the precipice, it's good to be back to watching at least a little fictional drama.   And The Undoing is mystery drama par excellence.

So, here's what we've learned in episodes 1.2 and 1.3: Jonathan is alive.   He's Elena's baby's father.  Grace is coming around to at least being open to the possibility that Jonathan didn't kill Elena.  And ... she was in the area of Elena's murder the night she was so savagely killed.

That's a lot to digest.  For Grace to be the murderer, she has to be a psycho par excellence -- if that phrase can be used in conjunction with a psycho.  If memory serves, there's been at least one other drama -- a movie, I think -- in which the killer was not the patient the shrink was treating, but the shrink her or himself.  So we now have two suspects:  Jonathan and Grace.

I'll go out on an obvious limb and say I think the killer is neither.   Fernando the victim's husband has the obvious motive, but police say the camera in the area has no record of his being near the scene of the crime.  Is that conclusive?  Probably not -- I mean, he could have gotten into the room of the crime some other way, been waiting in an apartment above where Elena was killed, right?   So, no, his not being in the video footage is not conclusive.  But, and, yet, I don't think he's the killer, either.

So who then?  We're running out of suspects.  Franklyn, Grace's father, could have done it, I guess.  But does he have the physical strength?  I don't know.  Who's left?  I can't think of anyone.

All of which makes for one good detective story.   Sharply acted, with great New York flavor, including that prison room for visits, which looks like it was shot in the cafeteria of my junior high school in the Bronx, or is that just me?

See you here next week.

See also The Undoing 1.1: A Murder, A Missing Person, and NYC Bustling in the Snow

 

The Undoing 1.1: A Murder, A Missing Person, and NYC Bustling in the Snow

David Kelley's The Undoing mini-series debuted with a star-studded cast on HBO tonight.  I mean, with Nicole Kidman as Grace Fraser a psychologist and Hugh Grant as her husband Jonathan Fraser an oncologist on the posh side of New York City, and a murder and a missing person, we can just stop there and how can you go wrong, right?  You can't.  The first episode was sleek and blockbuster powerful, an East Coast analog in many ways of Kelley's California Big Little Lies, which was pretty hot, suspenseful stuff, too, over two seasons.

[spoilers below]

The Undoing starts off with a nice long build-up of rich mothers (whose kids are in an elite private school) plus one (who's among them on a scholarship) meeting on some auction committee.  Before the hour's over, Elena (the young mother with a scholarship for her son) has a conversation in the nude with Grace in a locker room (that is, Elena has not even a towel around her), Elena on the night of the auction kisses Grace on the lips, and Elena is found brutally murdered the next morning.  And, when Grace tries to let her husband know about the murder -- he left in the morning to (supposedly) to attend a meeting in Cleveland -- she finds that he's gone missing.  About as good a set-up as you're likely to find on any screen.

So here's where we stand:

1. Is there a connection between Elena's murder and Jonathan's disappearance?  We don't know that yet, for sure, but, how could there not be?  

2. Did Jonathan murder Elena?  He's the most likely suspect at this point, his motive being jealousy, or maybe he was sleeping with Elena and she or he wanted to end that.  He did say something to Grace about Elena, and his being missing doesn't help,  but that's all still circumstantial at this point, as they say.  There's even a chance that he, too, could be dead.

3. Any other suspects?  The husband -- Elena's -- is always a possibility, but he seems like a nice guy.  I suppose there's a very outside chance that Grace did it, but she didn't really have the time, and she seemed genuinely shocked to find out about the murder.  So, make that chance very slight and outside.  (My wife suggested Grace's father Franklin.  We don't know much at all about him, but he's played by Donald Sutherland, which suggests some kind of significant role.)

4. How about someone not at all in the first episode?  I'd say no -- Kelley's too good to pull rabbits like that out of a hat.

So we have a nice, taut, high-octane mystery on our hands, set in snowy, pre-pandemic New York City, which is fun to see in any case.  See you back here next week.