Today's Episode
We watched it. Every episode covers the latest installment(s) of a different TV show.
Today's Episode
All Her Fault
Do you know where your kid is? All Her Fault is Peacock’s new eight-episode thriller based on Andrea Mara’s Sunday Times bestseller. The series moves the story from Dublin to Chicago and shifts the book’s multi-POV structure into a tighter mystery led by Sarah Snook, Jake Lacy, Abby Elliott, Michael Peña, Dakota Fanning, and Sophia Lillis. In this podcast, we unpack the big changes from page to screen (the gender-swaps, expanded storylines, and the reworked timeline), the performances, the red herrings that work, and the twists the show gives away too early. We also get into the book’s darker reveals, the series’ pacing problems, what the finale nails, what it fumbles, and our rating.
Tune in. Welcome to Today’s Episode!
Welcome to today's episode, the podcast, where we discuss the most recent installments of a different series every show. It is Monday, November 24th, Thanksgiving week if you're in America. Today is the day that the Origin of Species, or On the Origin of Species, the Charles Darwin book, came out in 1859 and changed academia forever. Survival of the fittest, right? It's considered, it won't natural selection, evolution, all that jazz. But it's considered the most influential academic book ever written. And it was just by this English dude 200 years ago.
SPEAKER_01:I mean, he was a biologist, so it wasn't just some English dude.
SPEAKER_02:Yeah, he would just like travel on ships and he would collect bugs. That's all he'd do. And then he'd decide to write a book about it. Um, all her fault. It's also a book. Yes, by it is not an academic book.
SPEAKER_01:No. It came out in July of 2021 by much more recently.
SPEAKER_02:Andrea Mara. Andrea Mara, and it was a Sunday, Sunday Times bestseller. What's the difference between a Sunday Times bestseller and a New York Times bestseller? I actually don't know the difference. Well, one's released in the UK and one's released in the US.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, and it was it's her only bestseller that she's written so far. She has eight books. I think a ninth one is coming out in January of uh this next year.
SPEAKER_02:Yeah, you read All Her Vault, and I watched it, but you also watched it so that you could compare the two. And the one thing that struck me is that because this is a British book, did it take place in the UK and then move it to America? Yes.
SPEAKER_01:So it took place in the book in Dublin.
SPEAKER_02:This is a reverse Coben, a reverse Harlan Coben, where all his books take place in America and they take place in the TV series in the UK. Do you know in the where it takes place in the TV series? Chicago. Yes. The Bean. They talk about it. Yes. Exactly. And you have the Star of Succession, you have, or one of the stars of succession, you have one of the stars of the White Lotus, one of the stars of the bear, and a fanny.
SPEAKER_01:No, well, not only that, you have those three stars with those shows that have defined almost the 20s at least, but also they're playing very similar characters, right? Abby Elliott is still playing the sister, uh Jake Lacey, he's still playing kind of the Sarah Snug is just depressed the whole time, very much like Shiv from Succession, I felt like. I think Shiv's a bit different.
SPEAKER_02:Shiv is much less selfish in this show. However, she does uh end up committing more of a felony than I think Shiv in Succession ever did, which is crazy by the end of it.
SPEAKER_01:Uh the book follows four different characters, primarily Marissa, Jenny, Irene, who was Carrie's mom, and then whenever it goes back in time, uh most of the time when it goes back in time, it follows Carrie. I felt different about each character. I thought that Marissa for the first uh part of the book, because it's split into three parts, whenever it focused on her, I really enjoyed it because it was fast moving and the pay, yeah, the the plot was always going at a good pace. Jenny and Carrie, whenever it focused on them, Jenny's kind of the main character for the first part, I would say. I could like hit or miss. It was sometimes interesting to read about their perspective and how their lives were going. And then Irene, who was Carrie's mom, I hated her story the entire time. It didn't tie back into the uh ending at all. And it just ended very abruptly, kind of like Jenny's story does in the book as well. But the show decides to go a different path and just kind of focuses entirely on Marissa. Yes. However, I think it simplifies things. Yes.
SPEAKER_02:I also but it keeps all the characters.
SPEAKER_01:Yes, it does. And I was glad that they decided to cut down Irene's storyline. She's still in the show, the character, um, but she is in it way less, which I think was already a smart decision that they made.
SPEAKER_02:It reminds me a bit of when I read Expats. It also had three points of view, also women-centric, also dealt with a kidnapped kid, uh, which did not go as well in that story with how Milo ends up turning up in like episode F five or six here. But I think it was episode six. Yeah, and expat expats, it's a completely different ending. Um, but I was I was sort of used to that. This also reminded me of Bad Sisters um because of the bad husbands. And then it also reminded me of High and Low because uh that is a movie. What when did that take?
SPEAKER_01:I think you're talking about the like the black and white Japanese film, right?
SPEAKER_02:Right. The new one starring Denzel Washington was called like too high, too low, or something like that.
SPEAKER_01:And it came out on Apple this year, I think.
SPEAKER_02:Were the highest and the lowest or something. They did a spin on it. But that also deals with the kidnapping. It also felt a little bit like the accused, that FX series from a a while back. It felt like it could have been an extended episode of one of those, especially. It was Fox, wasn't it? Or something. Yeah. Fox FX. Uh and and it felt like Michael Pena's character there really kind of embraced that type of, I don't know, show mentality.
SPEAKER_01:So Michael Peña's character, it's interesting because he's given a lot more screen time here. They also gender swapped his character from the book because I believe he's supposed to be playing Officer McConville. In the book, it's a woman. Um, but yeah, they decided to make him Detective Alcaraz here. Yeah. And they gave him like a kid that has is autistic, I think. Autistic, yeah, exactly.
SPEAKER_02:So, like all her fault is sort of tongue-in-cheek in the title because if this show is anything, it's a bit sexist in that all the women characters are redeemed, and all the men characters, sides maybe a couple, are trash cans. Like they are the worst of the worst. So it's very easy to draw that gender line and be like, okay, so I can even go down them for you. Leah, you said that's the sister, right? Yep. She is a recovered drug addict and she didn't hurt her brother's spine. That was like the big reveal halfway through the thing, because the whole time she'd been blamed for hurting her brother when they were kids. Yes. And it's she's redeemed. Jenny is shown to be a good mom. She didn't mess up with the hiring of Carrie because for a while it seemed like maybe she was responsible for the kidnapping, doesn't have anything to do with it. Uh, she's great at her job. We see that on multiple fronts. She is the victim of her husband's lies, and she isn't faking her relationship friendship with Marissa. That's also called into question by her husband, who, again, is a trash bag.
SPEAKER_01:And she's not afraid to leave him by the end of the series. It was interesting to see that change from the book because it does end almost as abruptly as it does in the TV series. But in the book, Jenny and her husband decide that they're going to stay together and just kind of try to work things out. It ends on a positive or more positive note than the TV series does. That is interesting.
SPEAKER_02:They did decide to kind of scrap all the husband characters and kill one of the boyfriends, you know. Marissa, she's shown to be a good mom. She is the victim of her husband's lies, is a victim of the media and their lies, is a victim of uh basically everything Peter's ever done. Yeah. You know, Peter's just he's he's going about harming everyone and then calling them like crazy for even questioning him. Sarah is a busy, busybody. She is the closest you could get by saying that there was a woman who was kind of a villain. But if you really think about it, she's judgmental, yes, but she takes care of the kids whenever anybody asks her to. She only uh uh asks the she pesters, the parents, about volunteering for the school. That's not really a bad thing to do. And she's proud of Jenny when Jenny stands up for herself. Even though she gets yelled at by Jenny, she's even like, good for you.
SPEAKER_01:It was very odd because you could tell that the show was kind of trying to paint her to be like a bad character or an evil character, but I never really got that sense.
SPEAKER_02:I think it was just to show like you can be kind of uh a a put busybody and still be a good person. Is Carrie who you were going to go to next? Uh Anna Garcia, the nanny. Oh, okay, yes. So everybody turned to the nanny and was like, does she have anything to do with Milo's uh abduction? And then turns out she didn't. And she there was no reason why she shouldn't make friends with the other nannies. You know? So like that was her redemption, is that everybody turned on her and was like, you must have had something to do with it. And she was like, No, I was just trying to be friends with that.
SPEAKER_01:That's that's very much the first, like I say, three episodes of the TV series, very much like the book. Maybe some things were dramatized a little more, but like that is very that's just like almost straight from the page.
SPEAKER_02:And then the ultimate one that you were saying, Carrie slash Josephine. She did kidnap Milo, she did go on the lamb, she did make some questionable choices that we'll get into, but Milo is her son. She never killed anyone, and none of this would have happened if not for Peter. Peter's Peter in the accident, Peter uh stealing the baby, Peter and her death. Oh like everything that Carrie that you would want to put blame on her for, you you really can't because of the existence of Peter.
SPEAKER_01:I have I have so much to say about Jakey and Peter and his character, but I will say that in the book, though Peter is sometimes a suspect, it was such a great twist for like the last fourth, where it's just this section where after Marissa figures out from her son that Peter actually was the one that kidnapped him, and then it's just revelation on top of revelation. It's like, okay, he was the one to kidnap Milo, but he was doing it for this purpose. Wait a minute. He didn't just kidnap Milo, he also like knew Carrie. Wait a minute, he also knew Rob and Colin is just responsible for all their deaths, and that's what it And he was all responsible for his brother's injury when he was a kid. Yeah, and I mean that the brother's injury was actually just something that they made up for the TV series. It actually wasn't I think his brother is in the book, but he's able-bodied. So that was just something that I think they did for dramatic effect.
SPEAKER_02:But I'm just saying that for the ending of that book, it was such a needed extra reason to hate him so that when the main character decides to kill him, it's justified.
SPEAKER_01:Well, my question is that Jake Lacey, I think that he's a good actor. I was a little worried though, because when I saw that he was going to be playing Peter, I was I was worried that you were going to figure out because he's only been playing bad characters with a friend of the family and the White Lotus, that it was him from the start.
SPEAKER_02:So if we're just I want to get to the guys and how they like made them into bad characters. But first, I will say that my two things going into the show was I thought it was just going to be a Jenny and Marissa storyline because those are the two on the cover that I see first. For a majority of the first part of the book, Marissa and Jenny, and I just thought that they would have like a frenemy relationship where maybe one of them was responsible for the kidnapping and that the lies between them that it would just focus on those two characters. Instead, Jenny is hardly in this show compared to the other side characters. He really doesn't come along to become that main character. In fact, the with Dakota Johnson, or not Dakota Johnson, Dakota Fanning, um, it really does deserve the with because it is kind of just like a thrown-in character.
SPEAKER_01:She's barely in there, and they give so much more time to also Leah. Like, yeah, they they they decided to almost put Jenny to the sidelines. Right.
SPEAKER_02:So that was what I thought seeing the poster. And then when I started seeing the people trickle in, yes, because of a friend in the family, and because I'm aware that he's a bad guy in the White Lotus. I haven't actually seen that season. I think it was the first season, yeah. I instantly was suspicious of this guy. In fact, I was so suspicious that I was unwilling, even when given like the first episode tries to give him a little bit of a break, but they shouldn't have laid any foundation for anybody to be suspicious of him, and they did. They had him flip out at his wife and they started trickling that like little stuff too early because everybody knows this guy. This guy is so typecast. He's the Sean being of I'm going to kill this character in the first season, but like he's just going to be evil. So I could not take him seriously.
SPEAKER_01:I think he's a great actor. It's just that when it comes to that, yeah, I the the the the hints that they were giving were too big and it and almost way more in the TV series than in the book, where Peter it's like, okay, yeah, there's a couple things here and there, but really it's the ending when you learn everything. So let's talk about the other tinier characters.
SPEAKER_02:Richie is a bad husband, Jenny's husband. He slacks off on his duties, he lies to Jenny about where he's going and why he can't hang out with their kid. Yeah. He accuses her of not being friends with Marissa. The only thing he didn't do, which I was like, well, maybe he's part of the, maybe he had an affair with Carrie. And it was like, and that ended up not being the case at all. So, but he is an asshole for that reason. You have Colin, who for some reason is Marissa's best friend. We never, it's never sold to me in the show. We watch eight episodes of him being in every family discussion, him uh part of the Milo investigation. He even did the canvassing, like he arranged that, but it never really, I never really buy that him and Marissa are all that close. Yeah. They don't they don't show them, but they are in business together. And for some reason, Marissa has decided to go into business, financial business, with a gambling addict, which I confounds me. Like I had, I remember in uh college, uh, I was taking like OCAM or something like that. And there was a lady who came in there to talk to about uh biochemistry and what she was doing in the field and stuff. And in the middle of the uh lecture she was giving, she got a ping on her phone and she looked at her phone and then she looked back at the class and she was just went into a whole tangent about how you should never get in business with your family. And I and I was I took that as note. I was like, okay, well, that's clear. But to go into business with your friend who happens to have problems with money in a money field, and then finding out that yes, later on that he is stealing from the company, he is this bad, it was so on the nose. I felt, and he also is part of the reason why Milo is then blackmailed or not blackmailed, is uh kidnapped because if not for him and his debt, then the bookie would never have stopped by and seen Milo.
SPEAKER_01:It's yeah, there's there's a lot to there. I agree with you. I'll start off with what I agree with because one, yeah, he was like part of these family uh like discussions or these arguments that were happening.
SPEAKER_02:Very perfect.
SPEAKER_01:He was always there and it was very strange. He's a lot more in the TV series. I never really got why he was there for that. However, when it comes to the gambling thing, when it comes to him skimming off the top and working with Marissa, that is from the book. It's better.
SPEAKER_02:It's just why would you do that? Why would you go into business with a gambling addict?
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, I I think that like it was more natural in the story, at least when I was reading it. But I I understand your complaints with this character. I thought here they, yeah, everything that made him kind of a cool character in the book was just kind of like he was just randomly here.
SPEAKER_02:And then Josephine's dad, who is sort of presented, he's the bookie. Uh, he's sort of presented as a good dude at first. Like he does care about his daughter. He just doesn't want to put her up and like let her stay with him or anything because he's divorced with the mom. It's a complicated relationship. He kills her boyfriend. Yeah. And he also ends up blackmailing the Irvines and taking what he doesn't realize is her actual son away from her. But he knows that she thinks it's her son. So just he he's an awful parent.
SPEAKER_01:They changed a lot of things because I Rob Murphy, I think, is who you're talking about. And in the book, uh Yeah, because it's Josephine Murphy.
SPEAKER_02:It's his guy.
SPEAKER_01:Right. So at kind of the very end of it, this is when Peter is talking to Marissa about his whole plan. He was um kind of blackmailing Colin to go to the hotel and uh and then actually Rob Murphy and Colin. Well, actually, what happens is Rob Murphy then shoots Colin because Colin had an amount of money like that. Yeah, so they flip it all around. Yeah, and then Peter kills uh Rob Murphy, kind of like how you saw in the finale.
SPEAKER_02:But in this show, he connects with uh Peter directly and he says, I have your son, you just need to bring uh the money here. Peter brings the money there, he kills the dad, and then he uh goes back home, and then uh Colin ends up dying just by a loose gunshot when um Carrie shows up to kind of confront Peter on being a bad guy, you know? So, like, yeah, it's it's changed. Then Peter himself, he's Mr. Gas Gaslight, he is a murderer, he is a sociopath, he is a control freak, and ultimately at fault for everything. So it's not all her fault, unless you want to say it's the fault of the women for having bad taste in men. Like, that is the the only good guys in this series are Detective uh Alcarez Alcarez, uh Kyle and Brian. Brian uh has the disability, but he does have like his full tangent meltdown halfway through, which is kind of strange. Kyle also went to jail for a while, and Detective Alvarez or Alcarez is burdened by having to take care of his son, but that's where he learns his compassion. And that's why he's such a good detective, is because he even uses things that he's gained along the way of uh of taking his kid to class, like the drawings and stuff, to diagnose Milo as having like synesthesia or whatever.
SPEAKER_01:So, did you like episode four? Because that's when it focuses mostly on his own.
SPEAKER_02:Yeah, I think episode four and episode seven was that Carrie's episode. Yeah, that's where it's those are the two most important episodes of the series, and I think they do a decent job. Those are the closest to accused.
SPEAKER_01:Um I like the first three because again, they were closest to the book. Afterwards, though, oh, it goes in so many different directions. I just did not like.
SPEAKER_02:Okay. So despite the beginning of the series, so the the series starts with uh kind of like the slap, a very foundational moment where Marissa arrives to pick up her son Milo from a play date, and she finds out that he's been kidnapped. The person that she's sent to, or the house that she ends up showing up to, the person's very helpful, helps her contact Jenny, who that's supposed to be the mom in charge. And Jenny's like, I've never heard about this. Then they find out Carrie, her nanny is the one who set it all up. And from there, the next few episodes are the first one's just missing kids, second one's about them going public, the media turning on the parents and being like, What if this is all a setup? I heard that her company is in in trouble and they're having an audit, and so there's a lot of just random drama that they're gonna do.
SPEAKER_01:They took they took what Jenny was seeing on the internet in the later part of the book and decided to, I guess, take that out and then put in the second episode with the media, and it didn't flow as well.
SPEAKER_02:It didn't flow as well because when someone comes out to with their lawyers and everything, and they they f throw a conference and it's like, please come home, Milo, like you know, that type of uh of spiel. You don't get the first question from the media being like, Did you guys set this up? You know, that that is that would be a troll on the internet for sure. And that's what you said was in the book, right?
SPEAKER_01:Yes, yeah. She was reading these comments that people were like, Oh, this is all a conspiracy, they wanted the kid to go missing and just all this stuff.
SPEAKER_02:Right. But besides the second episode, it then just like goes to the periphery. Like we never hear about that again. The third episode is about canvassing people, like uh everybody goes around, they don't get any leads. Um, the fourth episode where Alcarez, you said the detective, he's going around and he's actually getting some clues. So this is actually a good episode, and uh I would say part of the show where if you don't mind the meandering plots, you can kind of be doing other things and still understand everything that's going on.
SPEAKER_01:I did, I did not like this episode. I didn't like all the characterization they were giving Alcaraz. It felt like it was slow moving. And again, it didn't even really really deal with like Marissa or Jenny or any of the main characters. I just like Michael Payne as an actor.
SPEAKER_02:I think he did a better job than the rest of them because the rest of them weren't given as good a lines to deal with. And then episode five, you got the Mr. Chips storyline. That's the kid's stuffed doll, and you find out more about how Carrie must have been stalking this kid for a very long time. And then Milo shows up. That like he just shows up in the back of a car. At the end of the episode, they find out that there's that a kid has shown up, and in episode six, you find out that Milo's big.
SPEAKER_01:But can we go back to episode five? Sure, because I kind of want to rage about this a little bit. Why? Why would they decide to do this? They basically gave away that Peter was the evil villain in episode five. Episode five is where they were talking about how Kyle ended up getting his injury and how Peter was the one to actually do it when he was 10 years old.
SPEAKER_02:So you wanted them to do all the twists at once? No, no, can you imagine?
SPEAKER_01:Like he's in the middle of murdering Carrie, and then they're like, You you're the one who messed up my back. Well, no, no, no. The thing is, is that like epit that was all fabricated. Like I said, it wasn't from the book at all. And I thought that episode eight was going to be the twist on top of twist on top of twist. But by making Jake Lacey evil, it was almost like all her fault knew that Jake Lacy knew that he was going to be the villain. Like you were supposed to almost put that together because they just ended up making him like the most dick person at the end of it.
SPEAKER_02:Well, it's funny because in the first couple episodes, you just have um uh Marissa's character absolutely hating her husband. Yes, like she cannot stand to be around him. She even says as much. She's like, I'm tired of you hovering, I'm tired of you just constantly trying to be there for me. It doesn't feel like you're being authentic, like that type of thing. And she's right, but at the same time, it's like I don't like either of those characters for the very longest time because I don't trust Peter. But Marissa doesn't really lend herself to me feeling bad for her because I still haven't even understood Carrie's storyline. They they hint at in the early episodes what that Carrie is like dressing up, she's hiding Milo, and you have to wait till episode seven before you finally they and they don't give you like breadcrumbs throughout, they legit legitimately just make up the fact or they tell you the facts straight out, which is fun. But maybe in episode four, the series could have been half as long and they could have told just as entertaining a story.
SPEAKER_01:My my thing was was that like I I thought Marissa's character like Sarah sucked a uh did a fine job, but my problem was just with episode five where it's like, why give away that Peter is a dick? It's like, okay, so we have this evil villain who's been very villainous. He not only put his brother accidentally shirt, but still put his brother like had made him uh crippled. But then he's decided to blame his sister. And then by the time the twist comes in episode eight, it's like, oh, we already knew he was a villain. You they basically gave it away.
SPEAKER_02:I guess I disagree with you just because I feel like they gave it away from the very start. He was continually gaslighting every single episode. Had they waited to tell the story about the spine, I agree with you that it didn't need to be there at all. But if they were gonna do it, they had to do it earlier than the finale. And it it just there was no obfuscation for this guy. They shouldn't have cast him if they were going to write it this way. Had they a hundred percent kept it that he was just a great guy until episode eight, then it would have maybe played okay. Because then that's why I'm saying they should have done. Yeah, I just they still would have needed to then not give away Carrie's storyline. And that's where I find a real problem because had they told you Carrie's storyline in episode four or three, the whole thing would be much more compelling. Like they wasted so much time with the side plots and the arguing and the whose fault is it, and nothing really gets done except for the Alcaraz episode, the Carrie episode, once Milo's already been returned, and then all the bodies start stacking up. I wanted to run.
SPEAKER_01:I wanted to talk very, very fast because I know that you brought up how you see Carrie in the second episode. You never see her in the present storyline. Whenever in the book, it's always in the past. So that was something different where it's like when she's doing her scheme, when she's doing her actual kidnapping, like all those scenes that was not in the book.
SPEAKER_02:Yeah, but does that mean that you figure out like why she's doing it though?
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, like episode seven was almost some accumulation of all the things in the past.
SPEAKER_02:Right, because it ends where episode six ends, because all of it is just a big giant backlash. But that's what I'm saying. You get little bits of information throughout, and you're led to believe that like she thinks that Milo is her kid, right? From the past backflashes in the book, but you don't get that until the very end of episode seven. And if you knew that, then you would know that it was because of Peter. And what I'm saying is if they tried to do those little backflash things, like if they tried to keep it like the book and and save the ending with Peter till the very end, they still would have given it away with Carrie's backflashes. The reason they saved those until the very end is because they wanted the big reveal being that this Milo is her kid. She kidnapped her own kid what six years later, five to six years later, he turns six.
SPEAKER_01:He's yeah, he's five, I think, in the in the series.
SPEAKER_02:Right. And so and the part of the reason she's able to diagnose that is not only did when she got in the car crash with these people when she was coming back from the hospital, but like when she finally sees Milo, she has the same synesthesia that he does, where she attributes like different words with different colors and stuff like that. And that's apparently so rare that like she didn't need to do a DNA test. This is my problem with not doing a DNA test, though. She went through a huge amount of work to like she was highly depressed, and then she turns her entire life around and then takes on a new identity to go work as a nanny close by to Milo, and then after months of being a nanny, then steal him away with her boyfriend and try to get out of town. I understand the short-term strategy of not just going to the police and saying, I think that's my son. A, she would have sound crazy. B, had she gone ahead and become a nanny and taken the DNA swab of his mouth and then waited for the results, you know, like that, and then tried to go through the court system. She A, she doesn't have nearly as much money as the other people. They would have tried to bury it, you know, they would have gone after her. Yeah. And so she thought this is the quicker fashion. But I still think she should have done it. And here's why. Had she had those results at her disposal, can you imagine? Had she shown them to her dad, her dad would not have then, because he's a trash bag, we already established, but he would not have, I believe, tried to sell off his actual grandson. Yeah. That's different. Like then if he thought his daughter was crazy, he was just putting up with her bullshit. It would have been irrefutable proof. Yes. And even it, so if he hadn't turned her in, but she'd still gone caught, because I would believe that she would still get caught at eventually, you know, especially with the way that Marissa's character was so hell-bent on finding her kid and even Peter. Um, and when that happened, can you imagine when the police bust down the door and she shoves the DNA results into their face and says, This is actually my kid, obviously they would take Milo away, but they wouldn't return him to Peter and Marissa. They would wait until like things sorted themselves out and it would go to a court and the truth would come out because there'd be no way that she would just randomly have lost her baby. But do you think that's the thing? And it would have been exposed that Peter, because they would have interviewed the same guy that Alcaraz interviewed. Yeah. The guy who said, I remember the guy with a baby, that Peter actually took the baby from her car. That would have been known. And then at that point, we would have she would be alive, and everybody would at least have uh the knowledge that Peter is this douchebag, he would have gone to jail. Everything would have been sorted had she just done the DNA test. I don't there was no reason she shouldn't have.
SPEAKER_01:I can't, I yeah, in the book, she doesn't even really try to do the DNA test either.
SPEAKER_02:So it's I it's like going through this whole process. I get where she's coming from. She wanted to simplify things, and in her ideal world, if she did make it away with Milo in a false identity and convince him that she is his mom, um, then then the world is golden. But she should have just had this as a back burner, like option two, because it serves as a way better idea than what she ends up doing, which is taking her dad's gun, going directly to their house, and then threatening them all at gunpoint just to tell them that Peter's a bad guy.
SPEAKER_01:All that stuff, all that stuff does not happen. In the book, her plan is that she's actually going to give Milo a haircut because he's four in the book. That was a change that they made. They aged him up in the T. Oh, that one year. One whole year. But um, but also that uh she was they were going to act like he was a girl, and then her and her dad, uh, and Peter goes out of his way to say there's no incestuous stuff that was happening between them in the book, but they were just kind of gonna live out their lives a couple and like kind of travel, and then a couple years later, uh, when Milo kind of you know became older, he was just going to be their kid. Yeah.
SPEAKER_02:So that's just I mean, it's it's so convoluted when you could just prove that it is your kid. It actually is your kid, right? Yeah. Um, yeah, so so that is an issue with me. That is probably the biggest issue of the show. The other thing is once everything's uncovered, Carrie dies because of Peter. And for some reason Marissa decides she's not gonna tell the police about it. She has a recording. Okay, yes. She has a recording that literally has him admitting to stealing the baby, sort of, and also killing uh Josephine's dad. And instead of just delivering it, we're they they go through extra effort on the show to try to prove to you why she should be afraid for her life, and that's why she can't tell anybody about it. But I'm not buying it.
SPEAKER_01:So the ending, the ending of the book is is that um Carrie, uh, Peter smothered Carrie. It wasn't a gunshot, and Carrie doesn't come to their house. Uh he smothered Carrie and she died, like I think, um, definitely like a couple days earlier. But what happened was was that Marissa, after hearing this whole story about what Peter did and how he kind of caused all these people to die, goes to the police record uh and is calling the police, and Peter is telling her not to say anything. And then as she's on the call with the police, she actually goes to bat for Peter, and that's supposed to be the end of the book. There was what I thought was would have been a perfect um she saves Peter's bacon by the end.
SPEAKER_02:Yes. So Jake Lacey is a worse Peter than uh then oh okay.
SPEAKER_01:By the by the by the last chapter is like a news report about how six months later Peter ended up dying from a fish allergy. That's what it is in the book.
SPEAKER_02:So as opposed to a soy allergies.
SPEAKER_01:And it's supposed to be kind of played for last, but the the fake ending is almost Peter and Marissa kind of just both um, yeah, like basically them being okay and her saving Peter by the end. Interesting.
SPEAKER_02:Well, I still think that she should have just given up the information she knew at that point. I also think it was kind of a scummy way to kill off Carrie after everything that we learned about it. It's like, I understand Colin, he was kind of dead weight anyway, honestly. But but like with Carrie's character, it did kind of feel like selfish that we had to wait that long. And Sophia Lilis, right? Or they she did a really good job. I think she was my second favorite after Michael Pena. And it just felt like her death was so unnecessary. And more importantly, like if it had ended like expats, it's funny because you would have had the three women kind of all bonding together and then like over a baby. And it kind of would have been the same thing. Jenny and Marissa do end up at the end like single moms just hanging out with their wine and with a kid. Just imagine Carrie's next to them. You know, at the school. Yeah, yeah, yeah. She'd be like half a nanny and half like that's my actual son. The bigger question is like the way that she kills off, because we do see her kill off Peter by making out with him after she just ate some soy.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, because it's a soy sauce allergy, as opposed to which.
SPEAKER_02:I credit the team for like trying to be creative. I it was kind of predictable because they kept on stressing how allergic he was in every scene. But also anaphylaxis, which is what he goes into. And what she did is she replaced his uh his EpiPen with something that had expired, and the police took a while to get there in the middle of this party so that it wouldn't look as suspicious, and everybody'd be like, Oh, you tried to save him, and her husband would also know that she killed him because she literally like whispers in his ear, like, I was in charge of your your epi pen and stuff, and that's kind of your your allergy. I was supposed to take care of this, right? Um she's be she's very smug about it, but there's no set rule as to how long someone's severe reaction can last and whether or not he would have died in 15 minutes, 30 minutes, two hours. And had they saved him, this would be a whole nother story. She hinged everything on the fact that she thought that his allergy would kill him right then and there. And she got lucky that it did, but like that's where it's like this is fanciful television because like there's a good 50% chance that he would have survived till the ambulance got there. And then you're dealing with the same situation, only worse, because now he has dirt on you. Like you may have had dirt on him, but now he has dirt on you. You tried to kill me, and so now they both go to prison and Milo's left as an orphan. So I just didn't see how that was a very smart move at the end.
SPEAKER_01:And after Peter dies, there's like a huge section. I say there's still like 30 minutes of the show left, right? And I I felt like that was just unusual.
SPEAKER_02:Surprisingly, though, in that 30 minutes, they still didn't answer most of the lingering questions. Like, how does Leah respond now that her boyfriend is dead? How, like, we see her uh give testimony and kind of clear um uh not Carrie's name, but uh Marissa's name. But we don't see anything about her like dramatic, her boyfriend just died.
SPEAKER_01:It's funny, they only dated in it was like years, it was decades past in the book. They dated like once. They had went on one date, but in the show they decided to make them.
SPEAKER_02:We never find out about the spinal procedure, whether or not that guy gets it done. We don't find out um what like there's no resolution as to what Colin shenanigans added up to. Is her company bankrupt? Like, how is she going to survive? Is it was Peter rich enough where she can just live off that money for the rest of her life? We don't get really anything with Jenny besides the fact that we know that she got divorced. We do find out that her deal with the book went pretty well.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah. And that was that was a weird storyline that they kept going back to.
SPEAKER_02:Alcaraz, they introduced that plot where he uh suspended his um uh moral values so that he could get his son into a better school. And then he at the end figures out that uh Marissa killed her husband and why she killed him. But like, I don't know if that's is that closure?
SPEAKER_01:Did that feel like closure to you? Not really. Um, but anything with Michael Payne's character, it just seemed like there were a lot of open-ended questions. Like, even the stuff with his son, even though he got into the school, it didn't really feel like there was any type of um, yeah, like final thing there. It was just kind of like they could have had two more episodes, and I felt like his story would still be the same.
SPEAKER_02:He did his job, he let a murderer go. They they stacked all the deaths at the very end. It was like five deaths in a row. You had Colin, you had Josephine's dad, you had uh Carrie slash Josephine, you had um uh Peter, yeah, uh, you had Peter's original baby, and I I am still missing one though, but it it doesn't matter. All her fault. Um, four out of ten from me. Uh it attempts to be adolescence, and it is not. Uh, and so my favorite line, though, I will say, is Alcarez when he says, Um, because we didn't even talk about this too much, but like the person that Kyle sent Marissa to at the very beginning. Um, she was like, Oh, he was flaunting in my face like who he was, you know, because we find out that that was actually his foster mom. And Alcaraz had a completely different take. He was like, you know, he knew this was gonna be the worst day of your life, and he sent you to the place, to the person who made him feel the best or gave him the best life um at your moment of you knowing that you were gonna need someone like that, knowing that you were gonna need the nicest person to deal with your trauma. And uh, and so that was a cool little bit. I thought that was a clever line in there.
SPEAKER_01:I would I would probably also give it four out of ten. I know that Andrea Amara, the actual author, she helped with the writing of it. She also came up with this idea when she went to pick up her kid from a play date and the house was empty. And what really happened was a neighbor just came out and realized that that she had moved and then she went to the right location because the uh paper that the school gave her was it wasn't updated yet. But overall, the series has gotten first off, did great with streaming. Like it's the top screaming show of anything, like even uh Death by Lightning, which is number two in streaming, which is a Neb screen or a docuseries, yeah. Triple that it has like 33.6 million views watched in its first week. Um, so huge success for Peacock. They were hinting there might be a season two, but ever since they've kind of asked the creators and they've been like, no, we're we're we're kind of done, slim to none chance on that. But it has a 77% critic score on Ron Tomatoes, a 7.6 on IMDB, and a 75% audience score. So I find it funny because it just incrementally goes down by one. And then it really depends on what you're looking at because like The Guardian gave the series five out of five and said you come from the terrifying premise and stay for the absolute pleasure.
SPEAKER_02:But then you I mean it's very bad sisters in the way that like the bad husbands are dealt with um with a similar vibe. Like you've just got these people who eventually are so fed up with their significant others that they kind of turn on them, you know?
SPEAKER_01:Yeah. And I mean, uh also Indy Wire gave a make sure you gave the series a C and said it's kind of fun, but runs out of steam, and the delayed answers stretch themselves silly to emphasize a point made. I think I probably mostly agree with that. And then uh Time said pace is a problem from the beginning, the season feels disjointed. It's so crazy.
SPEAKER_02:We get so many shows that are like five episodes nowadays, like really, really short shows. This should have been one of them. Yeah.
SPEAKER_01:Why did they make it so long? I find it funny because the death by lightning, our thing, was that it was too short. This was too long. And uh yeah, I think it could have probably been six episodes, and I agree with you. It probably would have been better. Yes.
SPEAKER_02:All right. Well, thanks for listening. We'll see you in the next episode. Hope you enjoyed this one. Bye. Bye.