Between - S1E3 - Crossing Lines
Previously on Between, ‘Who’s the Boss?’
Episode three ‘Crossing Lines’ opens with yet another disturbing child death leaving me saying “Fuck this show,” before the title card is even displayed. This week, a poor unsuspecting kid has been tasked with feeding the tigers. Can we just pause a minute and discuss why the fuck this small town has tigers AT ALL, much less why they sent a 5-year-old to feed them? Well, Tony the tiger isn’t feeling the meat scrap this kid drops in his cage, so like any young child would do, he opens the door to the cage and promptly gets eaten.
We know he was eaten because his bloodied shoe is shown along with the title card as we learn that it’s been sixteen days since the quarantine was inacted. Minister Miller comes on the television with a message that an unknown substance has been detected in the air surrounding Pretty Lake, so even though you followed our do-it-yourself parent barbeque instructions, you kids are still left in there to fend for yourselves. With the tiger, evidently.
A Post-Cremation World
Wiley and Adam lay on his bed recovering from her near-death brush with fire in the last episode. Wiley asks him what happened to her and he deduces that she was dehydrated and combined with the stress and her recent blood loss, she fainted. She asks him if she’s going to be okay and he tells her that he thinks so. After some awkward flirting, Wiley motions Adam in for a kiss. As he pulls back he says that he has been waiting two years for this.
Side note: I had to watch this scene twice because Adam is a mumbler and I couldn’t understand him without cranking the volume up. Then I realized that maybe I am old and this sounds normal to people younger than me. He mumbles on Finding Carter as well, so I think this is just how this actor talks.
At Chuck’s, Amanda has found Lana’s phone under her bed. Note: I had her name incorrect last week because these kids are mumblers, it’s Lana, not Hanna. Chuck looks through the phone and spots something unsavory, so he takes it into town to talk to Gord. After showing him the phone, Chuck tells Gord that he is going to go out there and confront them. Gord, the only voice of reason in town, tells him that he cannot go bust “Creekers’” skulls. Pause to point out that Creekers has to be the dumbest name for a group of people I’ve ever heard. I feel like someone read/watched The Outsiders and was trying to mimic the Greasers. Chuck doesn’t care, he does what he wants.
Back at the farm, Gord lectures Frannie about responsibility or something else dad-like before heading out to accompany Chuck and Company to the Creekers house to confront Ronnie. Frannie brought up some great logic points on why he shouldn’t go, not the least of which is that you don’t leave a twelve-year-old girl alone to tend the farm when it’s an almost post-apocalyptic situation in town right now. Gord doesn’t care, he does what he wants.
At Pat and Ronnie’s house, the Creekers sit around discussing their plight of being stuck in this quarantine. Chuck calls Pat’s cell phone and asks for Ronnie to come out for the midnight rumble. Pat tells Ronnie to go hide in the basement and not to show his face. He also tells his sister to text the cousins. I was distracted by all of the plastic sheeting in their house. It looked like a reject set from Dexter and I couldn’t tell if it was supposed to make them look poor or what its purpose was.
A Shootout In the Creeker Canal
Pat goes outside to confront Chuck and his letterman jacket gang. I half expected a West Side Story dance fight because of the coordinated outfits and general theme, but Chuck is convinced that Ronnie killed his sister Lana because he was the last person she texted. Please don’t become a detective, Chuck.
At the same time, Ronnie sneaks up from the basement because he listens as well as an untrained puppy with his rifle and aims at them. To be fair, the Socs did bring the guns out first. Regardless, as they reach a standoff, the power goes out in all of Pretty Lake, Ronnie assumes it is all a trap and starts shooting creating mass chaos. Somehow, the only person who gets shot is the one who was unarmed, Gord. Chuck takes him back into the now powerless town and drops him off at the pharmacy to patch himself up. Gord claims he was just grazed by the bullet and to go on home.
Back at the Creeker Compound, Pat yells at Ronnie for being an idiot with a gun. Their sister confronts Ronnie about Lana and wants to see his phone to check his past text messages. He gets mad that she suspects he may have murdered someone and places his phone on the table before storming out. He finds Chuck organizing his gang into a night-watch team and then heads off to find Chuck’s girlfriend, Stacy.
Ronnie finds Stacy at Chuck’s house asleep, and wakes her up asking why she didn’t warn him Chuck was looking for him. She says that by the time she found out, it was too late to text him. He reveals she was his alibi for that day, so why didn’t she speak up. She mentions that she unfortunately does know there is no way he could’ve killed Lana.
At the pharmacy, Gord tries to be a badass and sew up his own bullethole. Hint: It’s not a graze, it’s a straight up hole in his side. During his attempt at self-healing, he passes out in the floor and Melissa finds him. Who is with those kids at the orphanage while she’s wandering around town? She sews him up and we get a beautiful scene of Gord without a shirt. It’s also important to note that after Gord passes out, but before Melissa shows up, back at the farm, Frannie has woken up to find that damn tiger from the opening scene wandering around her front yard, because of course there is a tiger out front.
The Morning After
The next morning Stacy wakes up in an RV wrapped up with Ronnie. After acting like a vapid whore, he convinces her to come into town with him and explain to Chuck that she is his alibi and that there is no way he killed Lana. I kind of hope Stacy gets eaten by the runaway tiger by the end of the episode.
Frannie wakes up and hears her cows mooing because they are hungry. She sneaks out to the barn and shuts the door. She then proceeds to feed the cows next to a wide the fuck open door and the tiger wanders up, so she does what anyone would do in this situation, she climbs up to the barn loft and throws wood shavings at the tiger while yelling at it to go away. Somehow it works and the tiger slinks off.
Adam finds the teacher at school (because, obviously she lives there) and tells her about the escape plan he and Wiley hatched up the night before in the cemetary. This is only after she tries to convince him into helping her get the kids of the town back into school. Am I the only one who thinks this is about a futile as shooting that fire from last week with a water gun?
While Adam tries to convince Miss Teacher to escape with them, Wiley goes to the orphanage to get her son, who she dumped on her sister. She sees Melissa holding a well-bundled baby and then leaves before Melissa sees her. When she goes to meet Adam and he asks about the baby she gives him the “fuck off” look and tells him they need to go.
Gord stops by the orphanage with a space heater for the kids and Melissa starts complaining about Wiley and how different they are. Poor Gord looks at her like, “I’mma need you to keep your white girl problems to yourself. I gotta go keep people from shooting each other.” He then tells her to keep the kids away from the heater and leaves. Outside, Gord runs into Chuck and confronts him about his vigilante gang of preppy boys. Chuck tries to get him to join in, but Gord wants to go check on his sister. Chuck calls him afraid which flips some kind of bitch switch in Gord, but he reins it in and leaves to go back to his farm.
At the Creekers’ house, their sister comes downstairs with Ronnie’s phone and gives it to Pat showing there’s no way Ronnie killed Lana because he’d spent the day with Stacy. Pat heads into town to find Ronnie and takes the phone with him, but his truck breaks down so he flags down Gord and asks him to take him back into town. Good Guy Gord agrees to take him.
Adam and Wiley continue with their escape plan and as they reach the fence and ever so slowly cut a hole through it, they think they are home free. About 100 feet outside the fence, a minefield has been set up. Wiley isn’t convinced that this is real, so Adam grabs her backpack and tosses it into the minefield to test and blows her sack full of cash sky high. Well, shit. At this point Wiley loses her shit and tells him he had no right to throw her bag. I mean, you couldn’t have thrown those bolt cutters instead of her entire bag?
As they patrol town, Chuck and his crew come across Stacy and Ronnie. She immediately turns on Ronnie, sucker punches him in the eye, and runs to Chuck’s side claiming that Ronnie attacked her. Ronnie runs off while she is being annoying. One of Chuck’s gangmembers comes across Amanda in the antique store while searching for Ronnie. and after he leaves her there, it turns out she’s been kidnapped by Ronnie. As Chuck starts to look for her because she was supposed to meet him, he hears someone yell for him and finds Ronnie holding Amanda with a knife to her throat.
Frannie Get Your Gun
Back at the farm, Frannie has decided to get the rifle and hunt down the tiger. Unfortunately Frannie is tiny, and when confronted with the tiger, the gun backlash knocks her down. She reloads and fires again just as the tiger reaches her and we hear her scream. If Frannie had turned into tiger bait, I’d be done with this show. Luckily we soon find out that she’s a good shot and Gord eventually makes it home to find a dead tiger and a shaken Frannie.
In town, Chuck and one of his crew hold Ronnie at gunpoint while Ronnie holds Amanda at knifepoint. Ronnie trades Amanda for one of the guns so they will be even. After getting Amanda out of harm’s way and sending her down the street with Stacy, Chuck walks up to Ronnie, who attempts to shoot him but Chuck reveals he removed the gun magazine before handing over the rifle. Chuck starts beating the hell out of Ronnie before Gord shows up with Pat and saves the day. Pat grabs Ronnie and takes him to the car after proving to Chuck that he was with Stacy the entire day and didn’t kill Lana.
As they walk back toward town, Wiley and Adam argue about pretty much everything. She claims she only kissed him because he caught her at a weak moment and she felt sorry for him. He gets mad and storms off and she heads for the orphanage. Her sister has been chasing kids around all day and is about to lose her damn mind because one of those little shits is setting paper on fire in the space heater. She goes off on Wiley about being a horrible mother and person in general. So Wiley takes her baby and leaves.
After the showdown, Chuck finds Stacy and Amanda and tells Amanda to go wait outside for him. He confronts Stacy about Ronnie and she lies saying she wasn’t with him. But Chuck pulls out Ronnie’s phone as evidence and tells her that since she lied instead of telling him the truth, he is no longer going to protect her during this quarantine. As he takes Amanda home and his flunkies stand guard, Pretty Eyes shows up in a beer truck claiming that Christmas has come early. Lord help these kids when everyone is drunk.
As Wiley walks herself and her baby out of town, she comes across a bruised and beaten Ronnie. After a few back and forths, he offers her a place to stay with him and his family for the night. She says sure and together they walk off as the credits roll.
As in the first two episodes, the dialogue is a little amateur, but all in all, the storyline is good. I am interested to find out if Ronnie is Wiley’s baby daddy. It’s obvious that the government does not want these kids getting out of Pretty Lake, but now that the power is down and it’s winter, things are going to get rough. This should be an interesting ride!
