Margo wants the Morgans’ house so badly, and nothing is going to stop her. We’ve known her to be a schemer since day one, but now that she is unleashing that quite prodigious skill on Derby Drive, the lengths she’ll go to get what she wants are on full display, and something tells me we’re only seeing the tip of the fake fingernail, as it were. She is in full control of her manipulations — honestly, there are times when she is so good at lying you have to wonder if she’s even convinced herself she’s telling the truth (she declares she is 33 with such confidence!) — what happens when Margo goes unhinged?
Speaking of unhinged, Paul still has his brother sealed behind a wall. You’d think Paul and Lydia would both be more stressed about this development, but they don’t seem stressed at all. Sure, Paul feels good about his decision to play a little chicken with Mikey until he gives up all the evidence he has on the night Jacob died. Also, he’s given him water and a pee bucket and has a security camera in there so he can keep track of what his brother is doing. But Lydia? She’s just letting her husband go through with this? I get being fucked-up from grief, but this is very fucked-up.
Lydia makes a comment about how they got this way and that they used to be so normal — again, while knowing a human being who just suffered some major head trauma is in the wall — but, like, were they? Part of this show’s problem is that Paul and Lydia don’t exactly feel like lived-in characters. Were they happy before Jacob died? Were they always terrible and terribly fucked-up people? Do they not have any friends or family members (aside from Mikey) from before who can inform us as to what their normal actually looked like so we can see how far things have gone off the rails? It’s hard to find a way to empathize with them on anything more than a surface level at this point (five episodes in!).
Even if the Morgans don’t seem too worried about Mikey, this whole situation has definitely cracked open their marriage. Paul isn’t holding back any of his contempt for Lydia — now he’s making fun of her wearing Jacob’s Dodgers hat (“Is he talking through baseball caps now?”) and is calling her out for doing whatever she can to not sell the house. I mean, I’m no expert, but you probably don’t want to have your house on the market when you’re holding a man hostage in the wall, but you do you, Paul. He seemingly can’t talk to his wife without rolling his eyes at her.
Lydia sees it, and she’s not afraid to be vocal about it. With Mikey in the wall and the house off the market for a hot second as they regroup, Paul wants to get out for a bit, so he takes Lydia to the park for tacos. When she tries to bring up Jacob, he brushes her off with a one-word answer. When she points out a couple getting engaged nearby, and he responds with cynicism, she finally asks the question she’s definitely been wondering about for some time: Does he even love her anymore?
Before he can answer — although his hesitation speaks volumes — who should pop by but Margo and JD? But don’t be fooled; this “coincidence” has been fully schemed out by Margo, pissed that the house is off the market after, as she claims, Lydia was so receptive to her bid the other day at her house. While JD is a terrible improviser — is Luke Wilson saving this show? — Margo is excellent at it (even if no one believes she is just turning 33 that very day). She’s also good at reading people, and after a quick conversation with the Morgans about the house, she realizes that Paul is the better mark to get them to hand over the keys. Lydia clearly doesn’t want to sell, Paul is desperate to get rid of the house, and there is a schism there that Margo can play with. She does what any resourceful young woman would do — she slashes the tires on Paul and Lydia’s car to force them to accept a ride home and then strong-arms them to come over to celebrate Margo’s birthday.
Margo puts on a little swimsuit and uses Paul’s need to stick it to Lydia to get him to join her in the hot tub, where she proceeds to lay it on thick. There is flirting and touching and laughing at jokes that aren’t funny. There are more than a few Margo-ritas. At first, Paul is into it — the Margo-ritas aren’t too spicy for him, thank you very much — but when Margo responds to his playful “go fuck yourself” with “okay, wanna watch?,” the whole thing crosses too far of a line for him. He goes to leave, and desperate to make her case, she changes her tactic and instead leans into what she noticed earlier between Paul and Lydia and “opens up” about the rough patch her marriage is in currently. She doesn’t recognize the person she’s married to anymore, and sometimes she just needs a break. Of course, Paul can relate to that.
Inside, that leaves JD and Lydia hanging out, which provides a showcase for just how ridiculous JD is. He “wows” her with his miming … er, acting, skills that he picked up while playing a blind baker in the Hallmark movie Love at First Bite. He attempts to play Lydia, the woman who used to be in the Philharmonic, Elton John’s “Your Song,” and is downright terrible. Lydia is as polite as possible, but it grows increasingly more difficult. When she tells him that she hasn’t been able to play since Jacob died, it’s JD who breaks down in tears. He confesses that the night Jacob died, the robber broke into their house. He and Margo heard him … but instead of doing something about it or confronting him, he wound up hiding in the closet until he was gone. He has a gun in the house, and he feels guilty that he didn’t stop him before going to the Morgans’. But, as Lydia knows, he would’ve felt worse if he had done something because he would’ve shot Jacob.
Thankfully, Lydia and Paul make it home relatively unscathed. Margo thinks she worked her magic on Paul, but we all know Margo is typically delusional. She is, however, correct in that Paul seems changed by the evening. He tells Lydia that Margo offered well over asking, but he also knows that his wife doesn’t want that woman to have the house, and finally, realizing how big of a decision this is, he wants Lydia to be the one who decides whose offer they’ll accept. The kind gesture gets these two hot and bothered, and they begin making out. They might have sex for the first time in three years! Paul and Lydia need to get it on!
Alas, the doorbell rings and interrupts the moment. Who’s the fun little visitor arriving behind door No. 1? It’s a cop. And not just any cop. It’s Nate, Mikey’s son, and he’s looking for his dad. I knew that “love you” in the fake text Paul sent was going to have repercussions!
Closing Costs
• Leslie and Sarah go full true-crime addicts on us when they start putting some pieces together about both Jacob’s and Mikey’s deaths. (Greg informed them the Morgan house was off the market for a bit because of his brother.) Through Sarah’s beloved citizen app, they get hooked up with Phyllis, who has a whole file on the Morgans, including a video that looks like Lydia assaulting Mikey. Between that and the gun Leslie saw Paul hide, they are starting to think he and Lydia are looking pretty guilty.
• When Sarah freaks out after hearing about the unsolved murder in her dream home, Leslie tries to calm her down by reminding her that she’s “sure a lot of Indigenous people were also murdered on the block, if that helps.” Sarah’s response: “What kind of sick fuck would I be if that helped?” Abbi Jacobson and Poppy Liu are so good together.
• Leslie gets a text from Greg letting her know he wasn’t able to respond before because he was “in a sensory deprivation chamber.” What is this man’s life? I’m obsessed.
• JD laments that he, his wife, and his daughter rarely sit down to eat dinner anymore. His explanation: “Harper got older, and Margo’s a vegan after 2 p.m.”
