Stewart Hotston presents his take on the themes of the fourth episode of the HBO / Sky Atlantic series…

There’s an elephant in this episode and it’s a revelation right at the end of the show which throws everything we know about what’s happened so far into a different and, for now, unknowable light.

It’s an event involving sudden extreme violence for which I wasn’t prepared. It’s placed there deliberately, and it recasts everything we know about Atticus’ family and who they are.

However, the episode is something of a bridge – although please don’t take this as a bad thing. In stories characters have to be moved from one place to another, to build towards their destinations and after last week’s extraordinary events this week is really a following up of what the characters learned about the lives they’re leading and the claims they’re making. We learn much about the world into which they’ve been plunged and through an Indiana Jones style escapade we come across yet more gruesome examples of the faithlessness of the powerful man.

I’d like to say the episode was about Guilt but I’m not quite sure. There’s a definite movement throughout of people living with the consequences of their actions, not in terms of legacy but in terms of the immediate aftermath of making choices which have no perfect outcomes and can build, little by little, into hangovers of regret and resentment.

Central to this is Montrose. Purportedly Atticus’ father, the episode starts with him and it ends with him too. Thing is, the initial read of Montrose is of a man driven to drink and dissolution by grief over his brother’s death and his own failure to protect him. We see a man who’s made a car crash of his life – an absent father, a failed husband and a man whose community regards him as having burned up long ago.

Instead the final shot transforms what we know. Was he drunk because of guilt? Not guilt over failures but guilt the old fashioned way – for what he’d done? Deeds about which we’re still in the dark. We’re left at the end with a million questions which condense down into one – who are you Montrose Freeman?

Let’s return to the ideas in the episode.

A bridging story means we see the continuation of what we’ve been following through in the first three episodes. Belonging, history and what it costs to make a claim on a hostile world.

Yet we also see fall out. We see Leti’s sister’s bitterness at what she believes has been done to her, how her chances have been robbed from her and how the next person along succeeds without the struggle she’s been through. She’s angry, but not like Leti who’s woken up and found she wants what the world won’t give her without a fight. She’s angry in the way of those who’ve tried and seen themselves stunted through no fault of their own. When they’ve found their trajectory fall back to the ground without ever coming close to the target for which they were aiming through no fault of their own.

This same fallout, this same sense of decisions coming back to haunt us hits another member of the family as Hippolyta, played by the wonderfully grounded Aunjanue Ellis, literally makes a right turn into facing her past.

It seems not a single one of Atticus’ family are ignorant of the mysteries surrounding him – except perhaps him. Which is where we see the ground beginning to fall away. Leti reprimands him, and thank goodness, for thinking the world revolves around him. I can’t tell you how many shows I’ve watched where some male ‘hero’ excludes everyone else from risk as if they’re the only one who actually gets to have agency.

Yet in their own way each and every member of his family is acting as if they’re the centre of the universe and for each of them their isolation, their tendency to solipsism, sees them spiralling out of control.

Which, in the end, brings us back to Montrose and his guilt.

His guilt is deep seated, played not for what has come before but because of the life he’s chosen to lead here and now and where that still has to take him. He warns us, he warns everyone, to leave well alone but he’s roundly ignored. The show is warning us that he’s winding up to carry out actions he knows are wrong because he’s failed to stop them from being necessary (at least in his mind); all the while accepting carrying them out will eat what’s left of his soul.

We see him comment at one point, ‘smells like Tulsa,’ and we’re asked to wonder what hell he lived through, what memories he’s hiding and again, what guilt he’s carrying.

The show also carefully places gender, identity and queerness in its sights but so far its handling of these things has been incidental, off hand and without asking us to think of whether these elements make sense beyond being there for plot purposes. I am interested to see where these elements go (if anywhere) because they’re in front of us now and presented as tied up in the nature of the supernatural elements of the show by virtue of simply existing. This fills me with a little unease but it’s too early to understand what the ideas are behind what we’ve been shown.

White folks are largely incidental this week – but they’re not idle and we see plotting continue in ways which again warn us the future is going to be fraught.

Finally, we don’t have any mention of the Count. Yet in Montrose’s actions we see something of the dark history, the tragedy and, possibly, the revenge so central to that story. Is he our Edmond Dantès or is he Danglars?

Wherever we go from here the show has carefully laid the groundwork to have guilt dig its fingers in to our heroes’ lives. They may be looking to the future but if they’re doing so by reclaiming the past, guilt is riding alongside them preparing to fight back.