This recap of The Watcher season 1, episode 3, “Götterdämmerung”, contains spoilers.
Well, let’s recap, since that’s exactly what Dean and Schuyler are doing at the start of “Götterdämmerung” anyway. (If you’re wondering, the title refers to Richard Wagner’s final cycle of four musical dramas titled The Ring of the Nibelungs.) Mitch and Mo are dead, the former having killed the latter and himself with a shotgun. Since Mo was dying of cancer, Schuyler, who is also dying of cancer, doesn’t suspect her of committing these crimes – after all, when you’re about to tell the goodbye to the world, the natural impulse is to make peace with it, not create a ruckus. Anyway, if they were guilty, they are now dead, so the problem is solved.
As far as the blood cult goes, well, Andrew Pierce seems like a bit of a crazy fantasy who’s accused all sorts of people and organizations of all sorts of things, so his testimony doesn’t hold up much whether he has received similar letters or not. Detective Chamberland (Chris McDonald) remains more interested in construction work than Dean does. And that means the only other viable suspect, at least for now, is Jasper Winslow.
The Watcher season 1, episode 3 recap
Through perhaps not entirely legal research, Theodora discovered a bit of Jasper — lived at home all her life, graduated from high school, got a job at a grocery store, then quit working when his parents began donating to the Avalon Behavioral Health Center, which diagnosed Jasper with schizoid disorder with elective mutism. Something happened to him in 1995 that made him quiet, then later his diagnosis was changed to PTSD. Curious!
Meanwhile, Karen continues to offer Nora shockingly bad advice. She’s still adamant that the Brannocks are selling at a loss and moving into a much smaller property, the idea being that the million dollar savings on the new place would eliminate Nora’s money troubles (she told Karen earlier that they had been in trouble.) She also suggests that Dean is probably having an affair; Nora is sexually turned off by the way he treats Ellie, thinking he is sexualizing her in his accusations of sexualization, which seems like the last thing to say to someone like Karen, but who am I to judge?
The weirdness continues at home when Dean encounters a man who introduces himself as John, one of the town’s building inspectors, who is making a sandwich with the contents of the refrigerator. John is odd, asking Dean if his family is Christian, suggesting that Ellie and this “African American man” – he says this with obvious disdain – are in an intimate relationship, and explaining a concept called the Fourth turn. Simply put, here’s the idea: In a generational theory devised by William Strauss and Neil Howe, “turning points” are eras lasting 20 to 25 years during which significant social, political and economic changes occur. . Turning points are part of a larger cyclical “seculum” that lasts roughly the entire span of a human life – at least if one takes care of oneself – and at the end of each one, a kind of crisis. occurs. In Western human history, crisis is always war, and apparently we owe another. He is obviously a happy boy.
When Dean asks his contractors about John, they tell him that none of the inspectors they know are named John and that they aren’t inspecting anything until the job is done anyway. Yeah.
When Nora returns home, she tries to have sex with Dean, but he wants to activate the alarm first and she is frustrated. Now obviously that’s pretty funny, and Cannavale is really selling the awkwardness here, but I can’t help but think Nora is being a bit unreasonable. Like, this guy is stress, and he just had to deal with a mysterious evangelical making sandwiches in his kitchen and blaming his teenage daughter. Speaking of which, Dean asks Ellie about it, in a relatively benign way, and Nora sees it as another version of him creepily sexualizing their child. It’s a series of unfortunate assumptions, but Dean really isn’t wrong here.
Anyway, Schuyler has some news she gleaned from police files about 657 Boulevard, which was provided to her with rather suspicious glee by Detective Chamberland. The box had already been handled, but it contained files on an old family named the Graffs who had lived in the house before. The patriarch, John, moved there from the city after being violently attacked. Because his mother helped him with the purchase, she also moved in. John was normal, pious, but worried about his 17-year-old soon-to-be-30-year-old daughter, who was a bit too was interested in boys, and his potentially alcoholic wife, who liked to humiliate him in public. When he lost his job as an accountant, he pretended to still be at work and began stealing small amounts of money from his mother’s accounts to maintain the illusion. When the Watcher’s letters began to arrive, he knew someone knew his secrets. The letters prompted him to offer ‘young blood’ at home, so he shot his wife, mother and daughter, had a sandwich, attended his son’s basketball game, brought him back home and shot him too. He put music on the intercom – Götterdämmerung, predictably, the same music the Brannocks were hearing – which attracted someone from the outside: Jasper Winslow, who found the bodies all drained and dried out.
Why drained? Well, some empty milk jugs in the basement suggest they were filled with blood and then emptied. John was nowhere to be found, but the teacher he caught his daughter dancing with at a Halloween party was found shot, though the ballistics do not match the gun used to kill the Graff family. The whole time the bodies were at 657 Boulevard, someone kept watching him, picking up the paper and guarding the mailbox. empty.
No one knows what happened to John Graff – except the audience, since this story is told in flashback, and we can see that this John is the same John Dean met earlier. He ends up putting two and two together, matching the details of the story with some of the things John said earlier. And that realization couldn’t have come at a worse time, really. With most of the construction work done, Nora and the kids head home, and according to Pearl – Dean tries to tell Jasper about John Graff and has no luck – the Preservation Society has apparently ordered an inspection of the mount’s removal. -dishes that will allow the two Winslows to enter the house whenever they feel like it.
And then the episode ends with the receipt of another letter. Despite all the new cameras, the Observer is… well, still watching.
You can stream The Watcher season 1, episode 3, “Götterdämmerung”, exclusively on Netflix.
Further reading:
- The Observer exam.
- East The Observer based on a true story?
- The Observer summary of season 1, episode 2.
- The Observer summary of season 1, episode 4.
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