By JASON MARTIN (July 16, 2018)

It takes almost no time for the second hour of Sharp Objects to remind us how damaged Camille Preaker is, as she tries to take notes on Natalie Keene’s brother at his sister’s funeral. He’s sobbing and she scribbles down two observations: “Prom King, Loser?” Just incase anyone had forgotten, she’s there to do a job and seems somewhat detached from the emotion of the actual crimes, which is a little strange considering she knows what it feels like to lose a sibling. She also wonders what the story is with the brunette next to him, which is a question we all would likely have in her position.

Fittingly and unsurprisingly, she decides to leave the service as the heads bow for the Lord’s Prayer. Moments later we see her at a convenience store where she runs into Amma, who didn’t listen to her mom and had no intention of staying home. Amma has one particularly ghoulish friend who, when Camille says she needs to be at home because people are killing little girls, retorts, “Not the cool ones.” That’s nice. We have to again remember these people are all terrible.

Furthering the same concept, immediately prior to this sequence, we also saw Camille’s mother cold and unfeeling towards her following her sister’s death, leaving her to grieve at an age where she needed support. The parenting here is lacking, both then and now, and without question, Gillian Flynn wrote it this way to show what a neglectful upbringing can do to a child.

And, maybe the biggest example of the awfulness surrounding this group of individuals are the cliquish conversations taking place after the funeral, where whispers under the breath emanate from every corner and where none of them are tasteful or in any way classy. Camille’s old high school classmates, who cheered with her, are particularly repugnant, as they take Preaker’s secret notes to another level mocking John Keene. He isn’t eating, which we find out from Ashley, the aforementioned brunette, who does seem to care about him. But it’s all theories and the outskirts of evil coming from almost everybody else.

We also discover that Frank Curry sent Camille to Wind Gap not just to cover a juicy story, but more so to help cleanse her of old demons and remind her how good she is as a reporter and how good she could be as a writer. His wife believes it’s a dangerous game to play and potentially a Sisyphus situation, stating plainly that you simply cannot fix people. She’s probably right, although neither she nor her husband know just how deep Preaker’s problems rest, and that they include a pin and various forms of self-harm. Frank knows she drinks and comes to work with vodka on her breath, but he has no idea of the rest of the issues.

One nice little tidbit this week comes in the form of LCD Soundsystem’s 2017 gem of an album, American Dream, playing on the iPod. That’s definitely a record to check out if you missed it, although it rewards repeat listens and might not overwhelm you on the first trip through. It’s great though.The music as a whole has been a strength of Sharp Objects, as the soundtrack has been exquisite, just as Amy Adams’ performance continues to be.

Bob Nash continues to be the focus and the character the series desperately wants you to believe is unhinged. He may well be, but there’s no chance he turns out to be behind things. It’s not likely his mysteriously absent wife is either, but we have six more episodes to fill and Flynn had hundreds of pages she needed to pack with content. Thus, we get the obvious, and obviously wrong suspect, but time will exonerate him, probably right around the time Camille begins to believe him guilty. Similarly, Natalie’s brother fits that same description and fulfills the very same narrative need.

The idea of the Woman in White was introduced well, and here we have our first taste of a larger urban legend, long known in Wind Gap, of a lady that helped kids disappear. It makes James’ story easy to dismiss for the local police, who just assume he was seeing ghosts or making up a tall enough tale to cause trouble. Still, Vickery could have looked into it a bit more, but in a small community not known for its crime rate, its understandable. Also, you add in the bonus that James’ mom is a struggling cancer patient and a drug addict, unable to take care of herself or her son, wanting money for any information she could provide, and his reliability percentage isn’t particularly strong.

One more point Vickery makes is that James is used to seeing his sick mother in white gowns and then quickly points to a male as being the culprit, again mentioning the strength it would have taken, which we recognize might be true thanks to our pliers-wielding detective.

Willis and the hog head is perfect example of a visual aid employed to make the plot that much more unseemly and stomach turning. What he’s doing makes complete sense on the surface, as he’s attempting to determine how much force it takes to remove teeth. We now know that act was part of the mutilation of Natalie Keene. But, the way the head explodes out of that plastic bag and the sheer ugliness of it felt straight out of the first season of True Detective. This series has tenets of Nic Pizzolatto’s drama, mixed with The Sinner, which we briefly discussed last week.

The end of the episode was strange, as it looked as if Amma’s entire act was just that, and as Camille’s mom scolds her for drinking at the Keene house and for being beyond help in many respects, the younger girl says she believes Camille “can be good,” and shoots Preaker a weird look. That was awfully odd, but if we don’t already understand Amma to be less than respectable, we haven’t been paying attention.

It leads us to watch Camille, who saw Amma’s maneuvering throughout, met and spoke to Keene’s father, visited James and his mom, observed Bob Nash harshly handle his son for riding the big wheel off the family porch, dealt with her own mother’s ridiculousness and her stepfather’s ambivalence to anything but his own record collection, stick the pin in her abdomen. She had enough of life without actually inflicting pain on herself. She has another pin in a car seat that she can use as well, but didn’t have to be that crafty this time. Also, was it just me or did “SCARED” on the car become “SACRED” within the same episode?

If you can watch Sharp Objects, you probably like it at this stage. The mystery is intriguing, and although we could all find out how it ends with a five second Google search, that’s not how we roll around the Big6 Blog. We’ll continue to go week by week, usually with the review up on Sunday night as soon as the episode concludes, and we’ll play whodunit until we find out what actually went down. Again, the series is certainly interesting and well laid out. It’s as tough a watch as you’ll see, but we’ll make it through this thing together.