By JASON MARTIN (August 12, 2018)

I thought Camille was smarter than she proved to be this week, but honestly, we should have known better. She’s as damaged, if not more so, than anyone on the show. I was waiting to see her spit out the ecstasy tablet Amma passed her, but instead, she took both of them, and ended up in a daze on roller skates bonding with her half-sister in a long sequence near the end of the episode.

It’s fitting in Sharp Objects that yet again, the case took second place to more about the people. We’ve got two more hours left of the show and exactly one piece of true material evidence, in the form of Ann’s bike that was found in the lake by the farm. It’s certainly strange that Adora led to its discovery and she seems to be orchestrating a lot of the moves surrounding the murders. The more I watch, the more I wonder about Alan, who still exists for NO purpose unless he’s deeply involved somehow.

The chat on the front porch with Camille was pretty surface layered, except for the story behind the pinch, and his belief his wife had a hard life, and that Preaker’s presence has simply made her miserable. He’s doing Adora’s bidding and is really supposed to boot her from the house, but he doesn’t go quite that far. It’s a frosty meeting, and then it’s over. And, yet again, it amounts to almost nothing. Alan’s life IS nothing, which is why there has to be something coming with that character.

I wasn’t anticipating Richard looking into his friend/lover/partner as much as he did, traveling to St. Louis to ask questions at the rehab facility. He now knows, if he didn’t already, that she is self-injurious and clearly experienced her share of trauma in the past. It wasn’t just the death of her sister, and it also wasn’t the death of her roommate, though that changed her and led to her checking herself out of the clinic. It was also what Lacey tried unsuccessfully to gain absolution for at the get together. Camille doesn’t forgive him, despite him saying what he and his friends did to her that day in the woods still haunts him. It should. They gang raped a teenage girl they went to school with.

All that came from the bike thus far is Vickery believing a Mexican that works at the farm could be the suspect. Rest assured, it won’t be. I still have money a woman played the key role. Gillian Flynn, and this television adaptation in particular, are much more about “girl power” and much less about women having children and fulfilling that role as a primary purpose they’re proud of. If you saw that discussion at the classmate reunion of sorts, you could see the disdain for the very idea of the traditional female. It didn’t feel ironic or tongue in cheek. It felt like “mom” is antiquated. How many good parents have we met in this show?

The answer is basically zero.

Could I be reading too much into Sharp Objects? Sure. But parents aren’t really celebrated in our culture anymore, they’re vilified as selfish, enabling factors, or major parts of every problem. It’s a fictitious narrative that makes us think this world is much worse than it actually is. And that’s my issue with the series as a whole, in that I fear people actually believe this to be a plausible depiction of an entire town. There are bad apples everywhere, but there’s not a single edible fruit to be found in this whole place, except maybe Chief Vickery’s wife.

Amy Adams and Eliza Scanlen remain great together, however, in a very unsettling and creepy way. Amma finally gets to the crux of the matter in the final moments of “Cherry,” when she asks her half-sister whether she’s ever just known something bad was going to happen to her, but couldn’t in any way stop it or save herself from it. This goes back to the shuddering in the shack and some piece of the acting out. Amma may think it’s about getting out of Wind Gap, but part of her act is also this carefree “I’m going to die anyway” attitude. She knows if there’s a third victim, she has to be at the top of the hit list.

Richard and Jackie talk at the bar and I was hoping we’d get more information there, but we did not. It was sort of a wasted scene that appeared to be building to some kind of big drunken revelation from the latter, but instead led to the former telling her about the intel he gained from his trip to St. Louis. We learned more about Ashley in her brief conversations with Camille, as she desperately wants to be known and popular, which she even puts out there as a possible motive for the murders. She’s beside herself when she finds out she won’t be quoted in the paper, as “I already told everybody I was going to be in there.”

We still don’t exactly have the meaning of the Amma caught in the car lights teaser from a few weeks ago, as it almost looked like we were seeing it play out during her time with Camille during “Cherry” but it turned out not to be the case. With two episodes remaining, we still have very little hold on the case, but it’s clear now that the series in particular isn’t concerned with the murders and is focused on Camille, Adora, and Amma. That’s the point. That’s a shame, because I’m tired of a lot of that. I realized early on it wasn’t a series for me. But it has required a lot of patience to continue with as it continues to meander and not balance the substance with the style effectively.

Two episodes left and it could be anybody. Richard seems out of the running considering just how much work he’s doing to solve the case ON CAMERA. That’s the key. If he were just saying he’s doing a lot and we weren’t viewing it ourselves, it could be a lie. This can’t be. So he’s clean. Who do you think it is? Is Camille starting to seem like a possibility to you? I don’t buy it, but I know some of you have hit me up @JMartZone and suggested that very thing.

We’ll see in 14 days.