Apple TV+ dark comedy Bad Sisters regroups and strikes back harder this week. The Irish series about five sisters and their common enemies keeps winning — by losing.
After the untimely death of Grace’s no-good husband John Paul, Becka won’t let potential new boyfriend Thomas take “no” for an answer. And Thomas’ brother, Matthew, does the same in opening an insurance investigation into the death of Becka’s brother-in-law. In the past, Ursula gets on board with the murder plot as Bibi and Eva reassess after their first botched effort.
Bad Sisters recap: ‘Chopped Liver’
Season 1, episode 3: In this week’s episode, entitled “Chopped Liver,” Matthew Claffin (played by Daryl McCormack) and his brother, Thomas (Brian Gleeson), make the rounds of the Garvey sisters’ homes. Today they’re visiting with Ursula (Eva Birthistle). They snoop around in her medicine cabinet and ask some personal questions before asking bluntly if she was having an affair with John Paul (Claes Bang). She of course denies it, but it’s not hard to see how maybe they drew this conclusion.
A few months ago, Ursula was knee-deep in an affair — with her handsome photography teacher, Ben (Peter Coonan). John Paul found out about it, and maliciously blackmailed her. (Because JP was such an asshole, he didn’t even really want anything from her. He just liked feeling in control of her life.)
John Paul told Ursula she needed to stop it or he’d tell her husband, Donal (Jonjo O’Neill). She relented, but at a family gathering a few days later, he caught her texting him and did something unspeakably foul. He stole her phone, put his own number in for Ben’s, and texted asking for a dirty picture. After she sent it, John Paul revealed his scam, then sent the photo to Donal. She drove across town to Donal’s locker at the hospital and deleted the messages before he could see them.
Maybe they have a point about John Paul
At this point, she recognizes that when Bibi (Sarah Greene) and Eva (Sharon Horgan) suggested bumping off their brother-in-law, they had the right idea. John Paul is trying to drive a wedge between all of them, and ruin their lives for good measure. He’s gotta go.
Bibi and Eva had been considering poisonous mushrooms. (“We’ll poison him … like normal women,” says Eva, defiantly.) But Ursula the nurse(-ula) told them they’d be found out right away: Toxicologists know the signs. She suggests something less conspicuous. But when it comes time for Grace (Anne-Marie Duff) to cook John Paul his favorite meal, she drops the poisoned liver on the floor by accident. The family dog eats it and expires the next day. So much for that.
We also see that at the office where Eva is competing for a promotion with John Paul, she’s being gently courted by her office mate Gabriel (Assaad Bouab). She’s not the only one feeling amorous, either.
Becka (Eve Hewson) hasn’t stopped trying to get insurance investigator Thomas to take their budding relationship a little more seriously. They go on a date, and on the way back she makes him stop to point out a space she was going to buy before John Paul backed out of the deal. (There’s her motive!) She says all this not knowing that Thomas is still investigating her and her sisters for murder. But now he’s in too deep to tell the truth or back out.
He was getting on
Photo: Apple TV+
I’m conflicted about the effectiveness of the Ursula cellphone story. It’s obviously meant to be a cartoonishly evil thing to do. But we don’t know precisely what John Paul’s motive was for all this destruction of Grace’s family unit, or what it was meant to accomplish. Clearly, he doesn’t like these women. And clearly, he wants his wife to just tend to his needs.
But the way he goes about it borders on the truly byzantine and insane. Would someone really go to all this trouble if he was already a proven winner in the sociopathic manipulation game? I don’t know. And at worst, this episode strained credulity in John Paul’s characterization.
However, Bad Sisters is still an amazingly exacted and sharply directed series. I liked spending more time with Eva Birthistle, whose character Ursula bounces around the emotional spectrum like a rubber ball. She’s passionate and girlishly besotted with Ben. She’s in a full panic when John Paul betrays her. And she’s stressed and conflicted when her sisters tell her there’s only one way out of the situation.
Birthistle’s performance manages to convey that Ursula allows herself to give into her passionate side (something she confesses she hadn’t really touched since she was young) while still carrying the weight of all of her responsibilities. It’s very good work indeed.
It will be delightful to get to have more time with each of the sisters every week. Not that the plot isn’t engaging (even when it’s playing with fire). But the chance to just be with these characters for an hour each week is the greatest asset Bad Sisters has to offer.
★★★☆☆
Watch Bad Sisters on Apple TV+
New episodes of Bad Sisters arrive on Apple TV+ every Friday.
Rated: TV-MA
Watch on: Apple TV+
Scout Tafoya is a film and TV critic, director and creator of the long-running video essay series The Unloved for RogerEbert.com. He has written for The Village Voice, Film Comment, The Los Angeles Review of Books and Nylon Magazine. He is the author of Cinemaphagy: On the Psychedelic Classical Form of Tobe Hooper, the director of 25 feature films, and the director and editor of more than 300 video essays, which can be found at Patreon.com/honorszombie.
