This review contains spoilers.
3.4 Over My Head
This week on Haven: nothing is beautiful and everything hurts (except for the Teagues but we'll get to that). The core of the show, Duke, Audrey and Nathan, are splintering apart. It's been building for a while, but as the team looks for a woman whose troubles are manifesting her worst fears on people she cares about, the group is unravelling and expanding in ways I'm not sure I like.
Audrey's desperation is showing. She behaves as if she were already dead, like her life has ended already and that everything from now to the Hunter is just filler that she's hoping to manage as well as possible. Last week she said that she was focused on helping the Troubled because it's all she really knows about herself for certain. This episode further emphasizes that concept with the sudden appearance of old Lucy memories. It ties back to the transience of her existence and even though I'm thrilled to see her connecting with Claire – it's pulling her away from Nathan and straining things with Duke after the mess of coercion she pulled last week.
Speaking of Nathan, he seems to be losing it this season. Watching him unravel like the threads of an old jumper is painful getting progressively more so with every episode. He's stupidly in love with Audrey and watching him try to reach out to her is gutting. Worse is the way that every time he loses his cool and lashes out at Duke about being “a killer” and “just like his family” and other sorts of inherent badness, it feel as if he's using Duke to rage about his own insecurities and failings.
This week, in one of the more fun moments of the show, Nathan finds out from Vince and Dave Teague that the tattooed Troubled people are called the Guard and that a new character, a woman named Jordan, is the way in. In the end, he brings up his relationship to his biological father, Max – who was a convicted murderer – to make his point. Putting that in perspective, every time he shouts that Duke is going to kill because his father was a killer seems to back up the projection theory.
Duke, on the other hand, is rising above it. I love him so much lately because where Nathan is going to pieces in his paranoia and Audrey is on the brink of surrender, Duke is coming into his own. He's always stood up for himself against Nathan but this episode it didn't feel like pure antagonism. When faced with a terrible legacy, Duke is trying to be something better, something good. He says as much to Audrey when she apologizes about trying to get him to kill the Farmer. He flat-out says that he makes his own choices. The choices he's making are to help and to save lives whenever possible even though it seems as though his family were the villains of the piece. I'm pretty sure that Dumbledore is the one who said "It's our choices that show what we are far more than our abilities." And lately Duke's choices have been heroic while despite his abilities as the new chief of police, Nathan is descending into pettiness, discrimination and fear-motivated behaviour.
Over with the side characters, Vince and Dave were hands-down my favourite thing about this episode. They're in cahoots, digging around in Tommy the new detective's history. The pair being nosy and slightly manical as they investigate a shooting in Tommy's background was positively delightful. It's so good to see them back on the same team rather than at odds with each other. In return, Tommy does some digging of his own and we get to find out that the wealthy Teagues secretly own about half of Haven. Needless to say, the Teagues and Tommy are in something of a Mexican stand-off in terms of information exchange and only time will tell where that leads.
Meanwhile, our two long-running mysteries continue uninterrupted. The Bolt Gun Troubled Person Killer struck again, this time at the beginning of the episode. He took a scalp to go with the nose he took last time which we see him lovingly brushing at the end of the episode. At this point, if the serial murder arc doesn't conclude with TBGTPK standing in front of his mirror with a person-mask on dancing to Wild Horses, I'll be disappointed.
On the “Who is Audrey really?” front: Agent Howard (the first one, not the real one) returned in Audrey's mind along with the memories of the day the Colorado Kid was killed. In her dreams, Agent Howard warns her not to remember the murder or, apparently, the barn/house/thing that disappeared and took Audrey II's memories with them. Yeah, I have no idea where they're going with that plotline. It's sure to be a grade A mind-trip and I'll admit, I'm more than a little worried about Audrey. I guess until next week, I'll just ignore and deny, which is, as Duke so eloquently put it “the Haven way.”
Read Rachael's review of last week's episode, The Farmer, here.
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