‘Bad Monkey’ Episode 4 Recap: Killing Eve

With the Episode 3 reveal of its biggest twist yet – basically, if you’re already a con artist, the apparent progression is to fake your own death – Bad Monkey and its omniscient narrator decide it’s time for a lengthy flashback. Like waking up after a long night out in the Florida Keys, our boat captain says, to try and piece it all together means “we need to go back a little bit, to see how we got here.” And so Episode 4 does, pulling all the way back from Caitlin’s embrace of Nick, her now single-armed father, to find an Eve from five years ago, who was determined to be the star of something, even if she couldn’t cut the emotional mustard in a strip mall acting class. The flashback reveals how Caitlin’s burgeoning career as a print model contributed to her issues with substance abuse, and the estrangement from her dad. But it also shows us how Eve inserted herself into Nick’s succession of good-natured two-bit cons and poured gasoline all over his whole thing. They met and married in less than a year, with Izzy O’Peel as Nick’s best man and Eve choosing her little dog Tilly as maid of honor over Caitlin. 

Most of the threads of Bad Monkey’s present exist unwoven in Bad Monkey’s past. Like Eve and Nick on the beach in the Bahamas, with her grandiose visions of a signature resort already overtaking the land surrounding Neville’s fishing cottage. And Andrew Yancy as a police detective in Miami, where he’s still doing the overtalking thing, but also uncovering a scheme of kickbacks orchestrated by an aspiring detective named Mendez (Gonzalo Menendez), a scheme that somehow leads to Yancy’s censure and Florida Keys transfer. (The Miami police brass called him “consistently reckless, inappropriate, and glib,” which actually tracks.) Or Yancy and Rogelio, now partners in the Keys, and Yancy’s first encounter with Bonnie. And like the feds blowing a hole in Nick and Izz’s medical insurance thievery, which is when Nick realizes the level of what Eve expects. (“You promised you’d take care of me!”) And what the narrator calls “impulsive decisions that only feel good in the moment,” like concocting a plan to fake your own death in order to financially appease your demanding new wife, or deciding to ram the golfcart of your fling’s deadbeat husband, so that it sinks along with your career as a detective. Bonnie might have been a “bad decision in an orange dress.” But just like Nick with Eve, Yancy decided she was worth it.

Hey, it’s Scott Glenn. In episode 4 Bad Monkey also introduces the veteran actor as Jim Yancy, Andrew’s father, who uses the debacle with Mendez to remind his son that he doesn’t have to be a cop for the entire world. Life will go on, and “nature herself” will continue to speak, which is a nice connection to the show’s established soft spot for the natural world of South Florida, whether it’s Yancy watching over his local Key deer or the red lights that help the turtles and give everything at night a humid red sheen. And though Andrew protests – this is a really good scene between Vince Vaughn and Scott Glenn, it’s brief but tender, and full of bounty about their relationship – Jim tells his famous story about the magic manatee. Follow him, the gentle mammal told Jim, and he’d teach him how to let everything go. 

As the flashback continues, so does the evolution of the arm-chopping death-faking plot, demanding increasing investment from Nick against more meddling and annoyance from Eve. The DIY surgical bay set up by Izzy, the handoff of the arm to deckhand Phinney, and even an armless Nick insulting Dragon Queen and her grandmother YaYa in Andros. Bad Monkey isn’t necessarily making Nick a sympathetic character – he is not – but it’s definitely establishing him as a vessel for Eve’s control. She put it in his head that Phinney had to die, and given Nick’s fixation on her, it was just another task on top of removing his own limb. “That’s the problem with obsession,” our narrator chimes in. “You have to fight to hold onto your soul.” In the same breath, Eve promises the bad stuff is over while demanding that Nick murder his best friend Izzy O’Peel, and in the next breath, she shoots Heather with the Weather (Lauren Buglioli) to death. When the Miami meteorologist randomly overheard Nick blabbing about murdering Izzy, Eve just pulled out a pistol and shot her three times in the chest. That Rosa Campesino’s sister Mel (Gizel Jimenez) is Heather’s on-air replacement is so far a stray thread in Bad Monkey’s evolving web of South Florida randomness.  

As its flashback links up with Bad Monkey’s present, there is not a whole lot of resolution on the Caitlin front, besides a daddy-daughter stroll along the beach. Did she just accept that Nick faked his own death to secure a big insurance payoff? Does she still hate Eve? Because that seemed like it predated her dad’s latest scheme. We’ll have to wait and see about Caitlin’s level of involvement, the same way we’re still sourcing data on whether Rogelio is a good dude or part of the plot against Yancy. (The flashback does reveal that Ro left his wife and came out as gay right around the same time Bonnie appeared.) But we’re no longer waiting for a resolution on the heat being generated by Yancy’s connection with Rosa, because she decides to make the first move. As they have sex on the exam table in her morgue – he takes note of the venue but wisely decides to go with it – she tells him it’s his honesty that made him sexy, honesty about how getting involved with him would lead to almost certain disaster. And maybe it still will. Because after their moment together, as Yancy’s back in the Keys and enjoying his red-lit view of the water, he calls Rosa with that twisty revelation of what we already know. Nick is Christopher, Christopher is Nick. And Nick, acting on orders from Eve, sneaks up behind him to knock him out with a tire iron. Now that will be a development to piece together in the morning.

Johnny Loftus (@glennganges) is an independent writer and editor living at large in Chicagoland. His work has appeared in The Village Voice, All Music Guide, Pitchfork Media, and Nicki Swift.