Ringer 1.06 'The Poor Kids Do It Everyday'

A series that can keep the shocks coming is a good one in my book. I love when you think you know what’s going on, but it turns out you were completely wrong. This happened to me at several points during this week’s episode which was undoubtedly the best one so far.

Synopsis: When Bridget can’t get in touch with Gemma, she starts to believe that something may have happened to her. Juliet begins at her new public school, but gets off on the wrong foot. Agent Machado gets closer to finding out what happened to Malcolm.

From start to finish, this week’s episode held my interest. The show has almost done what it started to do from the third episode, and that was correct the series’ flaws which were really holding it back. This week the show seems to have found steady ground and managed to get its pacing, characterisation and twists right.

Starting with the most prevalent theme of the hour: What happened to Gemma? Personally, I’m convinced she’s not truly dead, I mean how could she? There is no way the writers would ever pass up the opportunity to bring her back as a great end of episode cliff-hanger, and so they shouldn’t. This episode managed to skip right past what we knew (or at least thought we knew) and got straight to the main issue, which was how they were going to deal with the clean-up.

Sure, Bridget’s decisions were a little weird; I mean how was she ever going to leave Siobhan’s life behind if her old one is now plagued with her being a suspect in someone’s murder? Maybe that was the point though; she might be staying for the long haul. Even so, I thought it was great to make us believe one thing, only to turn it around the next minute and proving Henry’s innocence so quickly while implicating Siobhan only made me more desperate to figure out what the hell is going on.

When Agent Machado began his snooping at the start of this episode I felt my initial excitement levels drop significantly since that element of the series was starting to become a little tedious, but in actual fact it was another strong part of the hour. Obviously we learnt nothing new, but at least we’re done with Malcolm being tortured, I was kind of worried we might be stuck watching that for a while.

Juliet’s high school drama did feel a little out of place during the episode’s events, having next to nothing to do with any of the crazy murder mystery but it’s pretty obvious why it was put in there to begin with. Obviously the CW needs to add this kind of thing to entice their usual demographic into the show, and honestly it wasn’t all bad; it had Logan Echolls! It was nice to see what kind of a character Juliet was away from all of our regulars too, since she hadn’t really gotten a chance to shine on her own and while she is still a bit of a brat, she showed some softer (if slightly clique) sides to her that managed to differ her somewhat from my initial impression; a straight up spoiled rich kid.

‘Ringer’ is continuing to grow into a brilliant campy drama. It’s not the series I originally envisioned it to be, it has started to become something else, and that something else is kind of amazing.

8/10