Ringer 1.08 'Maybe We Can Get a Dog Instead?'

After the disappointment of last week’s hour, I found myself pleasantly surprised with this offering. It seems as though the writers are trying to give their character’s some depth, as well as adding some weight to a lot of their stories. A lot of it was pretty standard but there’s no denying that this episode was one of the best so far.

In ‘Maybe We can get a Dog Instead?’ Malcolm returns to New York further complicating Bridget’s cover as Siobhan. Juliet tries her best to get closer to Mr Carpenter.

All of the issues last week were seemingly absent from this dose of twin madness. This felt like the first hour of Ringer that wrote its plot around the characters, rather than change and adapt them to whatever big twist they have planned. They majorly copped out of last week’s big question mark ending with a disappointingly quick 60 second scene, but what made up for it was the sad and touching exploration of how the loss of the baby affected all of the people who knew Siobhan. Henry's reaction was a part that got to me in particular, there is still a lot left unsaid with him so I hope he starts to play a bigger role further down the line.

What I’m assuming is a big selling point of Bridget’s masquerade is her attempting to fix all of the rifts that Siobhan herself had caused with her family and friends. Though her weird high school teacher crush was completely disjointed and so far seems completely pointless, Juliet’s scenes with Siobhan were a big highlight for me.  All of that hostility we saw from her at the beginning has completely evaporated.

That big romance I mentioned last week is still one of my favourite parts of the episode. Bridget said in ‘She’s Ruining Everything’ that she wanted to stick around to make a difference, and it’s in Siobhan’s marriage that she’s made the biggest turnaround. There’s a lot still left to explore with her and Andrew, but it’s evolving into something kind of great. Adding Malcolm into her already complicated scenario was a weird move on Bridget’s part, but seeing where they might go with it is kind of exciting. There can't be a love triangle like that on-screen at the moment, right? 

As a character, Malcolm doesn’t really appeal as a single unit; his struggle with the repercussions of his run-in with Bodaway were as straight forward as it gets, but he’s an interesting commodity in all this, so I’d like to see him in play a while longer. I have to admit though, it was a nice touch seeing Bridget's helping hand mirror what he did for her in the past, regardless of how little those flashbacks told us.

Siobhan’s episode time is seriously lacking. Her apparent attempt to swindle money off Andrew didn’t go anywhere this week, but taking Tyler and adding him in as a two-location player was a fantastic turn of events. I just wish it had gotten a lot more attention, that dinner scene could have been ridiculously entertaining if it was buffed out.

If only this episode had a few more major twists to it, then it could have easily bested every other episode, but what it did was prove that ‘Ringer’ has its neck-breaking twists, ridiculousness and characterisation down, now it just has to master the combination.

8/10