What I’m Watching: Big Little Lies (Penultimate Episode)

Big Little Lies: Season 1, Episode 6 “Burning Love” (B)

For some reason, this miniseries only has seven episodes, and therefore we’re just about at the end here. I still feel like there’s so little clarity on what murder actually happened, and that’s both frustrating and, in my mind, some cause for a clarifying second season. I’m not sure that all this has legitimized that, but I’m invested enough that I would stick around to find out what happened. The most crucial development of this hour was Celeste’s therapist telling her that she needed to find and buy a place to be able to go and to tell someone what was happening to her so that it couldn’t be used against her in court later that she always presented a positive front. She took the former advice and did nothing to acknowledge the latter, and Perry manipulated her like crazy by trying to convince her to skip the play, showing up to surprise her and attend, and then telling her that he should have killed her after a sex injury. Ed wishing for passionate sex with Madeline was about the calmest part of her experience this episode, after she was confronted by the wife of the man she almost broke up her marriage for her and then lost it, first with excessive shellfish vomiting all over the table and Bonnie, and then with an unexpected confession to her daughter that she wasn’t perfect, hardly a reasonable excuse for her daughter to be selling her virginity online. After Jane clawed out Renata’s eye, it’s interesting to see them moving forward, while Harper got quite the takedown from Jane for being Renata’s loyal lapdog. I’m not sure what kind of answer or closure we’ll get in the next episode, but I hope that it’s satisfying.