Outrageous Fortune Reviewcap: S1E07 (”Foul Deeds Will Rise”)
Y’know, I never really appreciated how good some of these episode titles were until this second run-through. Foul deeds in-deed. This episode is really something else, and I’m going to enjoy running through it, but before I do I just gotta quickly clarify one thing.
I mentioned, in the first post, that Loretta had a penchant for blackmail and also that she’d found a way to skip school most of the time. Well, I forgot to mention that those two were one and the same. Jethro’s current girlfriend, Caroline (who I misidentified before as the headmistress - she’s actually only deputy principal) has been fucking him since he was fifteen, and Loretta has pictures. She’s using that to blackmail her into letting her skip just about every day at school. I mention it now because it’s about to become very important.
I’m gonna have to do this episode in much the same way as I did episode four. It’s not nearly as dizzyingly densely-written as that one, but it nonetheless eschews the usual separate-plots format to focus on one fairly distinct throughline. There are, I suppose, technically two plots, but they have pretty much total overlap and are both driven almost entirely by the same character: Loretta West.
She gets this episode all to herself, pretty much, though Ted and Jethro naturally play very important roles. This is our deepest look into her psyche yet, and it happens - not coincidentally - to be another of my favorite ever episodes of the show.
We open with all the Wests, except Jethro, in the kitchen. Ted’s about to go off to play bowls with Margaret, and Loretta’s not any happier than she was last episode. Ted mentions that Margaret is on the local committee for the sport, which will be important. Margaret shows up, and cajoles Ted into admitting that the two of them are planning to move away together, which leaves Cheryl pretty much overjoyed. Loretta, though, looks as if Ted just tore out her heart and shattered it upon the ground.
The two of them leave, and Cheryl reminds the rest of them that Jethro’s bar admittance ceremony is coming up (Van’s not enthused about having to go). Loretta, though, doesn’t give a fuck; she follows Cheryl into her room and immediately sets about trying to convince her to stop Ted from leaving.
It doesn’t take one of Loretta’s intellect to work out that Cheryl is just happy she won’t have to look after Ted anymore, and she doesn’t bother trying to deny it. So Loretta turns to her next tactic: she immediately, and without a moment’s hesitation, outs Margaret as transgender to Cheryl, and in the most primally transphobic way she can conjure. “You know she’s a man, right?”, she seethes, making various horrible gestures as she explains it all to Cheryl. And Cheryl is certainly shocked, but it’s the neutral, just-plain-amazed kinda shock, free from any judgement and remarkably lacking in any real prejudice. She has no idea which pronouns to use, but ultimately just doesn’t really care. “Look, Margaret is a very nice woman who used to be a very nice man,” she says, very satisfyingly, and the disgusted Loretta is forced to her last resort: revealing that Margaret is a wanted criminal on the run from the law. But she must have known, on some level, that a woman as seasoned in the criminal world as Cheryl wouldn’t care about that either, and it all ends up with Loretta storming angrily out of the room as Cheryl continues to vocally give no shits about any of it.
Meanwhile, Jethro is preparing for his barring ceremony in the most appropriate way he can imagine.
Loretta’s still present, though, living rent-free in Caroline’s head, constantly grating between her and Jethro as the sandpapery wall that prevents them from living as a regular, out couple. Caroline fantasizes, mildly, about just straight-up killing her; Jethro doesn’t seem to object.
Loretta’s conduct the next day doesn’t help any. A teacher called Smail (poor guy) reminds her that she’s gotta do a speech about her favorite family member soon, a concept that bores her enough that she goes right to Caroline and demands that she call the man off. Caroline points out, really quite reasonably, that she literally can’t do this, which doesn’t faze Loretta one bit. She makes her ultimatum clear: Smail leaves her alone, or she reveals to the world that Caroline fucked a student.
Let’s pause and review for a second. Loretta, less than seven minutes into this episode, has just done two things that are both kind of awful in different ways. Firstly, she outed a trans woman without a moment’s second thought in order to try and serve her own ends, and this becomes more awful when you remember that she fully understands - indeed, is maybe the only member of the cast who does - how much prejudice they face. Indeed, that exact knowledge is what drove her to do it; she was trying to manipulate the prejudice she assumed she’d find in her own mother in order to achieve her own ends. The second is more complicated; threatening to destroy the life of a statutory rapist isn’t really all that objectionable in itself, one might think, and Caroline surely does not deserve much of our sympathy. But Loretta doesn’t give a toss about the morality here, of course. She just views it as a nice, efficient way to realize her aggressive laziness, and we can rest assured that Caroline’s own moral failings are no more important to Loretta than those of any fly she might swat.
We cut to Ted and Margaret enjoying their bowls tournament, all the while surreptitiously taking photos of the place. It is revealed, in a conversation between them, that they’ve gone back to their old ways; the two of them are constructing a meticulous plan to rob the club blind, and they seem to be having great fun doing it. Again, I want to stress this: there is never any suggestion of anything untoward in Ted and Margaret’s relationship, and there’s no evidence of dishonesty, manipulation or anything else. The two really do love each other, and it’s honestly very wholesome. I mean, aside from the whole conspiracy to rob a bunch of their fellow old folks, I guess.
Cut to Ted back in the house, talking to Loretta. She doesn’t want him to go, and she says so. What follows is a conversation that quickly goes down the drain.
It starts out innocently enough; Loretta reminds us all, in case we’ve forgotten, that she’s a teenage girl, and tells Ted that he’s “the only one in this fucked-up family who actually understands me”. But when the various garden-variety guilt trips and whatnot fail to move him, Loretta goes for the jugular: she mentions Rita. Well, I say “mentions”, but it’s really more like she wields her name as a bludgeon, suddenly abandoning all her sweet softness and just straight up wailing on Ted’s weakest point, implying that he’s selfish and the moral equivalent of an adulterer for finding someone new. Ted’s furious, and not a little upset; you can tell it got to him, and it may indeed have accomplished Loretta’s goal of giving him second thoughts. This wasn’t as calculated as Loretta’s usual cruelty, though; you can tell it came from a place of genuine hurt. She really is upset about the thought of her favorite family member leaving, and the truth is that this sort of reaction to the prospect of (perceived) abandonment isn’t actually too out of the ordinary for teenagers. Does that mean we should let it slide? Not really, but this time, I do understand. Anyway, Jethro and Caroline show up before Ted can respond, and they have a private conversation with Loretta in her room.
Jethro tries to convince Loretta to “just do what the nice teacher says”, for once. Loretta is unmoved. She’s generously come up with a solution for her Smail woes, too: she’s gonna accuse him of sexual assault, and Caroline’s gonna get him fired. Even Jethro is a little shocked at the newfound depths of the moral void present in the teenage girl sitting before him, and it’s true that it really is an absolutely awful thing to contemplate, let alone propose as a genuine plan. Blackmailing a teacher who really did commit sexual assault is one thing, but annihilating the life and career of a perfectly innocent one by falsely accusing him of that same thing (except, arguably, worse) just to avoid having to do one fucking speech is something entirely different. It also serves the nicely revealing function of letting us know for certain what we had already guessed: that Loretta doesn’t give a flying shit about the fact that what Caroline did was actually wrong. To her, it’s just another weapon she can use.
Meanwhile, Judd is trying as hard as he can to think of a reason to write a letter recommending that Jethro be denied entry to the bar. We cut, ominously, to Ted and Margaret planning their job. Ted is still thinking about Loretta’s words, and starts getting sentimental; “I swore there’d never be another woman,” he says, and Margaret says something about getting out of that on a technicality which I’m pretty sure no actual trans person would ever actually say, and which does make me wince a little. Ted mentions that Loretta loved Rita, which isn’t the last time that’ll come up.
Jethro is trying to console a very upset Caroline, who is just about at breaking point. Loretta, in her youthful inexperience, has dared to push it too far; Caroline is so distraught by the whole affair that she’s actually pretty much willing to commit career suicide and just let her send the photos, feeling that death (so to speak) would be a better fate than the abominable constant torture of living at the beck and call of a lazy, smug fifteen-year-old girl. So Jethro comes to Loretta in the middle of the night (prompting a very strange quip about incest from her) and leaves her an ultimatum: either she uses the photos now, or the blackmail stops. Loretta tries, in vain, to convince him otherwise, reminding him of the consequences, but he turns it round on her, asking if she’s considered how, exactly, Cheryl will react when she finds out what Loretta’s been doing. Loretta turns it back round against him, threatening to reveal his Maori fraud (and as far as I can tell, she’s the first white person in the show to pronounce the word “Maori” like the Maori do); Jethro simply points out that this would just straight-up break Cheryl’s heart, and has to trust that there’s at least something other than pure void in the girl’s soul that’ll restrain her. He leaves her with that, presumably nervous as anything. After all, he's Loretta’s family, and he knows perhaps even better than Caroline just how low she can go. So this is a tremendously big gamble for him to take.
Cut to the video hut next day. Loretta’s on the verge of tears in the office she commandeered from the real owner, and she’s particularly snappy with Kurt, even by her standards. “Why can’t I just live the way I say? Me getting what I want, is that too much to ask?” It’s not my favorite dialogue in the show - it’s a bit too on-the-nose, honestly - but it’s not exactly out of character. It turns out Loretta doesn’t have the photos; she had stashed them in Ted’s unit, and when it burned down, they went with it. She’s been bluffing ever since, and up until now, it had worked. But she’d done that thing young geniuses like her so often do: she’d overestimated her own intelligence, overplayed her hand. If she hadn’t been so lazy this once, she might’ve been able to keep the charade going until the end, but now everything’s fallen apart and she’s managed to sweep her own legs out from underneath her. She’s going to have to start going to school now. She thinks that’s tragic. And in a way it is. What’s that classic friendlyshark review on Letterboxd? “TRAGIC DRAMA. SHARK DESTROYED BY OWN HUBRIS. MASTERFUL.”
Things don’t get any better for her anytime soon. Margaret shows up when Loretta’s on her way into school, and she’s correctly divined that Loretta is trying to prevent Ted from leaving. She’s not having that at all; she tells her to stay out of the two of their business or she’ll, and I quote here, “rip your fucking tongue out”. And she does it all with a big smile on her face! She also tells Loretta that she’s the spitting image of Rita, which is - again - not the last time we’ll hear that.
What’s shaping up here is a remarkably unusual kind of plot for TV shows outside of the sitcom realm. Loretta sure is the protagonist here, and her challenges, goals, and cast of villains is now all laid out before us. But “villains” here feels weird, because there’s nothing villainous about what Margaret is doing. She’s just protecting a relationship she cares deeply about from ruination at the hands of a selfish, frighteningly intelligent young girl, and there’s still no suggestion that her love for Ted isn’t genuine. If it wasn’t clear before, it’s becoming clear now: this is a plot with a villain protagonist, and Margaret is playing with something dangerous here.
We cut to Van, delicately polishing his toenails before scrambling to hide all the gear when Jethro comes in. He mostly ignores him and makes his way to Loretta’s room, looking for the photos. Loretta tells him she isn’t gonna use them because she “can’t do it to mum”, but Jethro knows her better than that; I don’t think he really expected that gambit he pulled to actually work, and he’s suspicious now that it did. Loretta tries hard not to spill the beans, but Jethro works it out anyway, and leaves gleefully secure in the knowledge that the photos are long gone.
This pisses her right off. And sheer rage is what seems to motivate her next move: flagrantly ignoring the old West no-snitching code and putting together an anonymous report about who Margaret really is, posting it to the police. We don’t see the effects of that right away, though - we cut, instead, to Jethro telling the overwhelmingly relieved Caroline that the photos don’t exist anymore. She’s giddily excited at the prospect of her and Jethro becoming a regular couple. Jethro... well, he’s not as excited. You can see the enormity of it washing over him all at once, actually; it hits him, as Caroline is exploding with excitement before him, that he’s actually going to have to be seen out in public with her, and that now their relationship will involve more than just sex. Instantly, in that moment, you can tell this thing is doomed. But he invites her to his barring ceremony anyway.
It’s later, and Loretta and Ted are playing chess. It’s not clear who’s winning. Loretta eventually gives up anyway and tells Ted she’s going to give her speech about him. It’s a tender little scene, actually; Antonia Prebble really brings her A-game to this episode, capturing a very wide range of emotions in young Loretta, and it’s clear she really does love and care about her grandfather very dearly.
He reappears the next morning, as Cheryl is making clear she will attend Loretta’s speech and drag Pascalle along with her (Van declares he isn’t going, and nobody seems to have any objection). Ted expresses an interest in it, too, in his usual feigned-dementia way. The good vibes are interrupted, though, by the demons Loretta herself conjured up earlier; Judd and Hickey turn up talking about “Mark”, making it clear that they’re onto Margaret, even if they don’t actually know where she lives or even really who she is (apparently she’s been savvy enough to keep her real name off any records). Judd not-so-subtly implies that he might use this as a reason to get Jethro denied admission to the bar.
She still doesn’t care enough to stop any of their plans, but she does make it clear, as non-maliciously as possible, that Margaret isn’t welcome in the West house anymore. Ted and Margaret, later, have some discussion about whether to continue with the job at all; Ted wants to call it off, but Margaret insists that they continue. The one concession she makes is that they move the job forward and do it tonight. Ted is conflicted, since that means missing Loretta’s speech, but ultimately his love for Margaret wins out.
The Wests, minus only Ted and Van, show up at the school, reminiscing about bygone days. Jethro reveals to the family that he’s dating Caroline, which seems to have Pascalle equal parts disgusted and amused. Cheryl is a bit nonplussed, too, but they’re all interrupted by Loretta, anxious and nervous that Ted hasn’t showed up yet. That’s because Ted is, at that very moment, getting ready to break into the club. He won’t be showing, and poor Loretta is waiting in vain, standing next to the man she would have completely destroyed without a second’s hesitation to get out of doing this very speech.
Loretta has to give her speech anyway, and the stage doesn’t suit her. But she finds her stride anyway, with the help of a jab at lawyers (Jethro very much included). What follows is a nicely efficient mix of character exploration, setting exposition, and plot development.
Loretta’s speech is, as promised, about Ted (”Theodore Francis West”), and she doesn’t pull any punches. The audience is shocked when she proudly mentions that he was once known as “the finest safe-cracker of his generation”, but this only seems to spur her on; offending the polite society with which she feels no connection is clearly instinctively pleasurable to her. We learn a bit about Ted’s early life; he married and had children young, he had a code of ethics he followed almost without fail, he was superstitious, and he was meticulous. This, then, is the origin of the West family profession, and Loretta seems to find it as romantic as anybody else might. But as she speaks - specifically, as she mentions that Ted’s targets always used to include sports clubs - she reaches a sudden, overwhelming moment of epiphany, and we know well what it is, because the whole thing has been intercut with scenes of Ted and Margaret expertly breaking into and robbing the bowls club.
She really is the smartest West. She’s also inherited both her mother’s drive and her father’s clarity of vision; the moment she finishes her speech, she fucks right off, failing to convince Jethro to lend her his car (she “drives like a maniac”, apparently, which isn’t surprising considering she’s fifteen) and thus instead just stealing and hotwiring a random unlocked one she finds in the parking lot. She drives off, coincidentally passing Judd and Hickey (surveiling Margaret’s house, I think, and very much not enjoying each other’s company) while, back at the school, Cheryl fails to get used to the fact that Jethro is dating his old teacher, and Jethro’s blood runs cold when he hears mention of a car stolen from just outside.
She drives quite well, actually, and Judd and Hickey don’t recognise her. Cut to Ted and Margaret, jubilant with excitement at the success of their job. Ted opts to walk home, leaving the money with Margaret, who promises to pick him up tomorrow morning. But as she drives off, she encounters Loretta, and the two have a confrontation in the dark.
Loretta makes it clear: Margaret is to leave, and she’s not to take Ted with her. Margaret, of course, doesn’t see why she should - she loves Ted, after all, and what could be more important than that?
What Loretta says next is important.
“Do you love him enough to go back inside?” she asks. And that’s a threat that confused me at first, because what she’s threatening is basically to snitch, and hasn’t she already done that? But it’s different now, of course, because Loretta knows more. She’s at the scene of the crime; she’s a credible witness who can place her there and identify her car. Her prior act of snitching was limited, being entirely anonymous and based only off a decades-old cold case about a prison runaway; this time, she has real dirt, and the police will be far more motivated to pursue this one. And there’s another implication here, one that makes it all so much more horrible: if she tells the police about this, she’ll be putting Ted in the line of fire too. Is that what Loretta’s implying here? Does she really realise that’s what she’s doing? The dialogue leaves it open to interpretation, which may be intentional. Personally, though? I think she knows exactly what she’s doing. She’s forcing Margaret into a horrible choice: either risk the both of them getting caught and, one way or the other, separated, or just leave now and leave them both separated but, at least, still free. Either way, they won’t be together.
Loretta justifies this to herself as concern for Ted, who, she tells Margaret, is just too old for this sort of thing. Maybe she’s right - I dunno, he still seemed pretty spry when he broke into that safe. But are those really her reasons? Somehow, I’m skeptical. And that doesn’t jive very well with the veiled threat to put him in danger of prison, does it?
Cut to the West home. Loretta’s home already when the others all get back. She says she walked home; Cheryl believes her. Jethro knows better. He’s furious, since Loretta’s little stunt put him in danger; if she’d gotten caught, that might’ve endangered his admittance to the bar. Loretta’s response is as quintessentially teenage-girl as it gets. “I had my reasons, okay? And you wouldn’t understand.”
Next morning, Cheryl hears news of the break-in on the radio. Loretta lies as expertly as ever and reassures her that Ted wouldn’t be capable of such a thing. Ted pops his head out of his room, asking if the phone had gone for him; Loretta says the phone didn’t go. And that is such a quietly, horribly tragic moment - Ted facing up to the horrible beginnings of building, dreadful feelings of betrayal and abandonment; it being mistaken, by anyone present, for just his regular demented-old-man rambling, taken seriously by nobody; Loretta playing along with it, cold and sharp as ice, knowing the enormity of what she’s hiding from him and seeing what it’s doing to him and still displaying absolutely no response to it - that it rips me up inside a little bit every time I see it.
Cheryl doesn’t want him coming to Jethro’s barring ceremony; Loretta offers to stay and look after him. And if, at this point, you feel a sudden cresting wave of appalled, horrified disgust at that little thing, sitting there innocent and contented as a lamb as she awaits the full detonation of that abominable time-bomb of trauma and grief she just planted for her own grandfather, ready to be there with first-aid when it goes - well, that’s only natural.
We cut now to the only part of this episode that really doesn’t concern Loretta at all: Jethro’s barring ceremony. In its own way, that’s kind of horrible in itself, after all, but really Judd had it right earlier in the episode: “have you ever met a lawyer that wasn’t a ratbag?” Jethro’s general scummery ain’t exactly out of the ordinary for his profession, and one expects that he’ll fit right in. The ceremony itself is as big a moment for Cheryl as it is for Jethro, but alas, it isn’t everyone’s cup of tea.
The afterparty contains a couple of pretty great jokes - the head of Jethro’s law firm hesitantly trying to tread the line between admitting and not admitting that he’s seen Pascalle stripping; him also mistaking Van for Jethro and being absolutely baffled by his behavior - but one plot-important thing does take place: Tracy Hong shows up, for unimportant reasons, and promptly and immediately realises that the man she had sex with that one time was definitely Jethro and not Van. That will be important, though not perhaps in the way I’d like.
Judd and Hickey call off their surveillance, though not before Hickey creeps out Judd some more. Elsewhere, Caroline tells Jethro she loves him before they sleep; Jethro doesn’t say it back, and he dreams about Tracy. Uh oh.
And then we’re back in the West household, populated only by Ted and Loretta.
This show doesn’t pull any punches, and Frank Whitten (R.I.P) throws into it with all his might. Ted is in two. He’s ripped apart, torn up, absolutely shattered, utterly distraught with a truly awful concoction of grief, confusion, betrayal and pain. It was never in any doubt, and it’s even less in doubt now: Ted loved Margaret. He loved her deeply and truly. And right now, he is in overwhelming agony.
And then there’s Loretta.
A lot of people will talk about fictional characters they hate. Not hate in the sense of critiquing the quality of their writing, but hate in the sense that they just loathe them. Dolores Umbridge and Joffrey Baratheon are the most common names mentioned. But let me tell you that in this moment, when I’m watching this brief, minute-long scene, I have never hated either of them with even a cinder’s worth of the hate that I feel for Loretta in this moment. She’s sitting there, tender and soft, gently caressing Ted with needles concealed within cushions. “She’s not coming, Grandpa;” “Maybe she didn’t really love you.” She leans in close to him and whispers: “but I’m still here.” She looks the desolation and annihilation she has wrought square in his trembling, tear-stained eyes, reaches into his shattered soul, and reconstructs it with threads that all lead back to her. She weaponizes the agony she conjured in him to root him even firmer to the spot, building the moss-encrusted walls of grief that were erected with Rita’s death even higher up round him, constructing a fortress of pain in which the only exit leads to her.
She didn’t do this because “he’s old”, or any other altruistic concern. She did it because she loves her grandpa. She loved him so much, in fact, that she didn’t want him to ever leave her side; he is, as she said in her speech, her oldest and best friend. And she has precious few friends, as we know. She has little to cling to in this world. So when she faces the prospect of losing one of those rocks, she moves heaven and Earth to keep it locked firmly where it is.
“Sometimes you’re so like your grandmother,” says Ted. “So I’ve been told,” says Loretta, hugging him, satisfied that she achieved her goal. She’s not losing Ted. She’s had to shatter him into a million pieces and make him live through the worst pain imaginable once again, but that’s okay with her. If anything, it’s strengthened his bond with her. Things have turned out better than she could possibly have imagined.
I hate Loretta West. I hate her with every fiber of my being. She is, truly and deeply and utterly to her core, a monster. All her excuses, all her alienation, all her teenage rage - all of that just makes it worse. She’s a complex, three-dimensional human being, one of the best-written characters I have ever encountered, laden with layers and depth and commentary on levels I’ve never seen before. And she is, far and away, the blackest, most evil, most hateful and horrible soul I have ever seen on television. Sure, she hasn’t got a body count like Joffrey or Hannibal, but that’s just setting and context, and by that metric the worst monster in television history is some Cylon from BSG. This is a show set in the suburbs in a well-developed country, and it’s not about murderers or wars. It’s about a little suburban family of screw-ups and misfits, and at their core, sitting at the dinner table alongside them every night, is a child whose heart is as black as obsidian, whose capacity for evil is deep as a black hole. And the thing she does in this episode is evil, make no mistake. It’s so evil it’s honestly kind of nauseating. It gets worse the more you think about it, fractally awful, a kaleidescope of blackness.
Anyway, erm... I don’t really remember what happens in the next episode. It’ll be fun to remind myself. Until next time, I suppose.
