gonna be controversial and say i hope rio never sees beth in the dress she wore on her date with fitz. that dress was so distinctly different from anything we've ever seen beth in and she was uncomfortable on that date from start to finish. the dress was a mask and a bad one; she was playing up her desirability and couldn't even playact basic pleasantries. she was miserable that whole dinner—fitz was infantilizing, pushy, and rude, and he trampled over beth's boundaries by removing her plate from in front of her and engaging in violence she never asked for supposedly on her behalf.
in contrast, we've seen beth dress up for rio twice. both times, beth chose pieces that she felt good in, not what she thought rio might want to see her in.
the first time, she wore a floral blouse and her blazer and fluffed her hair:
the second time, she wore polka dots, playing off the first outfit she wore when they were intimate. she also perfumed her hair, calling back to the way rio had his face buried in her hair during the act:
she's manipulating rio when she wears the polka dot dress, yes, but it's far less false than she was with fitz. one, she's calling back to a genuinely good memory that they shared. two, there are real, buried feelings underneath the surface for both of them. three, rio is immediately aware that she's scheming and how she's scheming, and he responds in kind, calling her on her pseudo-seduction by challenging her with his "anything, huh?" line, forcing beth to immediately walk it back. they're engaging in their usual push/pull, and both win and lose in the interaction. beth can put on a performance here for rio, but she can only do so because she knows him, and it ultimately doesn't matter because he can see through it because he knows her as well.
in contrast, if fitz is aware that beth has no romantic interest in him, he seems indifferent at best to this fact. he may see her enough to call out her moral slips, but he doesn't care to read her blatant disinterest in him, let alone have any idea (or real concern for) what her limits are. there is no push/pull between them—there is only push. to wear the dress, to eat the radish, to move the line.
beth felt like she had to perform for fitz in the same way that she has to perform for dean. with rio, she doesn't feel like she has to. he's attracted to her, period. beth equates looking good for rio with feeling good for herself, and if that isn't sexy, i don't know what is.
ok so i just rewatched the scene where the girls and rio are at "carolyn's" house and noticed that there is a butterfly at the wall behind beth and it's quite interesting bc it's like the third time there we see a butterfly (at the wall in granny's room and at beths dress) so i looked up the symbolism of butterflies and it says that it's "a representation of resurrection, change, renewal, hope, endurance, and courage to embrace the transformation to make life better" so do you think it might be about beth choosing crime?
Ah, what a great catch, anon!
I think we definitely are seeing Beth change and flip her allegiance. And I do think she chose Rio at the end of the episode—but not in a way that’s definitive and absolute. I just think the needle moved and we’re going to see that transformation process happen over the rest of the season.
I think of it like this:
3.07-3.09
Coming off of Lucy’s murder, Beth is 100% committed to the hitman plot because she feels its the only viable solution. She tells Max they can’t go to the cops because, as Ruby says, “we’ll all end up in that van.” These episodes are the height of Beth struggling in her relationship with Rio. She tells Max she feels “nothing” and Annie explicitly says that “it’s not a life” if all they do is work for Rio without pay, agency, or choice. She feels utterly trapped and sees this as the only way out. After Rio gets her fingerprints on the gun, she’s distraught, but once she has Fitzpatrick lined up, she’s proud of herself and feels incentivized because it ultimately means she will be free from him.
3.10
Beth passes Fitzpatrick’s test, but she’s resistant to making the call and the needle nudges because she’s unable to watch it happen. She celebrates Rio’s death, but has a brief moment of reflection looking out over the picnic table, remembering that there were better times between them. She insists no one was jilted, but corrects the girls when they say it was a “one and done.” She chooses to let go of the door handle when she’s in the car with Rio, ultimately taking the chance that he won’t hurt her and she’s proven right. Her inability to lie to him returns when she can’t come with a plausible excuse for where her money is going—a marked difference from her cocky assertion that she “can’t control the world market” or the way she tries to play him when she dresses up in the polka dot dress. She’s proud of her hot tub scheme and she gets frustrated, throwing a temper tantrum, when Rio doesn’t give her his full attention and stamp of approval.
3.11
Beth’s ire gets reignited when Rio “consolidates,” forcing Beth to print and wash while he takes a large cut of the profits. She’s frustrated by his control over her, but she can’t help but feel flattered when he tells her that he “loves” Boland Bubbles, asking him, “Really?” Rio flirts and while Beth doesn’t flirt back, she is somewhat playful. She asks when it “gets to be mine” because she “made all of this happen.” She wants credit, but the fact that she asks also means things might be different if he were ever willing to let her have anything to herself. Rio essentially tells her that will never happen until she kills him. The moment is loaded, but when Rio leaves, Beth doesn’t look victorious—despite the fact that she has an active hit on him.
4.01
When Lucy’s body is found and Rio reminds Beth that he can and will use her fingerprints against her. While Annie and Ruby are fixated on contacting the hit hitman, Beth instead focuses on how she can offer him something he “really needs” in order to try and get the gun back. After successfully bribing the inspector to look the other way, Beth goes to the bar and meet Rio to celebrate, trying to capitalize on the shared success (“I’m making you bank”) by asking for the gun back because it “doesn’t make sense” to hold it over her anymore. When Rio agrees and tells her that she’s right, Beth doubtfully asks, “I am?” like she wants to believe him. However, when Rio doubles down and suggests that he might turn it over to the cops, Beth feels that she’s at the end of the line. Instead of scrambling to find another solution to her Rio problem, she instead prepares to be arrested, writing Dean the letter, telling the girls that she won’t run, and that she “may as well have” killed Lucy herself. She’s still committed to the hitman, but its with less fervor than before. Instead, she’s more actively playing the cat and mouse game. Even when Fitzpatrick visits her at the end of the episode and she asks him to move her up on his schedule, it lacks intensity. She emphasizes how much money she’s paid him, not how badly she needs Rio gone.
4.02
Annie insists that if they “pop [Rio], all of this goes away” while Beth waffles over whether or not to go to dinner with Fitzpatrick in order to speed up the timeline. She’s pushed to make this move, however, when Rio forces her hand to hold some of his money while she’s feeling “heat” about her books as it reminds her how “the last time [she] did that”—that being held something for him—”[she] got tied to a murder.” On the date with Fitzpatrick, Beth struggles to play her part despite the stakes. Despite being a canonically good liar, she’s really putting in bare minimum effort, diverting the conversation back to the job by saying she just “needs [it] done.” When Fitzpatrick asks her what the hurry is, she says, “He’s making my life hell”—which is a very different motivation than we saw across 3.07-3.09. At this point, Beth is focused more on how Rio is making life challenging for her and how much money she’s sunk into hiring Fitzpatrick, but she’s no longer feeling the same dread, fear, and hopelessness, all emphasized by how she asks Rio for things (like when the business gets to be hers or to get the gun back). She thinks she has leverage with him she didn’t before, and while she’s still moving forward with her plan, their dynamic is shifting and her resolve is weakening. It weakens further when Fitzpatrick asks her what life will be like when Rio’s gone and Fitzpatrick challenges Beth when she says it will be “normal.”
4.03
Beth goes to Rio for help after Dean is arrested, believing him at his word when he says he’ll cover the loan if she sinks the eight ball. Despite herself, she still trusts him, and she feels burned when she realizes the catch. When Beth complains about Fitzpatrick to the girls while bemoaning her predicament with Fitzpatrick, she says, “I wish he’d put a bullet in me.” Again, she’s less focused on him completing the job and more focused on her present problem. She only hits a breaking point when Fitzpatrick shows up and tries to get her to come to Fiji with him. Even at the exact moment she’s pushing him to complete the job, she says she wants “to be nothing like [him]” which he points out is ironic considering she hired him. When he promises to fulfill the contract when he gets back, we get a lingering shot of Beth breathing heavily before she shakes herself off and finishes unloading groceries. She’s still going through with her plan, but she’s pausing more and seems to be feeling doubt—not necessarily because of how she feels about Rio, but because it’s becoming real and she seems uncertain if this is the kind of person she wants to be.
4.04
Dave and Phoebe approach Beth, offering Dean’s freedom in exchange for Beth becoming an informant. Beth insists that Rio will kill her and that she “can’t do this.” The Secret Service threatens that if she doesn’t do this, she, Annie, and Ruby will all get rounded up and arrested for their crimes. In order to avoid this, she goes to call off the hit—but Fitzpatrick is mysteriously gone. She clues Dean into the Nevada plan, but gives him no indication of how it could be possible, potentially signifying a lack of commitment. When she tracks down Fitzpatrick, her reactions have shifted. She doesn’t correct him when he calls them jilted lovers. She pauses before answering when he says she just can’t live without him and when he tells her she’s not the only side dish. Realizing that Beth’s cut a deal, Fitzpatrick calls her on it, and she insists that “it’s complicated.” In order to wrap up the hitman plot, Beth cons Rio into taking care of Fitzpatrick for her—only she gives Rio an honest monologue about how she can’t go back to her normal life in order to accomplish it. She says she wants normalcy, a fresh start, a blank slate—but she wants crime. When she succeeds in duping Rio, she’s not celebratory or pleased. Instead, she’s weighed down, feeling like this was her last resort. Again, she’s unable to lie to Rio. When he signals that he doesn’t buy that the person he killed was Secret Service, Beth can barely hold it together, further emphasizing that she can only lie to him when she threads that lie with a truth and when she has extensive time to practice. She says it herself: her commitment to the Secret Service plan and her manipulating Rio into doing her dirty work is because it’s the “only way this goes away.”
4.05
When Beth waits for Rio at the sting drop, she nervously checks her phone, but never attempts to contact or call him. She insists he “knows” and the Secret Service refuses to do anything to protect her, making her upset. Beth defiantly strips to prove to Rio that she’s not wearing a wire, then agonizes whether or not he knows. Beth then enjoys being The Banker and imitates Rio while creatively coming up with her own way of handling Penny, telling her to “watch [her] back.” She’s having fun again, riding the hide of being successful, and regardless of the reason or the truthfulness of Mick’s statement, she’s rattled when he tells her that Rio trusts her. Beth alludes to the idea that “someone is still watching” directly to Rio’s face in order to try to weasel out of remaining the Banker and Beth realizes she’s Rio’s fall guy as much as he’s hers. She then tells the Secret Service that Rio has a boss, AKA someone that’s an even bigger fish to catch than Rio himself.
4.06
The Secret Service refuses to pay the girls to make up the difference in what they are no longer making working for Rio so they rob the jewelry store and leverage the meeting with the boss in order to con the Secret Service into paying up, causing trouble for them and definitely not acting compliant or loyal. Beth has a dream that explicitly explores that she feels guilty that she’s letting Rio down and betraying his trust while feeling pressured to deliver for the Secret Service. Before going to meet the boss, Beth tells Dean that she’s “stuck for life” in crime. Phoebe and Dave do nothing to prepare or reassure Beth when she’s nervous about wearing the wire. Beth starts off the scene asking Rio if he wants to frisk her. Despite the fact that it doesn’t benefit her to announce this over the wire—or that she looks at her plate like she’s waiting for the correction from Rio—she announces that they’re partners at dinner. She becomes protective over the name “Elizabeth,” showing that she’ll only allow Rio to call her that. An intimate hand on her back causes Beth to become frantic and panic, furiously removing the wire and desperate to find somewhere to stash it. As you point out, costuming puts her in a butterfly dress. There are more butterflies on the wall in Rosa’s house. A romantic song about softening and forgiveness plays. After tucking the wire away, Beth studies the photos of Rio growing up—until she’s interrupted, at which point she can barely form the words “I don’t know” in answer to what she’s doing. The entire conversation works on two levels to be about the immediate moment and the larger operation to betray him, with Beth signaling that she might not be good enough for him or his business. Rio is telling her about the overlap between business and family in private, yet Beth takes no opportunity to try and ask him anything that might gather evidence for the case. Then, under the guise of trying to distract him from finding the wire—despite the fact that she had better means to do so—Beth initiates intimacy with him after meeting his family.
4.07
Beth insists that she only hooked up with Rio to distract him from finding the wire, but her behavior in the episode doesn’t correspond with this. She refuses to wear a wire again. Although Dean knows that she’s working against Rio to cut a deal with the Secret Service, she lies to him about going to see Rio, dressing up, fluffing her hair, and putting on perfume. At the bar, she flirts with him. She tries to say that she didn’t want to hook up with Rio again, but Ruby—her best friend in the world who knows her better than anyone—doesn’t believe her. She goes along with the plan the entire way, but it’s painfully obvious that Rio doesn’t buy it and Beth is just sticking her head in the sand because what else can she do? When Rio asks if Beth is “really gonna do this,” she offers that they can back out of the deal with “Carolyn” to use someone else instead, like she’s entirely willing to cancel this operation at the last second, instead of even attempting to convince him that it’s fine. Again, subtextual clues are consistent and clear: costuming, blocking, and music all underscore that Beth aligns with Rio. She admits she felt like she didn’t have a choice, and when he gives her one, she’s able to go home to Dean, indicating that she picked Rio and crime. She’s glassy-eyed and, in contrast to her scene in 4.05 with Rio, she’s unable to strip bare for him, getting into the hot tub with her own husband in her own home fully dressed.
Her reasons for her lack of loyalty shift from actively fearing for her life to feeling like her life is meaningless under his control to feeling like he makes her life hell to working against him to save herself to feeling like she has no other option. It’s a gradual shift, and we’ve only just crossed the line.
The monologue at the bar in 4.04—reiterated in 4.06 just before the start—set us up to know that Beth is committed to (or “stuck in”) crime for life. Her dynamic with Rio is shifting, but only just. They’re trying out real, straightforward communication and honesty for the first time… ever. So far, it’s more effective than anything else they’ve tried. But there is still a lot of holding Beth back, including the fight with Ruby, Dean’s reliance on the plan, and her inability to take accountability for her actions.
While I think that needle nudged over the line to choosing Rio, I don’t think we should yet expect that she’s going to be clearly and completely on his side just yet. It’s still jumbled and complicated, but we’ve already seen her admit to him that she’s working with the Secret Service only to duplicitously try to continue to do so in secret. I think we’ll see a progression from that, even though I’m not 100% sure in which way we’ll see it yet.
But I do think she’s now more loyal to him now than she is to the Secret Service and that they’re only going to get closer, she’s only going to soften more towards him, and we’ll see a lot of development from this point forward with the needle moving more and more towards Beth proving her loyalty to Rio.
So you think Beth was Lying to Dean when she said I love you to him
It’s hard to say for certain based off of the briefness of the promo, but at best, I think Beth believes she means it but it’s not true. Not deep down.
Compare it to the last time that Beth had the opportunity to tell Dean how she felt about him: they’d just been intimate, Dean made her coffee, and he told her he loved her. She stared at him blankly. Privately, she was dealing with the fact that she thought her ex-lover was going to murder her—something she didn’t confide to her husband, although she did eventually tell her best friend and her sister. He thought they were in the best spot of their relationship in years.
Before that, the last time we saw Dean tell Beth he loved her was the morning of the robbery, where she plastered on a fake smile and told him to keep his tuna in the fridge. It feels significant that Beth threw the original motivation for that robbery—him almost losing their home—in his face the second he started getting suspicious about the books in this episode, right before Dean was about to discover a major betrayal of Beth’s.
Beth’s never moved on from Dean’s original transgressions (reiterated in 3.11 when she threatened Gayle that her family would “hate her forever”) and clearly, Dean’s never forgiven her for her relationship with Rio either (which Beth is aware of, which is why she tried to slink down in the passenger seat of Rio’s car when he came to move his money into her accounts at the exact time that she was trying to move money out in order to mask the crimes she was committing at her family business—which Rio called “our business”).
I know people have been wanting Beth to leave Dean for a long time now, but since season 2, I’ve thought two things:
Dean will be the one to leave Beth
Something huge has to happen to cause this shift
So far, Beth has put up with a minimum of five affairs and Dean almost losing their home, not to mention that he cut the plates when she literally told him that Rio was going to kill her. I’m not sure what Dean could do to make her finally budge; she’s resigned herself to a life with him, to the cold comfort that his familiarity and normalcy brings.
But this episode also had Fitzpatrick remind her that her lines have moved too far, that she’s a different person now, that the normalcy she once had no longer exists.
Dean’s been fighting for that normalcy. He wanted a legitimate business. His conversation with DL Dave showed that he wants a relationship dynamic where he’s the boss and Beth makes him look good.
And he’s about to find out that everything between him and Beth has been a sham.
I don’t think Beth loves Dean; I think she’s scrambling to try and stop her life from imploding. I think it’s an apology.
In rewatching 4x02, specifically when Annie goes to ask Kevin to the fundraiser and he initially tells her no because he doesn’t “want to be her favor anymore”, it feels very pointed to me that they made him homeless. Like, here’s this dude living in his car using random garbage as toilet paper (things society would have him feel ashamed of) but he seems to have more self-respect than Annie—she makes a TOTAL fool out of herself later all because she thinks Ben’s embarrassed of how poor/unsophisticated she is. I know your love for Annie is great, I’m curious to know what your thoughts are on this specific pairing and what they were hoping to accomplish by bringing Kevin into the story.
Based on 4.02, it seems like Kevin's function right now is to help Annie grow. His first appearance in season 3 where he shows up at Annie’s door, reminding her that she’s the kind of person that hooked up with a stranger in her car on the highway, supporting Ben’s point that she made questionable decisions while chasing after affection. It was a point of shame for her, and she rejected him in that moment, wanting to be different.
However, she backslid later, having a quickie with Kevin in her workplace on her fifteen-minute break after Cohen came to her apartment and called her out, and she explicitly told Kevin, “I’m getting over someone by getting under someone else.” Finding out that he was homeless was supposed to represent a “low” point her because it’s essentially used as a (problematic) shorthand to suggest that he’s not “good enough,” that he’s part of the same pattern Cohen pointed out to her where she pursues “inaccessible men.”
In 4.02, when Annie asks Kevin to the charity auction, Kevin points out that she’s using him, and by the end of the episode, the scene where she’s lying with him in the backseat watching a show projected onto the ceiling seems like it’s supposed to show that Annie is growing and letting go of some of the judgments she had of him that were making her treat him poorly. I found it pretty significant too that she was meeting him at his level and engaging in an innocuous activity with him where they were simply enjoying spending time together—a contrast to the way that she typically shoots her shot and escalates her relationships with men rapidly, like immediately sleeping with Noah or falling hard for Cohen the second both of them were nice to her.
Annie is clearly very insecure generally (as evidenced by her pleading with Greg to tell her what was on his “list” for her or feeling second-tier to Beth as the “boss” in their relationship) and season 4 seems to be delving into her specific shame related to financial insecurity and irresponsibility and the way that it creates distance between her and Ben. Kevin, like you pointed out, does not seem to share this shame although he is experiencing more difficult circumstances, and he’s fundamentally honest about who he is in a way that Annie is not—as we see when she (maybe?) lies about being Jewish and the ways she has been continually lying about her work and how she makes money while she lavishes Ben with gifts that he’s never asked for.
I suspect Kevin will help Annie work through her embarrassment in regards to the disparity in lifestyles she can offer Ben in comparison to Greg and Nancy. I also think that it’s important that Kevin seems to like Annie at the same time that he has no problem telling her when she’s treating him badly. Kevin’s security in himself will be something that I think will be good for Annie to be around, particularly because I think we can expect to see Annie at her lowest this season.
I’m a little confused about the scene with Beth Annie and Ruby after the date... who is Beth talking about when she says “he doesn’t deserve this?” And was she calling Mick to stop him from getting the books? Is that why dean got arrested?
I’d have to watch it again to be sure, but my impression was that she was talking about DL Dave, who she thought was just a spa salesman. In her conversation with Fitz, they were talking about where the “line” was and how it keeps moving—just before he went into the kitchen and assaulted the chef for cooking Beth’s salmon incorrectly. Beth then turns around and tells the girls about it and discusses what their line is. Initially, when she went to Mick, she was clear that she didn’t want Mick to kill Dave; he promised he wouldn’t, but announced that he was going to “wish” he was dead. That was a line Beth seemed comfortable with until she saw violence up close again and was shaken over it; then she seemed to call Mick to call it off because she didn’t think Dave deserved it—even if it put her and Dean in jeopardy. Essentially, it seems like she’s figuring out where her line is and how far she is willing to go to save herself (or Dean, or their business).
