#4.14 analysis

[foxmagpie]

I really feel like I’m in the middle of a fever dream. Rio has been such a messy bench accidentally broadcasting his feelings for Beth left and right to everyone in his vicinity for months, but last night, very intentionally and deliberately, he drove to Beth’s house to let her know in as many ways as possible. It didn’t just happen. It didn’t come out sideways. It wasn’t veiled or ambiguous. Like that’s a decision he made. One that he thought about and wanted to be a participant in, one wholly different from him stuffing that baby blanket in an envelope and shoving it in a mailbox without a word. He made a choice to show her his hand and he handed her that power on purpose. For once, he wanted Beth to have all the facts, so he just told her.

[foxmagpie]

Re-watching season four, can you please tell me why Beth decided when she saw all that evidence to take down Nick and not Rio because her and Rio had been at each other‘s throat‘s all the time and she wasn’t happy that he took over the strip club so what made her decide to take Nick down and protect Rio? 

Yeah! It's because of the events of 4.14 and 4.15 that she really switches allegiances, but it's actually part of a much slower and more incremental development of her shifting feelings forwards Rio across the whole of season 4.

It starts with her burgeoning guilt over using him in 4.04 when she sets him up to handle Dave, then develops with her stress dream about betraying him and her subsequent inaction to find any incriminating evidence in 4.06, her offering him an out seconds before believing she's setting him up in 4.07, and her glee at finding an alternate in Gene before choosing Annie and Ruby over him in 4.08. By 4.10, she subtly chooses him over Dean when she asks Dean to go instead of Rio when he catches them at Paper Porcupine, and significantly, in 4.12, Annie basically tells her that Rio's incapable of harming her, something which doesn't have immediate effects but which certainly weighs on Beth and likely majorly informs her interpretation of his actions of returning her furniture and money in 4.14.

When that happens, Beth has to consider that Rio kept her furniture, which likely meant he always intended to give it back—meaning that even at the height of his anger and desire for vengeance, he seemed to see a different sort of future for them. After Annie came back unscathed from her kidnapping, too, it reframes Rio's ability to harm her or the people close to her. Basically, she sees more clearly that he's not the threat that she once thought he was.

On top of that, Rio, prompted by Nick insinuating he is going to steal Beth away from him, pivots his tactics and becomes much more direct and honest about his feelings for her. She's touched by the return of the money as his signaling that he supports her and believes in her ability to pull off the impossible (a stark contrast to Nick and Dean in the same episode), and when he also conveys that he's listening to her in 4.15 and when he openly decides to align himself with her over Nick—even choosing to come talk to the cops with her—she puts her trust in him and chooses to protect him when the time comes for it.

I talk about the incremental shifts a bit more in depth here.

[foxmagpie]

What are your thoughts on Beth's reaction in the last scene? To me she looks freaked out and then kind of exasperated once he leaves

I think she is freaked out—but mostly in the way that I think she's totally and completely overwhelmed by what just happened, by the gift Rio has given her completely inexplicably, not unlike the return of the dubby, and by what that means.

When she opened the dubby, she had to take a shot just to be able to handle it because he had no reason to get it for her besides the fact that she cared about it.

To return to her home and to have all of her items returned to her—items that he stole, as @bethsuglywigs just said to me in our chat—when they were at their worst and he was most angry with her, but that he kept anyway, as if he always intended to give them back—is hard to interpret as anything but what it is. Rio has feelings for Beth, and she's been incapable of recognizing that through the trauma of 2.13, through the fear for her life, through the way she's always scrambling to take back a semblance of control over her life. She knows that he's attracted to her because of their hook up in 4.06 and because Annie and Ruby teaser her in 4.13 that she has leverage with him because he wants to sleep with her, but this isn't that. It's so much more.

It's the way he gives her back the money when he cares about money more than (supposedly) anything.

It's the way he didn't barge in because he watched her campaign speech and listened and wanted her to know he heard what she cares about.

It's the way his guys are her guys because they're a team and their team is helping her with her campaign.

It's the way he took a t-shirt to signify that he supports her.

And it's the way he does it all while he's really saying that he took the money from her because he knew she could do it without Nick because he knew she could do it on her own because he's always believed in her and been impressed by her capacity to pull off the impossible.

(And for me, it's the way that she pulls it off with a move that's a complete fusion of their MOs. Beth gains access to Denise's house by using her visible suburban status to lie and dupe her, and then she chatters about fancy butter dishes and ice skating practice while she lets Mick destroy things and hold a gun to Denise's head, all while playing on her cell phone.)

On top of the fact that Beth gets all of this information at once, completely unexpected, after so long of believing she meant nothing to him (or at best, that what they had between them was nothing more than business and sex and business), she also gets it sober. She doesn't have her bourbon in her hand this time, and it's a smack in the face.

When she opens the box and sees the money there's this moment where she kind of freezes and then tilts her head like she's taken aback by the gesture, like she can't really believe what she see's seeing.

After he leaves, I think she sort of snaps back to reality. The door closes and it's a bit loud and she looks across the house towards her bedroom—where I believe Dean is—so I think she's feeling invaded and exposed simultaneously and it's just a lot, especially in the context of what she's believed about him for so long being rattled.

I think she's probably still confused, but at the very least, she knows it's not as simple as she thought it was.

[foxmagpie]

Just curious, is Rio’s reaction to his professional/personal jealousy over Nick and Beth what you would’ve expected? Like if you were writing a fic with this plot line, would you have had him return her stuff, be supportive (I think he even did a little of that in the last ep with his trust in her ability to get and keep the club running), all this? I don’t think what’s happening on the show is out of character at all, I’m just so surprised (and delighted ofc) and am wondering if you are too!

Ooh, what an interesting question!

I'd say that up until 4.13/4.13, no, I wouldn't have written Rio making such a grand gesture like that, but that scene works because of what came before it, and I think it played perfectly because of how carefully it was built.

Now I think the development of those feelings stretch as far back as to 2.07, and I'm particularly obsessed with that because I think 4.14 is very much in conversation with it. Before 2.07, Rio was attracted to and interested in Beth, he'd already behaved irrationally in reaction to her, but I don't think those feelings were very deep, and I think that's supported by the end-of-season reveal that he'd been carefully setting her up with the storage unit, which started in 2.03.

The dubby gesture was significant because Rio so rarely does anything freely, and especially things that do not benefit him, but he went to that drug den and he retrieved that baby blanket and he was utterly incapable of looking at her in the eye when he handed it back to her. What's even better is that reaction from Rio was triggered by him feeling worried for her. In their alleyway fight, Rio is not gentle or kind despite the circumstances, but his anger isn't senseless—he tells her that if she messes up, "you go to jail or you die." Before this, Rio wasn't particularly concerned about consequences for Beth. He set her up in 1.09 at the risk of arrest and he offered her bare minimum advice for dealing with Turner in 1.05 despite her nerves. Here, he's agitated at the idea, and while that could be brushed off because of their stronger professional ties at this point in the series, it's not supported by his decision to go to the house (while pretending he's sure its not possible that they have Jane) and then collecting the dubby (which he could've left behind) simply because she cared about it. The whole scenario makes him consider what it would be like to lose her, and we see a new side of him as a result.

It's significant, too, that the dubby moment is a moment of connection that, at its root, is one parent understanding another parent. I think the show legitimized Rio as a love interest instead of merely a fling by giving him a son. Marcus's role is to reveal another side of Rio, one that Beth is curious about and wants to connect with, a side of Rio that she relates to and for which she admires him. The dubby shows that Rio understands Beth on this level, too, even if he judges her for going back into the house to retrieve it before he knows what it is.

Of course, these feelings were built on through 2.08 and 2.09 when they were at their best before Beth brutally dumped him, and from there, I think we got the sense that his feelings were masked, but that he knew about them, particularly in the 2.12 "work" conversation where he puts on a show of being once again indifferent to the idea of Beth getting arrested.

The big question, then, was how Rio would feel about Beth after she shot him, and I think the show deliberately and explicitly suggested that he was in love with her to explain his reactions to her behavior across season 3, to rationalize his inability to kill her after that initial rage wore down with the pregnancy lie. Although the insight came from an outsider POV that couldn't really know whether what he was saying was true, it was supported through Rio's actions: it's in decision to kill Lucy instead of touching Beth or her girls, it's in the way he sits beside Beth and is comparatively gentle when she's crying over Lucy, when he reluctantly checks her out in that dress because he can't stop himself, it's in the way he softens when she impresses him again when she shows off Boland Bubbles.

Frankly, Rio's feelings for Beth are the linchpin of season 3, and if you don't believe that Rio is in love with Beth, nothing he does makes much sense. Still, though, if season 3 Rio had pulled a 4.14 move, it wouldn't have landed for me. We knew we were supposed to believe he was in love with her, but we knew that didn't mean he wasn't still punishing her or willing to treat her harshly—as much as not touching Annie or Ruby was a signal, he did still force Beth to see Lucy executed to punish her, which they circled back to confirm in the conversation with Nick in 3.09.

And the introduction of Nick is absolutely crucial in further exploring Rio's feelings for Beth. We saw how quickly Rio re-established physical touch with Beth when he put his hand on her back after Nick's questioning and specifically the way Nick was trying to use Rio's name for Beth (that she tried to shut down), so we saw the way Rio was staking a claim from Nick's piqued interest in her. The flashbacks in 4.08 established the symbiotic relationship between Nick and Rio, but also the way Nick has used and abused Rio for the entirety of his life, and that gave us a good basis for a long-simmering resentment between them.

All of those episodes and events were kind of tentpole moments that build toward the believable culmination in 4.14, but the most crucial moment was in 4.13 when they gave us a Rio POV scene alone at the bar. Rio's isolation in this moment is important because there's no performance aspect to it. The bartender is there, but only to serve as a trigger to Rio reorienting himself and realizing where he is (he's been completely lost in his own thoughts before this) and for Rio to give a direction emphasizing his inability to handle the bottle himself. It's easier to come up with alternate theories and interpretations for characters' behaviors when they are interacting with another person because there may be conflicting motivations (for instance, Krebs discusses the Rio/Nick scene purely from a business standpoint, which is one of the layers in that scene, although not the only one) but Rio really has no reason to dramatize his reaction to the bourbon. In fact, I'd say that Rio's reaction is only as intense as it is because he's alone, and it'd be far more masked if he was in the presence of someone else that mattered. And Manny does a good job with that scene, too, because his voice sounds different than it usually does, there's a flash of glassiness to his eyes before he quickly looks away, and as someone else mentioned, his physicality is altered when he gets up and walks out of the bar.

In my head, I see it as sort of a marathon. The race kicks off with 2.07 and it's a strong start through 2.09, where those feelings really solidify and become something Rio recognizes. There's a handoff of the baton at 3.05 which carries us through a slow and steady portion, another handoff at 4.06, and Nick is a competing runner closing in that sparks a pick-up of the pace. The final handoff happens in 4.13 and it's a burst of energy that crosses over into the finish line of 4.14.

Essentially, 4.14 wouldn't work without all these careful puzzle pieces that came before it. It's a significant moment on its own, but the fact that Rio shows up at her door to give her the box in-person matters more because we know he couldn't do it in 2.07, and the fact that it's spurred by Rio fearing losing her matters more because that's exactly what prompted him to retrieve the dubby. Returning the furniture means more because we know he took it and kept it in the middle of their worst period. Returning it freely with no apparently strings attached? More significant because it calls back to him offering to retrieve the money from the baby hitmen, also without strings, from their best period. Rio's given Beth money before, but he's taken it back even when she earned it (1.08, 3.10) and when it was part of a test (2.04). So the fact that he takes it in 4.14 to give it back as proof that she didn't "need" Nick is also an extension of and growth from 2.04, when things were still a little more duplicitous between them.

That's why I love 4.14 so much. Everything means so! much! more! if you think about all the ways it calls back to these other touchstone moments between them. If it was a conspiracy board, 4.14 would be in the middle with a bunch of red strings leading back to nearly every significant Brio moment over the entire series. Imo, it's a pretty masterfully constructed moment in that way.

[foxmagpie]

Haiiiii! Sooo! What’s your take on Beth’s facial expressions or vibe during the whole kitchen scene at the end? Is she kinda just like waiting for him to somehow turn this around on her like usual? It’s seems she’s like in denial that this was merely a kind gesture from him, like she’s in shock and not willing to take it as what it is. Idkkkk

I think you're right! And I think it makes a lot of sense.

One of the ways Beth has grown over time is to learn that she can't take what Rio says at face value. Think of how much she pressed him in 4.10 when he explained that "all" she needed to do was "print and drop." She couldn't let it go, asking him why he was making it so easy, how she was going to get paid, et cetera. Rio acted exasperated with her, but then at the end of the episode—surprise!—he revealed that actually, he meant they needed to drop it in Canada, and she was on her own for figuring out how to smuggle it across the border.

She also questioned his other decisions throughout the season that seemed out of character, decisions which I think were made with a motive he kept secret—like in 4.04 when he didn't reduce her cut for losing the plates, or in 4.08 when she questioned that he wasn't going to retaliate when she turned him in.

The way that the 4.14 scene feels different is that we got Rio POV to show his reaction to the bottle of bourbon that Nick sent over, and as much as business is twisted up in it, Rio wasn't just trying to convince her to abandon the seat and continue working for him (although that may be coming). It wasn't simply about controlling her as an employee, because if that was the case, he never had to give the money back. We've seen over and over again how much money means to Rio, and how often he considers it "his" even when it's been rightfully earned by someone else (like in 1.08), so the move was pretty significant.

But breaking down Beth's reaction:

I think she's shocked, overwhelmed, and disoriented when she first opens her door. First, she exchages a look of disbelief with Kenny, but then when she's walking forward, she's wearing this sort of ghost of a smile (which I feel like is a bit easier to recognize in the live shot of it rather than a screen shot, but what can you do?):

It feels like the smile is being sort of repressed, and you can see that she's a bit hunched and making herself smaller? Afterward, we get this wide shot which "shows the depth of a character’s relationship or connection to the setting" [x]:

This shot makes me feel overwhelmed on multiple levels. One, it showcases the amount of work there is left to do—boxes to unpack, things to put away—and two, there's this soft lightening which softens the scene and emphasizes the grand gesture of it, and three, there's an element of irony in Beth getting back all the items that she's collected and built in her marriage while we, the audience, are reading that she's at the very end of it.

There's also a way in which I feel like the gesture, as romantic as it was, is invasive, and the shot illustrates that? It still means that Rio's broken into her house, and therefore it still illustrates the power imbalance that has been present in their relationship. The only reason he was able to complete this gesture, after all, is because he stole it all in the first place.

I do think the entire thing must be very disorienting because he's given it back without Beth having to ask for it, and he's given it back without Beth having to earn it—or at least, there's not a clear thing that she can point to in order to claim that that's how she earned it. Even though she was skeptical in 4.04, she could at least cling to the idea that she'd "earned" her cut by "turning over" Fitzpatrick, even though she knew the reality of the situation. Here, there's nothing, and it comes out of nowhere, and she's not sure what to do with that.

In the second scene, once she's in her jammies and unpacking, I do read annoyance, and I think it's both fed by this sense of invasiveness (he's showing up unannounced at her house late at night) and disorientation (she still can't possibly figure out what his motive is, and she's too proud to have reached out to ask), but also he's now coming inside of her house, which we know is a problem from the way he asks, "You'd rather I [think] inside?" in 4.03 and Beth sharply says, "No."

Although Dean has recognized that he can't scapegoat Rio for all the issues in his marriage anymore, he's still a sore spot, and Beth looks around toward her bedroom and the stairs as soon as she's read the text, like she doesn't want to get caught having Rio in her kitchen (Yet! She lets him in anyway instead of joining him outside).

She glances away once again towards her bedroom when she asks, "Why'd you give it all back?" and her voice is a bit lowered. Rio corrects her, saying he didn't, gesturing at the box, and then Beth sort of gets agitated—like, please just answer the question—and asks, "Why any of it?"

Then she opens the box and I love her expression SO! MUCH! I made @mego42 watch it with me about 10 times on repeat to try to dissect it, and I also love how she described it: "oh god, what is this? -> 404 error -> wait, where's the catch?" And when she realizes that there's not a catch, that's when the extreme confusion sinks in.

(@fondful was a peach and giffed the moment for me here, and it's also part of a lovely @mego42 set here, and I encourage everyone to watch it one billion times, because it is A Moment).

It's all extremely subtle too. Her lips are parted up until the point, and then she presses them together and keeps them closed. Her brows half-furrow, she tilts her head, and then she looks up at him, waiting for him to answer her question.

He doesn't, though. And from the moment she's focused on the box, she stops glancing around looking towards her family. Rio compliments her tag, Beth quips that she's got "a really good campaign team" (which I read as a reference at least partly to Mick's help taking out Denise as competition), and then I feel like she just totally short-circuits when Rio says, "I told you, you didn't need him."

First, Rio looks at her lips when he starts to say it, then ends by looking at her eyes, and Beth's got them wide open. She blinks once and her eyes follow his movements and she's rendered speechless at that moment. Then, Rio drops the money on the table (the money he's just returned-slash-gifted to her—ha) to buy one of her t-shirts, and it's a little bit joking and a lot of bit supportive, and Beth just... stands there. First unmoving, staring at the box, and then she glances over her shoulder to watch him, and THEN! There's another moment I love, because when the door shuts behind Rio, it's a bit loud, and Beth blinks in surprise, jolted back to reality, like the bubble that she and Rio exist in when they're alone just POPS! And she quickly looks back to her bedroom—back to see if Dean's heard, and then she scrambles to put the lid back on the money, her eyes still watching for any sign of him—and it's just this sense of her trying to make it all private again.

Hiding it, not wanting to explain it, keeping it for just herself.

So! Yes! I think she's annoyed and confused and surprised and touched, but she doesn't trust it, and really, she has no reason to—yet. Hopefully Rio follows through and lets the gesture stand as it is, but we all know he loves to pull that rug out from underneath her, so I think she's waiting for it, and how she reacts from here will be dependent on whether or not he falls into his usual patterns.

[foxmagpie]

what do you think of this?

Yeah, I think that's how Beth was reading the scene in the strip club from her own POV, but that Bill's answer doesn't account for the fact that we've had isolated Rio POV, which showed Rio being wounded by the idea of Nick and Beth having a romantic/sexual relationship. Beth can't pick up on that as well, though, because she 1) has no idea Rio has real feelings for her, and 2) has no idea that Rio thinks something has happened between her and Nick, since Nick is being duplicitous and Rio doesn't ask her outright.

It makes sense for Beth to be cautious when Rio returns the furniture, as their entire dynamic has had him yanking the rug out from underneath her over and over after doing something nice. I was just talking about it with a friend, but the return of the furniture is basically the inverse of 2.04:

Rio gives Beth the keys to the kingdom and gives her money -> Beth asks "Why me?" and Rio says "I think you could be someone." -> Beth comes up with a scheme and proves herself -> Rio steals the money back -> Rio leaves her a bottle of bourbon

Rio receives a bottle of bourbon signifying Beth and Nick's supposed romantic relationship -> Rio retaliates by stealing Beth's campaign money -> Beth comes up with a scheme and proves herself -> Rio returns the money -> Beth asks why? -> Rio tells her she doesn't need Nick AKA she is somebody

One starts with a gift and ends with stealing and a bottle of bourbon, the other starts with a bottle of bourbon and ends with returning something stolen and presenting it as a gift.

By looking to that establish relationship pattern, Beth's waiting for the other shoe to drop, and she can't take something nice from Rio for what it is, because it's never been that before.

As for Bill's second answer—yeah, I think that's present there, too. Rio and Nick aren't simply fighting over Beth. Beth is one piece of a large puzzle, and as Nick and Rio said in 4.13, Nick always wants what Rio already has and he always gets it, too. So yes—Rio's clearly agitated by Nick not taking him seriously. He says so himself in the scene: "You'd be on a city salary if it wasn't for me." But the conversation escalates to being about Beth. Nick has Beth as a pawn for the seat because of Rio, but we can't take the scene at face value.

The show has done too much otherwise to establish that Rio has real feelings for Beth and real jealousy about Beth and Nick's interactions, which have been shown over and over again through Rio POV scenes.

[foxmagpie]

The money that rio gave beth back at the end, was it now all hers meaning that she wouldn’t have to use it on her city council stuff bc she managed to do the campaign without it? Thankyou❤️

That was my interpretation!

Rio really yanked her by the ponytail and then gave her what she actually needed—the realization that she never needed Nick in the first place, and to remind her she’s capable of getting what she wants on her own.

[foxmagpie]

I don’t understand. Everyone’s like “Rio is showing his love for Beth” , “he’s getting so jealous” etc. But from what I understand after Nick somewhat stated that he isn’t the one going to do time(jailed), but Beth is once she become the councilwoman. Clearly making her the fall guy, but Rio still did not stop Beth from running for councilwoman. If he really loved her wouldn’t he be stopping her. What’s his motive with returning all the furnitures anyway.

I don’t think Nick was talking about Beth. He was talking about Rio, which is why Rio answered that with, “Yeah, because you’d make sure it was me.” Based on what we know from Dave and Phoebe’s explanation, Beth’s not the fall guy—she’s a pawn to get Nick’s projects funded.

Rio’s motive with returning the furniture is letting go of grudges and saying he’s done making her life hell. He’s not punishing her anymore, and it’s not because she did something to earn it as much as he’s ready to let go of it.