Hey I absolutely LOVE your analysis!! I’ve watched ep7 and i was so happy with the end, one thing i was wondering if you could explain was the part when beth said “i’ll be damned either way” i didn’t quite understand what she meant by that and also when rio said “you’ve got an angel and a devil on your shoulder” (or something like that i can’t remember) i don’t understand what he meant by that.
Okay so in what I am now officially interpreting as a scene occurring after the bank swap and near-arrest have occurred, Beth and Rio are in his car and have an exchange.
The reasons I think it occurs after are:
The previous scene prior to showing them enter the bank ends with Rio putting the gun away and Beth looking confused, like it leaves her unsettled and she can’t interpret the action.
In the bank, Beth is following Rio’s lead, but doesn’t seem confident about it. She looks to him and trails after him. He’s the leader.
Beth seemed rattled in the scene with the cops, like she didn’t know what was happening, like she didn’t know what Rio actually put in the duffle and how that might implicate her/him/them.
In this scene, Beth and Rio seem to be sitting in heavy silence, staring straight ahead. Beth seems contemplative, not like she’s making a last-ditch effort, but like she just saw everything happen and she’s making an announcement.
Basically, the somber tone she takes in the “I didn’t have a choice” scene is disjointed with the way she looks at the tail-end of the scene where he puts the gun away. I read this scene as them having just gone through stuff and Beth needing to make a (larger, more important) decision about where they go from here, not what she’s going to do in the moment. If it was just about what she was going to do in the moment, why stop her before going in to do it? He knows he’s safe either way, that the duffle is full of costume jewelry. The moment is about theatrics only meant to show her and the Secret Service that he’s capable of wriggling out of consequences again. If it was about what to do in the moment alone, it’s less of a win. It’s more of a move made out of desperation, not real choice. So I think he asks her to make it afterward.
ANYWAY. So then we get this exchange:
The “angel” on her shoulder is going with the law from this juncture forward and trying to put him away (something she has no capacity to do in the bank scene). Angels are associated with goodness and morality. The benefits to choosing this side are that Beth gets to save her marriage, keep her family intact, and help Annie and Ruby safely start new lives with blank slates that erase many of their troubles—not only presently with how deeply their embedded in crime, but also the kinds of troubles that pushed them into crime in the first place. They’ll be set up with houses, cars, jobs, debts erased because their identities are wiped—all things that they were struggling with before they robbed the grocery store.
The “devil” on her shoulder is choosing crime and therefore choosing Rio. It means breaking away from the Secret Service and likely getting her hands dirty in some capacity in order to succeed.
Beth says she’s “damned either way.” Choosing the angel—working with the Secret Service to take Rio down—means giving up a part of herself that she likes. It also means giving up Rio, betraying him and letting him down, something that her dreams explicitly showed us she doesn’t feel good about doing in 4.06. It also likely comes with consequences she doesn’t know or understand yet since Rio isn’t going to just let her do that. In some ways, this makes it a false choice.
However, it’s not like it’s just easy to choose crime and Rio, either. Doing so means exacerbating her conflict with Ruby (which reared its head in this episode) since she’s making a major decision that impacts all of them and their futures. It means imploding her marriage (when Dean explicitly said he needs them to get to Nevada and start over). Likely, it means a divorce that destabilizes her children's lives. And she has no guarantee or real reason to believe that things between her and Rio have settled—in business or personally—to make sure that she could withstand the financial ramifications of the impact of that decision on her family.
The episode ends with Beth and Rio looking at each other without Beth giving a clear answer:
However, I think it’s clear she chooses Rio.
One, when she goes home to Dean, her eyes are glassy and she uncharacteristically takes him up on his invitation to be intimate. I think she knows what she’s done to him and she’s allowing them both to enjoy one of the last few good moments they have been them before the truth is revealed.
Two, when Beth gets in the hot tub with Dean, she keeps her clothes on. She cannot strip bare in front of him or expose herself, which I think signifies secrets. Also, if we’re going with “angel” and “devil” imagery from Rio’s speech, water is symbolically related to baptism or the washing away of sins. Beth enters the tub, but she remains cloaked in her crime uniform—an all black ensemble that mimics Rio’s.
In fact—point three—they very deliberately cast Beth and Rio as partners by their matching outfits, but not just any partners. The “dark” partners dressed in all black:
In contrast, they’re pitted up against the “light” male/female partners dressed in neutrals and whites with Phoebe in a soft sort of cream/beige turtleneck and Dave in his classic, crisp white shirt:
And against the traditionally uniformed male/female cop duo with also (blatantly, obviously) signifies the law or “light”:
Meanwhile, Beth and Rio are positioned to once again mimic each other with a false surrender:
Beth and Rio are perfectly matched and the male and female cop are perfectly matched, and the only duo who isn’t are Dave and Phoebe, who are at odds in this scene when Dave turns on Phoebe and tells her that she “blew it.”
In nearly all senses—costuming, body language, whether both they’re looking ahead or at each other, often even framing putting them on equal positioning—Beth and Rio are aligned in this final sequence. She’s following him. She picked him.
Do you think Beth might end up setting up ? Dave up because in the being of the episode it seem like Dave was talking crazy to Beth
I certainly think they planted the seed tonight that the SS’s lack of regard for what happens to Beth will come into play. If she isn’t delivering for them, they are callous about the consequences for her. I’m not sure how it will play out yet, but that will not inspire loyalty.
So essentially Beth is now in nicks position?? how would that work though with the secret service?? They know everything??
i think it goes back to beth's conversation with phoebe where phoebe admits she really doesn't want to turn beth in and beth asks how a friendship between them would even work when she does what she does and phoebe does she she does. basically, i think over the course of working with her, phoebe came to like beth in a way which allowed her to turn a blind eye to what beth was doing so long as she had a bigger fish to fry, and i think that was compounded by how she could see beth in a way beth wasn't being seen because she was a woman—similarly to how phoebe was overlooked professionally because she was a woman.
i think the execution of this was actually quite muddied, especially as phoebe and dave seemed to reach an equilibrium when he was originally the figure looking down on her, but also because i don't think we saw phoebe and beth bonding quite enough. still, i liked the end point of this storyline even though i think it needed quite a bit of tweaking.
as for dave, i think he maybe cared about career advancement more than anything else? i'd have to rewatch season 4 and specifically pay attention to him, though. he's a murkier figure for me at this point.
either way, i do think it's clear that dave and phoebe are not from detroit and would eventually return to wherever they came from, which makes it a bit easier for them to ignore what's going on as well. however, i do think it's possible at least phoebe would've made an appearance in season 5, possibly related to her desire to help with annie's case since she knew annie was not responsible for lucy's murder.
Hi, can you please explain why exactly Rio got arrested? I mean, the SS only saw him with Beth at the picknick table with lots of fake cash, I mean was that enough for a arrest? They didn’t see where he went with the cash or what he did with it. I’m a bit confused lol. Thank you
I can't say for certain because I'm too lazy to look up law stuff (I'm genuinely okay with them handwaving, like, any and all realism in regards to crime stuff for the sake of television plots) but if I had to guess, I'd say it's because Beth was acting as an informant so they only needed some verifiable proof that he was involved with the operation. Since technically Beth works for Rio making the cash for him to then use, the hand-off is confirmation of their respective roles, illustrating that he's the one in charge.
However, the obvious mistake of Dave and Phoebe's operation is in thinking that it alone is enough to pin Rio. The FBI, after all, has way more information on him and has never been able to nab him. I think it comes from a combination of Dave and Phoebe's arrogance and impatience. What they really wanted was to discover where the money was going, but when they were unable to accomplish it—and when Beth was proving useless—they struck.
