Mr. Mercedes S01E08 Review: From the Ashes – Brady’s winning streak comes to an abrupt halt.

I guess no one ever told Brady that whole thing about digging two graves. Of course, at the rate he’s going, he’s going to have to go by Costco or get a Groupon.

He’s feeling pretty high on himself after killing Janey last week, so it’s no surprise that he wants to chat with Bill and rub it in. What is less understandable is why Bill would talk to him in the first place. His heart’s not in it and he’s not gathering info. It’s really just more of a chance for Brady to needle him.

We can see Bill is, unsurprisingly, not in a great place from the opening credits. They usually show Bill getting up and on with his dad, but this time, he’s stuck in the bed.

However, Bill does stir briefly to go check on Allie in rehab and make sure she’s safe there. She makes a point of asking if he’s checked on her mother, which he has not, but what’s the point? Brady’s never mentioned Bill’s ex-wife, just Allie.

Bill’s being gone freaks out everyone, including Pete and Ida, to the point that when he returns home, he’s got Ida and Holly waiting on him. Holly’s not ready to leave town yet, so she’s ditched her overbearing mom. And a small correction: last week I said that Holly was in her 20s; as she makes clear this week, she’s 31. And a half.

Bill lets Holly spend the night in Allie’s room, because he doesn’t have the strength to argue with anyone. She lays under the starry night he made for his daughter, until she’s struck with inspiration and gets out Olivia’s Macbook. Bill wakes the next morning to her and Jerome figuring out what they’d missed before. A hidden program had been installed on Olivia’s computer that could do all sorts of things, including play a hideous audio file of a woman screaming and asking after her dead baby.

Much to Jerome and Holly’s frustration, though, Bill insists on taking the laptop to the police. They are so close to finding Mr. Mercedes, especially after Holly figures out that the file had to be loaded manually. But at least Pete’s taking Bill seriously now.

Meanwhile, Brady’s good time fun dance comes to a crashing halt as Chekhov’s hamburger meat is finally served. Deborah cooks up some beef and peppers, which in no way looks like it was made with ground beef, but whatever. It takes only a few bites for her to start hemorrhaging. By the time Brady finds her moments later, she’s chewed through her lip and is barely conscious. He realizes what’s happened and helps her throw up, but it’s too late. She dies on the kitchen floor.

Brady makes a panicky phone call to Lou, but by the next day at work, he’s pretending everything is cool and nothing has changed. It’s a hard act for him to pull off, so he soon starts calling in sick, much to Robi’s chagrin. He’s not really sick, of course. He’s too busy Norman Bates-ing it up with her mother’s corpse, which he has placed lying neatly in her bed.

So this is where we are, by episode 8’s end: Two men who have just suffered terrible losses focusing their diminished strength on their respective white whales.

Who’s it going to be?

8/10 – After the high-intensity ending of last week, this episode was markedly more sedate, for obvious reasons. That is, if you don’t count Deborah’s bloody, foaming death. Once again, Kelly Lynch must be commended for the work she put into a character who, in lesser hands, could have been a throwaway.

On an unrelated note, maybe it’s the limited commercial interruption, but the last two episodes have seemed kind of trim.