'Ringer' Season 1, Episode 21 Recap - 'It's Called Improvising Bitch!'

Things are beginning to tie together on this week’s episode of “Ringer”. Who knew when we first started the show that Catherine, Andrew’s bitter ex-wife, would play such a prominent role in everything? Or that Olivia was involved? Or that she was a lesbian? It was just truth-bomb after truth-bomb this week.

Catherine tries to once more unsuccessfully kill Bridget by drugging her and leaving her to drown in the bath. How many times has Catherine failed to kill Siobhan and/or Bridget at this point? She’s attempted to kill her at least five times by now. Catherine is the worst at this.

Although on “Ringer”,  as we all know, being shot directly in the face doesn’t necessarily mean you’re dead. Similarly, being pumped full of drugs has basically no effect on Bridget after Andrew saves her from the tub. I was under the impression she was overdosing, but after Andrew’s save she’s alert enough to pull a clever phone trick on Catherine.

Someone who did successfully overdose? The Russian maid who planned to testify against Henry. First she impolitely takes a sex-customer while Siobhan is trying to blackmail her, then she shoves the 100 months pregnant Siobhan into a little closet. While knowing the whole time that Siobhan is in the closet, trying to find dirt on her to use as blackmail material, she does a bunch of drugs with her hooker customer and then dies. We barely knew you, Russian mail-order-hooker cliché!

Siobhan manages to escape the closet in time to deliver two twin baby girls, for maximum irony. I can’t wait until 30 years from now, when we can all relive this show in the spinoff “Ringer: The Next Generation”.  It’ll be like “Degrassi”, only with more misunderstandings and less Canadian accents.

After finding out about the dead Russian, Henry asks to get a paternity test on the twins. That’s clearly bad news for everyone. It really does take an extraordinary amount to get Henry to finally wise up and realize Siobhan’s crazy though. His wife has been killed, he’s lost his kids, he murdered a dude, Siobhan basically said straight up to his face that she wanted to kill her sister but it takes a random Russian prostitute for Henry to really draw the line.

Meanwhile, Catherine is getting progressively crazier as the episode wears on and she acquires more and more hostages. You can tell the progression of her crazy by the state of her eye makeup. She starts out the episode normal-crazy and ends the episode somewhere around Heath Ledger as the Joker levels of crazy.

We also learn that Olivia was much more involved in the main action than we otherwise would have thought. Sadly for the actress, none of this was on screen until this very second. But isn’t that the way with most of the cast members on “Ringer”? I would have loved to hear these actors get pitched on the show. “You’re going to have this juicy arc where you’re hooking up with your partner’s ex-wife because you are a lesbian with really excellent lipstick and also you guys plot to kill Siobhan! It’ll be so scandalous! It’ll also all happen off screen!”

(Then again, where is Malcolm? Probably getting heroin injected into his eyeballs while tied to a chair, occasionally being shot in the face for good measure. I hope the television karma gods give him a really great pilot next season.)

We learn through flashbacks that Catherina was angry at Siobhan because she convinced Andrew to sell the Miami property. “But where will I live?!” Catherine cries, at if at that very moment she wasn’t standing in a fancy cocktail party, but was instead begging Siobhan from a cardboard box on the street. Siobhan wisely surmises that she will find some poor sucker to hook up with and then subsequently mooch off. That poor sucker? Olivia, who Catherine goes to after Andrew throws her out after the Juliet “Wild Things” plotline fiasco. Olivia hits on her and Catherine is like “You seem pretty rich so I’m down” and they start a relationship.

Maybe the greatest part in the episode is that the whole family seems more shocked that Catherine is in love with Olivia than they are that she’s currently got them tied up and held at gunpoint. Oh Martins, you have the worst priorities.

Thankfully, Agent Pretty Eyes ignores his orders to stay out of the Martin’s affairs and saves the day when he has Olivia convince Catherine to bring Bridget over as a hostage. Bridget and Machado tag-team Catherine and haul her away. But not before she accuses Bridget of being pathetic because she needed to steal someone else’s life. You can see the tiny hamster wheel inside Bridget’s head turn at that comment. Seems like someone might be coming clean about her mistaken identity soon.

What did you think of the reveal that Catherine was behind everything and working with Olivia? Do you think the twins are Henry’s or Andrew’s? And will Bridget and Siobhan ever bump into each other before the season ends? Sound off in the comments!