'Ringer' Season 1, Episode 5 Recap - 'A Whole New Kind of Bitch'

This week “Ringer” finally delivered on the promise of its soapy premise and went full scale crazy. And it was glorious.

The show has always worked best when it takes the trappings of its ridiculous premise to the extreme. In this outing, it was like the show just decided to throw everything and the kitchen sink into the mix and strangely enough it worked. I was floored when five episodes into the show, Bridget revealed her dual identity. I was doubly floored at the shocking cliffhanger ending—but more on that later.

 What this episode revealed is that “Ringer” might not be the complacent show I had once pegged it for. I expected that we would be talking about Bridget’s identity being compromised somewhere around the end of the season, not the end of the fourth episode. If “Ringer” is really willing to commit to the frantic pace and high stakes set up in this episode then the show will be a lot more fun to watch.

My one major issue with the episode was how Gemma confirmed Bridget’s Siobhan fakery. In turmoil over finding out Henry cheated on her with her best friend and then having said best friend say she is really an identical twin sister, Gemma is watching old videos of happier times. What she sees in that video is that Siobhan has a burn scar on her wrist she got in cooking class. Confronting Bridget later, she sees that Bridget is missing this tell-tale scar and suddenly believes her story.

I’m sorry, what now? You are expecting the viewers to believe that no one else would have noticed that Siobhan was suddenly missing a fairly large, fairly visible scar? Not even her husband? Or her lover?

This isn’t a scar on a place that is always covered and it’s not like Bridget has been wearing Victorian gowns with sleeves down to her wrists. How is it that this is the first instance of anyone noticing her magical disappearing scar? I know the mere premise of this show calls for a certain suspension of disbelief, which I happily accept in order to see Sarah Michelle Gellar in fabulous clothes looking nervous. This, however, was just one giant plot hole too much.

Thankfully, the rest of the episode is so off the wall crazy that it’s almost easy to forget that the writers apparently think the audience is as brain damaged as Bridget.

The whole episode has the frantic, blurred, off-kilter feeling of a bad drug trip. Considering that about half of the characters on this show are either on drugs or recovering addicts, it feels oddly apropos. Certainly, it adds to the feeling that something bad is coming, which the end truly delivers on in spades.

Bridget spends all episode dealing with the fall-out from her one millionth moment of stupidity thus far: telling Gemma the truth. At first it seems Gemma might be cool with it: hey, you’re not the one that betrayed me! You’re just the weird sister impersonating her! Bridget is clearly already imagining a scenario where she and Gemma laugh over this whole misunderstanding while getting mani-pedis.

This is not the first time I will say it, but I sincerely worry about Bridget’s level of intelligence. I really hope the show doesn’t want us to think that Bridget is at all clever, because she most assuredly is not.

Unsurprisingly, Gemma uses the information against Bridget. She threatens to tell Andrew, or Agent Macado, the truth unless Bridget helps Gemma with the fidelity clause in her pre-nup. Gemma has finally decided to throw gross Henry out on his money-grubbing, publisher-rejected ass. But smartly, she doesn’t want him to get a dime of her money or access to the kids. If Bridget can whore herself out to Henry so that Gemma can get her proof and kick Henry to the poor-person curb, Gemma will keep mum on her identity.

For many reasons, Bridget is feeling pretty sensitive about the topic of whoring herself. Maybe it’s that she was an actual prostitute in her former, plaid-wearing days. Or perhaps it’s the giant ‘WHORE’ that Juliet wrote in big red letters across Siobhan’s glamour photo in the apartment.

(I continue to marvel at that glamour photo. Literally the first thing anyone sees off the elevator is a giant airbrushed-into-albino picture of Siobhan. How gross and/or awesome does that make Siobhan?)

Juliet is on another drug and party bender and Bridget desperately wants to help. But with her world unraveling, it’s even harder for her to stay clean herself. While Juliet is destroying all of Siobhan’s clothes in a rage over having to attend public school, she notices a narcotics anonymous flyer and follows her to the meeting. She shows up in time to see Bridget talking to her new semi-sponsor Charlie and misinterprets this as Siobhan’s attempt to put her in rehab.

We find out that Siobhan is apparently something of an infidelity MVP, having hooked up with Andrew before his marriage was officially over. This is apparently where Juliet’s hurt feelings have come from and when Bridget apologizes Juliet seems to come around a bit. Zooey Deutch, who plays Juliet, does a really great job at playing a spoiled, shrill rich girl. It’s like watching one of the daughters of the “Real Housewives” franchise, only with redeeming qualities.

Meanwhile, Bridget is still trying to figure a way out of this mess she has entirely created for herself through stupidity. Her first stop is to take some pills, but she wises up first. Her second stop is to tell Henry that Gemma is onto him in an attempt to convince him to return to his wife and make nice.

Except for how she forgot that Henry is horrible and needy, so he just whines at her and stomps away. Finally she pulls out her trump card, the thing that has gotten her through all her difficulties thus far: grand, emotional speeches. On the scale of motivational speeches it’s not exactly Coach Taylor from Friday Night Lights grade, but it does the trick.

Except that on the cab ride home Gemma gets an angry call from Henry. He says he knows her plan and he won’t let her get the money and the kids. This is why you can’t trust people who are lying about literally every single thing in their lives, Gemma! Angry and tearful, Gemma calls Andrew ready to tell him the truth.

But when Andrew arrives at the apartment to talk to Gemma, she’s nowhere to be found. Who is there is Henry, with a case of serial killer eyes holding the door only slightly ajar to talk to Andrew like he’s Jack Nicholson in “The Shining”. That analogy might not be that far off, because when the camera pulls back it reveals the apartment is riddled with shattered objects. And blood. A lot of blood.

So it looks as though Henry killed Gemma, which is crazy shocking. I was not at all expecting the show to kill people and certainly not a character as prominent as Gemma. While I’ve enjoyed the character, that ending was so nuts that I hope they don’t back off it next week.

What did you think about the episode? Were you shocked by the ending? Do you think Henry killed Gemma? Sound off in the comments!