‘Dead Ringers’ Episode 3 Recap: Now I’m Nothing

And now, some observations about the third episode of Dead Ringers:

• The Mantle-Parker Center for Birthing and Research or whatever they all agreed to call it is like a nightmare someone had and felt compelled to build in real life. Imagine giving birth or receiving fertility treatment in an art museum, huge and cold and echoey, with your own treatment as viewable by others as if you’d been hung on the wall. Imagine a staff wearing blood-red scrubs. Imagine routine incursions by protesters who throw bloody buckets of animal organs at the center’s namesakes to protest their complicity in the opioid epidemic. Imagine if half the braintrust of the place were very literally dedicated to experimenting on human beings and growing babies outside the womb and grafting the ovarian tissue of young women into older women like some bespoke (you’ll hear that word again and again, that’s for sure!) Elizabeth Bathory fountain of youth. 

• So despite getting everything she wanted, Beverly is unhappy. This does not sit well with her benefactor. It occurs to me, watching Rebecca Parker deliver yet another corrosive, casually profane monologue about how much Beverly sucks, that this woman never fucking shuts up. I think that’s a coping mechanism. I very much doubt that this is a person who experiences guilt anymore, but I think she was one once. In order to shake free of that guilt she had to construct an entire, impregnable persona, guarded by an edifice of verbiage, a suit of armor made from pitches and putdowns. At this point there’s nothing left inside the suit. Needless to say, Jennifer Ehle is delivering the performance of a lifetime from within that void.

• Elliot may have adopted a parental role towards her “baby sister,” but it’s she who needs the parenting. Beverly does work she genuinely cares about, for the sake of others rather than her own excitement and glory. Elliot has no such anchor. Beverly is in a loving relationship with a stable partner. Elliot sportfucks, which is fine as a general rule, but in her case it clearly provides her with little lasting sustenance even if she enjoys it in the moment, which by now is no longer even the case. Beneath the extroversion and exhibitionism, beneath the glamour and the tough talk, all she really has is Bev. No wonder she’s the one unhealthily attached to the other. No wonder she’s the one who begs the other to come home from a two-day (!!!) vacation with Genevieve, like a child missing her mommy. Indeed it occurs to me now that much of her brash behavior is actually just childlike.

• Returning to Elliot’s empty life, note how she tries to talk Bev out of going away for the weekend with Genevieve — we eventually learn they’ve literally never been in separate cities in their lives — by telling Bev she has everything she’s ever wanted. Elliot leaves Genevieve off that list of course, but regardless, I think this ploy isn’t just a clever bit of smoke-blowing, but also an unconscious expression of envy. 

• Elliot envies Genevieve too. I mean, it’s time to put all our cards on the table: The Mantle twins’ covert incest is barely even covert. They’ve shared women before, apparently; now that Bev is serious with Genevieve, Ellie rejects the seriousness specifically because she hasn’t slept with Genevieve herself. “You haven’t had her unless I’ve had her.” As with the grief support group (I think?) and the twin-swap at Genevieve’s cast party (she’s starring in a series called Rabid on Prime Video, presumably another Cronenberg adaptation, ha ha), she wants to step inside Beverly, feel what she feels, see what she sees, even when it extends to sex. It’s as close as she can get to having sex with her sister without stepping over the one line neither of them seems willing to cross.

But she’s getting closer. It seems clear that she’s so insistent on Bev’s attempts at pregnancy, and so horrified when she hears Bev doesn’t want to do that anymore, that she feels as if she were the one impregnating Bev. She’s certainly intimate with her sister’s genitals because of it. It’s hard to see that as happenstance.

Finally, she open-mouth kisses Bev on the neck while begging her to stay. This is not only inappropriately sexual, it’s also vampiric. Sister, lover, parasite.

• It all goes to what Agnes, the woman who lives in the alley outside the Mantles’ apartment and who storms the place after Ellie rains down debris on her from several stories up, says to Elliot in her fucking unbelievable rant on the rooftop. There’s really no way I can overstate what writer Rachel De-Lahay and actor Susan Blommaert accomplish here; it’s like watching some swift, muscular predator with claws the size of your middle finger tear a slow-moving gazelle to shreds. 

First, after banter that would put a screwball comedy to shame, Agnes, with whom Elliot has struck up an instantaneous friendship in much the same way that Rebecca liked Beverly better after she blew up at everyone, sells her on heroin as superior to cocaine. “It’s so good. Best fuck, best drink, best grind, best birth, best nipple suck, best steak, best kiss, best sweat, best legs wrapped around each other midnight connection? Nothing comes close, Two-Face.” Wonderful nickname, too.

But despite their improbably deep connection, Agnes has Elliot’s number. 

“Every experience, every high is half a fucking high.”

“Try double, you dick,” Elliot retorts, but Agnes won’t have it. She mocks Ellie’s description of Bev having sex with Genevieve in a saltwater pool (“that saltwater cunt,” Agnes calls it), and builds out of it an entire case where Bev moves on, grows, multiples, becomes whole, while Elliot literally fades from view. “You’re nothing,” she concludes. “You’re fucking nothing.”

So Elliot pushes her off the roof.

• Only she doesn’t, because Agnes never existed. It’s unclear, but entirely possible, that the entire party Agnes crashed, including the guy she fucked but then couldn’t keep it up with, never existed. (It’s either that, or Bev and Greta are exceptionally fast and thorough housecleaners.) Elliot is doing tons of drugs, she’s losing touch with reality, and, if Agnes is just her own mind talking to her, her own mind is telling her to start shooting heroin. She’s much more easily broken than Beverly, and she’s breaking.

Sean T. Collins (@theseantcollins) writes about TV for Rolling Stone, Vulture, The New York Times, and anyplace that will have him, really. He and his family live on Long Island.