Ringer: If You're Just an Evil Bitch Then Get Over It (1.20)

This close to the end, Ringer seems to have lost track of its original premise. We started this long slog through the mist way back in September, with Bridget a troubled young woman doing a stupid thing, and Siobhan the evil twin sister masterminding an elaborate scheme of faked suicide and hitman hoodoo. Could anybody have predicted all those months ago that we'd wind up in April with a show about two morons stumbling around Manhattan proving to be completely ineffectual when it comes to either pro-active investigating, or arch scheming. Bridget has turned out to be dangerously clueless, and Siobhan appears to be just as lost within her own criminal plot as we are at home. Ringer was at one point set in a world that we were led to believe was orchestrated by Siobhan, but plot contrivance has made her an annoying flip-flopper with no long-term game-plan and a penchant for stupid ideas.

Then again, isn't that a good description for everybody on this show? With Siobhan nothing but an ever-expanding tension vacuum, villain duties have fallen to the perpetually glowering Catherine Martin, exposed as a drunken junkie con artist but still invited over to stay by the family who hated her just last week. The episode ends with Catherine drugging Bridget and tossing a bottle of pills all over her face, presumably to imply suicide. But, again, what exactly is the long-term game-plan here? Catherine wants to kill Siobhan, but is actually killing Bridget, but 'Siobhan' has never shown any signs of drug dependency or suicidal tendencies, so wouldn't suspicion immediately fall to the horrible house-guest with a history of insanity? Ugh.

I commend the show for continuing to pull together the many, many loose ends that have cropped up all year, but it's still enough to inspire self-harm. Obviously there's a complicated idea at the heart of this show, what with people trying to kill two twin sisters, most of the time actually pursuing the wrong one, but surely there were better ways of writing all of this other than through a bunch of crude exposition and flashbacks from episodes that everybody's forgotten about. It's also confusing to see so many characters vanish without a trace, most of them at one point or another implicated as important elements of the show's elaborate mysteries. Bodaway Macawi is presumably buried under a pile of strippers somewhere, while everybody else (Olivia, Mr. Carpenter, Malcolm) has simply been removed from the show with an intentional lack of explanation.

Sometimes Ringer is casually successful -- it would be wrong to say that this week's final scene wasn't an impressive use of imagery, for example. But the show is so detached and vacuous that you struggle to find any resonance at all. It just lingers. C-

Credits
Guest stars Zoey Deutch (Juliet Martin); Gregory Harrison (Tim Arbogast); Jonathan Banks (Tobias); Chris Elwood (Agent Cupertino); Dasha Flynn (Oksana); Maximiliano Hernandez (Detective Towers); Anjali Bhimani (Dr. Rau); Andrea Roth (Catherine Martin)
Writer Cathryn Humphris Director Roger Kumble