Under the Bridge Recap: Fear and Loathing in British Columbia

Teenagers have woefully underdeveloped brains. The frontal lobe — the section dedicated to decision-making and higher-order thinking — doesn’t fully develop until age 25. You may already know this fact from a high-school biology class or a neuroscience course in college, but then again, maybe you weren’t paying attention because “teen brain” is a real thing.

This developing-brain issue can explain a bit of why Kelly Ellard acts the way she does after the discovery of Reena’s boots in her closets … but not quite all of it. This episode closely follows Josephine, Dusty, and Kelly in the aftermath of this reveal. Kelly wildly vacillates between acting tough and acting a fool. Izzy G. does an excellent job of giving her character a flat affect and a giddy excitement for intimidation and violence. She paints an eerie portrait of a young woman with startling signs of early psychopathy. (Technically, antisocial personality disorder can’t be officially diagnosed until a person reaches 18 years of age, but if I had been Kelly’s clinician, I might have been willing to make an exception.)

Late in the episode, when Kelly shares that she smoked an entire cigarette while holding Reena’s head underwater, she’s grinning like it’s her birthday. Watching her navigate her new situation, I squirmed in my seat and felt increasingly angry. According to Rebecca Godfrey’s book, the real Kelly Ellard actually did say these things about Reena. She bragged all over town about her involvement in the murder and didn’t really think anything would happen to her. The rest of the girls wanted to avoid any sort of punishment for participating in the beating, so they tried to keep quiet.

As the girls rally together, the idea of family comes up time and again. Coming from a horribly broken and abusive home, Josephine clearly loves the idea of having a found family, but she’s reluctant to truly let anyone in. Anyone, that is, except Kelly. Each time Kelly admits to something horrible, Josephine’s reactions are a sight to see. She works to hide her shock and horror by responding with her trusty coping mechanisms; she deploys sarcasm, cutting insults, and a dismissive tone to keep functioning under severe duress. When Kelly offers her Reena’s Steve Madden boots, a look of pure horror flits across her face before she says, “They’re not my size.” She throws them in the closet and slams the door shut, seemingly hoping that if the boots are out of her sight, she won’t have to deal with this anymore.

But she does have to deal with it because Cam and the cops are working to find the kids responsible for the beating and the murder. Cam and Rebecca chat briefly about the case. Rebecca tells Cam what she found out about Manjit, chiefly that the cops had arrested him with absolutely no proof that he had abused Reena. Cam pushes back on this a bit, saying they would have had to take him in, but it’s something that sticks with her, so much so that she confronts her bad dad about it later in the episode. Of course, he denies the cops were involved in any racial profiling, and when questioned by the press, he also roundly denies that Reena’s death was racially motivated. He says a “mixed-race group” attacked her and leaves it at that. It feels like everyone accepts this as gospel because there are no follow-up questions. [Gestures broadly on ’90s race politics.]

Cam and Rebecca also talk about the Seven Oaks girls, and Rebecca suggests that Cam try to scare them a little. She offers to try to get Josephine back on her side. It feels like Rebecca is trying to insert herself into this situation more for the thrills and less for her book, and Cam may know this but she also likes having someone on the inside.

So as Cam sends a little warning to the girls in the press, Rebecca heads off to take advantage of their fear. She rolls up to get the girls in her dad’s station wagon, acting all like “Come with me if you want to live.” Josephine and Dusty take the bait immediately, but Kelly is less trusting. Over a meal at the diner, Rebecca tries to convince the girls to hand over any evidence they have so she can get rid of it. It’s a pretty transparent attempt, but Josephine and Dusty are looking for anything that might get them out of jail.

Kelly, though, continues to be her best psychopath self. She makes Rebecca take them to the Crip lair. Even though Warren vouches for Rebecca, Kelly proceeds to kick the hornet’s nest, saying Rebecca is a cop. Josephine is appalled, but Rebecca has this on lock. She offers to smoke weed and they all laugh and laugh at her, but then Warren has a better idea: They should drop acid together. Fun times in the middle of a murder investigation!

Rebecca gamely pops a tab on her tongue, and the girls immediately bail on her. Warren stays with her, though, and both of them reveal heartbreaking truths to one another in the middle of their trip. We finally find out what happened to Rebecca’s older brother, Gabe. He drowned when Rebecca was 13. At the peak of her trip, Rebecca sees Warren as Gabe, and it’s clear she’s projecting her unresolved feelings of loss onto this kid. But Warren has a surprise for her too. He admits he took part in Reena’s murder. In a shaking and terrified voice, he shares sad details about his own life — he was an unwanted child and feels the world would be a better place without him — before diving into his confession. On the verge of tears, he tells Rebecca he attacked Reena too, but once he followed Kelly over the bridge and saw her beating on Reena even more, he told her to stop.

Warren’s tearful confession is cut short, but it has been established that Kelly was the murderer. She admits as much in the next scene in the Seven Oaks communal bathroom, but Dusty and Josephine are still protecting her for some reason. We follow Dusty for part of this episode as she tries to reestablish a relationship with her sister. She wants her family back, but her sister isn’t willing to give her that chance. The kids aren’t either. There’s a devastating beat when Dusty asks to stay and a young girl chirps, “Mom, no!” from the kitchen. The last time Dusty stayed with them, she held a knife to one kid’s throat. Yikes. A few minutes into this conversation, Cam knocks on the door. She picks up Dusty because she’s in violation of her protection order. Back at the station, Cam confronts her about a series of phone calls she and her friends made to the tip line earlier in the day saying Warren was responsible for Reena’s murder. When presented with an official form, Dusty angrily signs it and then demands to be dropped off a block away from Seven Oaks. (This turns out not to be helpful, as Cam ends up driving right past the home anyway, moments before Josephine sees Dusty walk in the door. Real slick.)

One thing this episode makes clear is that many of the kids involved in Reena’s demise were in crisis themselves. Warren, Dusty, and Josephine were all troubled youths with nowhere to go, so they sought alternative forms of family and belonging. And they were all just so angry at the adults and the world that had failed them. Kelly, however, is a different story. At the end of the episode, it feels like the fragile Seven Oaks family is falling apart as Dusty attacks Kelly and then, later, Kelly and Josephine go rouse Dusty, telling her they’re headed to Mexico. It feels like “Mexico” may be slang for something more nefarious, but we’ll have to wait until next week to see.

Random Thoughts

• What on earth is Kelly doing at Seven Oaks in the middle of the damn night? That place is pretty lax, but I can’t imagine sleepovers are allowed there.

• The flashbacks dealing with the fallout from Reena’s false accusation against her father are just so painful to watch. The Manjit stuff is incredibly tragic, but Josephine’s involvement is a bit more haunting. She inducts Reena into the crew by getting drunk with her on Smirnoff and iced tea, and she admits that all the things she’d said about her mom’s boyfriend were true. Reena is horrified to learn this because she thought Josephine had lied to liberate herself. Instead, we find out the origin story of Josephine’s love for gangster culture. She wants to get back at this dude for what he did and the life he stole from her. It’s a fully understandable revenge fantasy, and it makes Josephine a sympathetic figure for a few fleeting moments.

• Book-Club Corner: At one point in this episode, Cam says the kids all wanted to talk about the first attack but not the second. In real life, this was also the situation. In her book, Godfrey often reiterates that the case might not even have been investigated as a murder if not for two brave sisters named Nadja and Anya. Nadja was staying at Seven Oaks and heard Josephine and Kelly brag about the killing. She told her younger sister, Anya, who was in foster care at the time, and Anya convinced her to go to the police. These two girls have been erased from the narrative here, but their bravery and conviction to do the right thing are incredibly impressive.