Love and Death Episode 5 Review: The HBO Max miniseries is a true-crime story starring Elizabeth Olsen as Candy Montgomery, Jesse Plemons as Allan Gore, Lily Rabe as Betty Gore, Krysten Ritter as Sherry Cleckler, Elizabeth Marvel as Jackie Ponder, Patrick Fugit as Pat Montgomery and others. The series has been created and written for TV by David E Kelley, and directed by Lesli Linka Glatter. In addition to the two crew members, Nicole Kidman and Per Saari are also few of the executive producers of the show.
Love and Death Episode 5 Review Contains Spoilers
Premiering on May 11, 2023, Love and Death Episode 5 is titled ‘The Arrest’ and has a runtime of 53 minutes. Based on Texas Monthly articles and the book Evidence of Love by Jim Atkinson and John Bloom, this series maps out the real life story of a Texan housewife, who was ultimately accused of brutally murdering her friend in the ’80s. With Nicole Kidman as one of the executive producers of the show, it’s quite likely that the thematic thrust of the series will take you back to her own former show Big Little Lies.
Love and Death Episode 5 Review: Discussion
Since the very beginning of the series, a stark distinction has been drawn out between Candy and Betty’s characters. The idea of one’s community knowing its individuals co-existing within is repeatedly reminded, especially in Candy’s case – “the people in this town know you, Candy”, but do they? Do they really know anything profound about anyone at all? Yet again, the new episodes recall that Candy is a “housewife charged”, which goes back to the idea that Betty, too, was a housewife like her and needed by her family.
This counters the main conflict emphasised by Candy in one of the previous episodes – “all we ever do is sit at the house while the men go to work” – and this ties up with Don saying, “there’s a Candy Montgomery I know, and one who chopped up Betty Gore”. The same difference has been playing out all along. Their community can’t conflate the image of Candy Montgomery, who sees the “choir as her salvation”, vs the one who engaged in an affair outside her marriage and then chopped up her friend.
This antithetical interpretation and understanding of the split dissociation of her personality are constantly driven high to assert the idea that the same person can’t steer these traits or actions. However, when these two aspects suddenly collapse, the entire community experiences an upheaval. There’s a sudden interest in knowing “exactly what (they’re) dealing with” – the same premise that marked the onset of this show and the real-life story as well – how can a “HOUSEWIFE” do all these things – i.e. deliberately cause for a household to crack from the inside especially when that was the only apparent duty ascribed to women at the time (and is still associated with their person).
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As Don Crowder (Tom Pelphrey) described, the legal strategy is that Candy has to put up a performance first, even before the lawyers and the court handle the legality of it. She’s needed to look a certain way and cut her hair to present an outlook that is “something more conservative”; even her clothes will be picked out by Crowder.
Ironically, this backfires on her initial plans of freeing herself from the holds of society and again traps her in the same paradigm (this time even more severely) that she wanted to break out of in the first place. Crowder asserts that besides looking conservative, she must also seem more vulnerable to society – “no matter how tough you think you are, I don’t want you acting tough”.
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And now, even the church has to step in to push to convolute the reality further and turn the case around in Candy’s favour since her identity has now completely turned over from being a “housewife” to an “axe murderer”, aka “a monster”. More revelations make their way in when Candy is removed from the scene and has to be hypnotised to answer the questions that can’t be riddled otherwise. The only comfort she can find now is in the findings that she’s “not a sociopath” and has “just snapped”, which further scratches the surface of her past – her childhood, and how it all has repercussions in the present too.
Final Thoughts
Important pointers highlighted through this episode emerge with the claims that it’s not just about the crime but also the person behind it. And to probe into that person’s psyche, her legal team has to make attempts to dig deeper into fathoming what lies beyond the surface in Candy’s case, especially, which eventually reels in the suggestion of therapy.
However, despite all her issues and traumas, one just can’t rule out how twisted and deranged she’s been acting all along. As seen in the previous episode, too, she had sex with her husband that very night after knowing what she did, almost as if she’s trying her best to erase that part of the memory.
While she’s taken aback by her actions too and is numbed down by the situation and its aftermath, she’s also seen venturing out to cover her tracks, getting rid of the flip-flops (the one imprinted on the crime scene) and doing all kinds of things – again greying out not only her character, but also our understanding of her psyche, and Olsen’s presentation of the same deserves all the acclaim in the world.
New episodes of Love and Death will stream every Thursday till May 25, 2023. For the Indian audience, the show is also available to stream on Amazon Prime Video.
Also read: Our Previous Reviews of Love and Death