Editor’s note: Today’s offering contains spoilers for season four of The Sinner.
Season four of Derek Simonds’s detective series The Sinner, which broadcast on USA Network last year, is now streaming on Netflix. Originally adapted from Petra Hammesfahr’s novel – lands the series’ protagonist, the traumatized and recently retired detective Harry Ambrose (Bill Pullman), on Hanover Island, Maine, where he struggles to relax into a peaceful life with his girlfriend Sonya Barzel (Jessica Hecht). But because this is a detective series, death and mystery soon abound. And Harry himself communes with the deceased – they appear and speak to him.
His is a talent or psychosis upon which the series never casts judgment, though the focus of this season’s mystery, Percy Muldoon (Alice Kremelberg), tells him that she is trapped in his mind. Although Paganism works into The Sinner’s plot mainly as a red herring, the spin is primarily positive even if it is an eclectic mishmash of New Age practices.
Promotional image for The Sinner [USA Network]
Soon after his arrival on the island, Harry chats briefly with the soon-to-be-dead Percy, and this conversation allows him to recognize her when she steps off a cliff to her death. Harry inserts himself into the ensuing investigation (no body is initially found) and returns to the scene the following day to search the point on the promontory where Percy had focused her gaze prior to jumping.
Near an uprooted tree, he finds four items ritualistically placed: a bit of knotted blue rope, a small jade Buddha, a crucifix, and a cigarette case. Harry brings the items to the police chief, Lou Raskin (Joe Cobden), who is clearly out of his depth and fails to see the possible relevance, leading Harry to pursue leads on his own. Suspicion initially falls on Percy’s deviation from the family’s devout Catholicism, and Percy’s grandmother Meg Muldoon (Frances Fisher) tells Harry that a few months before her apparent suicide, Percy was moving away from her and keeping secrets.
Meg then produces a book entitled The Lunar Goddess: Connecting to the Spirit of the Earth from Percy’s closet, calling it “weird stuff.” “Something was shifting in her,” she explains. “She started collecting stuff like that,” she says, pointing to a bedside table with blue rope like that found near the scene of her jump.
The season gives us Percy and others involved in her demise in myriad flashbacks that blur the line between testimony and actual events for the viewer, and we see Percy on one of her family’s fishing boats in a conversation with Meg about Percy’s childhood. Meg compliments her innate fishing skills and family connection when Percy cuts a bit of the rope, saying she is “preserving the moment.” The rope clearly has totemic significance for Percy even if no one understands this. Harry asks to keep the book and Meg gives it to him.
During his next nocturnal perambulation, Harry follows low grunts and groans through a forested area and stumbles upon three sky-clad women moaning and gyrating in shallow water in a scene best described as pointless weirdness, though we learn its relevance later. Harry backs away when one of the women turns to face the camera. Any Pagan viewer will think “Oh, dear” at this point, and this concern appears to be borne out when Harry encounters the woman at an artists’ gathering. She laughs off his inquiry about swimming at night, and, though the background music turns ominous, we never see her again. When Chief Raskin leads Harry to another series of totemic items like those near where Percy’s car was abandoned, he dismisses Harry’s questions about “night swimming,” noting that the island gets is share of “tree huggers,” and “New Age hippie types,” as Meg Muldoon later calls them.
The next focus on Paganism comes when Sonya reads aloud a portion in The Lunar Goddess that Percy has underlined. “The ancient Lunar Goddess danced the world into existence and then danced it through its cycles of destruction and death,” she reads. “Her creative process is represented by the ouroboros, the snake swallowing its own tail.” The syncretic oddities of The Sinner’s cobbled-together practices may spare it objections from recognized faiths like Wicca and Santería, but it may leave uninitiated viewers wondering how to join in.
Percy’s conflicted faith and practices come into sharp relief when we learn from her uncle Colin that he had been praying with her and urging her back toward Catholicism. But Percy rebels and tells her uncle that Christian prayers don’t work when he finds her working on a series of pastel drawings with Pagan spiritual themes.
Angry and upset that suspicion has fallen on him, Colin tells Harry that Percy made “her choice,” and retrieves a folder of her drawings, shouting “tell me someone didn’t poison her mind with that shit.” Harry takes the folder and follows a reference in one of Percy’s drawings that refers to a local legend and a geographic point the on the island. There, Harry discovers a trail of totemic objects that lead him to a partially enclosed altar whose central symbol is a wooden carving of the ouroboros, and an apparent clue, a family crest or guild insignia on one of the altar boards.
Later, at the harbor master’s office to investigate the crest, Harry notices a small ouroboros hanging from the desk of Emiliana “Em” Castillo (Mercedes de la Zerda) and then drives out to her residence for a bit of breaking and entering.
Dried herbs hang from the ceiling on the upper and lower floors, and in Em’s bedroom, he finds books on shamanism as well as a therapeutic journal apparently documenting Em’s interactions with Percy. Ominously, “Free The Bone From The Flesh” is carved into Em’s worktable, a message Harry finds as he pushes the books and papers aside. Harry then returns to his rental home to find that turnabout is fair play when Em steps out of a side room. Harry tells her that he found her hut, and the journal, and asks if Em was performing “some sort of conversion” on Percy. However, Em counters him, saying “I’d call it growth.”
Harry notes that she is “an outsider here, same as me,” and tells her that if anyone were to suspect she had harmed Percy, “people are going to assume the worst” about her. Harry then pressures Em to tell him about her relationship with Percy. Em reveals that Percy found her meditating one night at the docks, and Percy’s curiosity about her is piqued. When Percy questions Em about her practices, Em tells her that Em’s aunt introduced her to “other ways of being.”
Percy then asks if Em’s practices are “Wiccan or something.” Em does not answer directly, telling her that she “pulls from things that inspire [her and that] it’s mostly just about embracing nature. But not a lot of people are open to it because it means embracing destruction […] nature’s cycle. Without death, there’s no rebirth. We just try to tap into that.” Percy asks if Em can teach her, and although Em hesitates, it is clear something is broken inside Percy and she agrees to help her.
As her first lesson, Em takes Percy into the woods, telling her to “Point to the first thing that you notice…that you’re drawn to. Don’t think.” Percy points to the roots of a fallen tree, and, with both women touching the roots, Em tells her to “try and feel its pulse. It’s like listening.” When Percy gets frustrated with the metaphysical psychometry and says that “It’s just a dead tree,” Em tells her, “It’s a reflection of you. You chose it.” Percy nearly walks away in anger, but Em convinces her to stay, and, seated near the roots, combines guided imagery and bodywork to the ground and validate the unmoored Percy.
Em tells Harry she worked with Percy “for a couple months,” and he asks if they were friends, but Em says no – that “there was something in her she wanted to exorcise and she wanted my help.”
Harry has the items he collected from near where Percy jumped – along with a wooden star that was found with Percy’s body – resting on the table between them and asks Em about their meaning, which she refuses to disclose. Em tells him the objects were personal to Percy and that he would not understand even if she tried to explain. Pressured to tell him about her work with Percy, Em says the only way she can trust Harry is if he does the things Percy did.
We next see Harry in his underwear waist deep in chilly shallows as Em directs him to submerge himself, which he does repeatedly until Em feels that he is sufficiently ego divested to proceed. The scene that follows reveals Harry writhing on a blanket, groaning in much the same way as the women he saw by the water, an exorcism of grief and, perhaps, guilt. We then see Harry fully clothed and seated beside a fire in the shamanistic seaside hut with Em who tells him that when, after two months, Percy was still blocked, Em asked her to choose five objects that would represent a relationship that was holding her back “so she could release them.”
We learn that her uncle Colin is represented by the crucifix, and we then witness Percy apologizing to her uncle for falling out over their differing belief systems. She tells him she is happy that his recommitment to the church has stabilized him in his recovery from addiction, but that it was not working for her. Colin rebuffs what he sees as an excuse for not having truly tried, and Percy tells him that she is no longer sure the world is “so black and white..right and wrong.” In her conversation with her uncle, we understand that she has moved away from the unyielding morality of Christianity, and if her new-found Paganism does not save her, neither does Catholicism; viewers are left to form their own judgments about the efficacy of either faith.
In the figure of Em Castillo, The Sinner gives viewers a compassionate woman of color who works to heal herself and others through an acceptance of self and one’s place in the natural world. Em’s eclectic Paganism frees Percy from judgment and condemnation, temporary mercy from the guilt that eventually overwhelms her. We come to understand the “night swimming” women of the forest as seekers of the self rather than pernicious practitioners of evil.
Although Percy’s newfound Paganism is labeled “weird stuff” Em, Percy, and Harry undermine the epithets cast by Meg and Colin, the true moral villains of the season.
Today’s review comes to us from Noelle K. Bowles. She teaches literature and writing courses at Kent State University at Trumbull, specializing in nineteenth-century British literature, the fantastic, creative writing, women’s literature, and the basic writing courses everyone loves to hate. When not preparing class materials or grading papers, she spends her time kissing her Frenchie, complaining about cat hair, cooking Indian cuisine, and shaping clay into ceramic monsters… oh, and reviewing television and film.
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