On Desperate Housewives, we’ve finally arrived at the identity of the strangler. He’s a friend of Preston Scavo, and we first met him on last Sunday’s episode. We thought that Nick might have been the strangler, but the twist is that the strangler is someone we don’t even know, someone who (as far as we can tell) is not even connected with the The Nick/Angie/Danny Saga that has been the main mystery for this season.
I don’t think that I’ve ever seen this before on Desperate Housewives. Ordinarily, there’s a mystery, in which we’re supposed to guess that one person is the guilty party, and it turns out that another person we know is the guilty party. Last season, we saw a departure from that, and our question was “What is Dave Williams up to, and why?” But the show solved that mystery early on—or at least earlier in the season than it usually solves its mysteries. In my opinion, that took some of the flavor out of the remaining episodes.
In our current season, the whole mystery of Nick and Angie has been solved: we now know that Angie was an environmental extremist who inadventently took someone’s life, and that her psychotic leader in that environmentalist movement is the father of her son, Danny. And the psychotic leader is out to kill Angie and to take her son, which echoes Season 4, in which Katherine’s psychotic ex-husband was going after her daughter, Dillian, who wasn’t even the real Dillian. (Trust me, it’s not as corny as it sounds when you’re actually watching it!)
But this season is unique because, now that the Nick and Angie mystery has been solved, we’re reminded of another mystery: the identity of the strangler. We were supposed to believe that the strangler was Nick, for he was having an affair with Julie Mayer, who got assaulted. But the strangler is actually Preston Scavo’s friend, Eddie (I think that’s his name). The mystery has been solved, but I’m still looking forward to next week’s episode. Next week’s episode will be like two of the episodes from last season. One of them starred Beau Bridges as the good-hearted handyman, Eli Scruggs, and it sequentially showed how he touched the lives of each of the main characters (Gabby, Susan, Bree, Edie, and Lynette; I don’t remember a story with Katherine). See my post, Martin Luther King Day 2009. The other was about Edie, who passed away, and it showed how she impacted the main characters in a positive manner. See First Desperate Housewives Post in a While.
Next week, we will see how Eddie interacted with the main characters. My cable TV Guide summarizes it as follows: The Fairview stranger’s past includes a time when Bree offered him a job and dating advice, when Susan encouraged his interest in art, and when Lynette showed him kindness and generosity.
I wonder what the narrator, Mary Alice, will say about this. It brings a couple of things to my mind. I think of Satan and the children of Israel in the Old Testament, who did wickedly despite all of the kindness that God had shown to them. I think of Charles Manson. I heard recently that there was a time when he actually had a shot at becoming a big-time musician, but he threw that away on account of his twisted mindset. Then there’s Harold Lauder in Stephen King’s The Stand, who arrived at a position of status in his community, yet he could not forgive Stu Redman for taking his crush away from him, and so he killed people in his community with a bomb. What will be Eddie’s motivation? Did his bitterness, impatience, and twisted thinking influence him to disregard the kindness of his neighbors and to throw away his future by hurting others?
Another point: I really liked the scene in which Lynette is talking to her disappointed son, Preston, after Preston had called off his wedding. Preston was engaged to marry an Eastern European hottie (or maybe she was Russian), and Lynette uncovered evidence that this lady had a record of marrying people and cleaning out their bank accounts. What this babe wanted with Preston, I have no idea. Perhaps she assumed that Preston had a lot of money because he was an American, but the problem with that proposal is that she rejected Eddie, who is himself an American. In any case, Preston is upset with his mother, and Lynette tells him that this is okay, for she is so concerned about her son’s well-being that she is willing to let him hate her for something she did to help him. She tells him that she will always be there to have a relationship with him when he is ready, but she hopes that he doesn’t take too long, for she already misses him.
Awesome scene! I’d like to think that God is like that. I think of the Parable of the Prodigal Son, in which the father waits for his son to come back to him.