Sharp Objects on HBO: episode reviews, recaps, and news

Sharp Objects went out with a bang — and if you were reeling as the credits began to roll, it’s understandable if you didn’t stick around to watch them.

But if you stopped too soon, you likely missed the show’s final surprise: a shocking mid-credits scene that revealed much more about the show’s central mystery than you might have suspected. Not only does the scene go into detail about how Natalie and Ann were killed, it undoes a few layers of mystery about how those murders were committed — and who actually did it. Turns out that if you thought everyone in Wind Gap was harboring some sort of secret, you were more right than you knew.

Sharp Objects might be the slow-burn thriller of the year, but in the series finale, it showed us just how fast it could shift from zero to unhinged, off-the-rails madness.

Viewers who’ve been along for this ride have probably known for a while that this series about family secrets and inherited violence — the calling card of every true Southern gothic — wasn’t going to go down easy. Episode 8, “Milk,” was less about wrapping up loose plot points regarding its murder mystery and more about finally plunging our protagonist, Camille, into a full awareness of the past trauma and collective insanity she’s spent years blocking out.

If you’ve been watching Sharp Objects, you know that solving the murder mystery isn’t really part of the story the show seems most concerned with telling. For the past six episodes, we’ve been examining the underpinnings of the Wind Gap murders, mostly through the lens of Camille’s (Amy Adams) deranged family life and her inescapable past.

It’s been a slow burn, while the show has focused on stories and themes centered on female sexuality, the idea of who gets to tell women’s stories, and society’s expectations of women. (It also interrogated a creepy, horny version of a Civil War heroine myth.)

One reason you can be sure HBO’s Sharp Objects is a true Southern Gothic is that when its debutante gloves finally unpeel, you don’t just get an effusion of secrets and darkness and a lot of deep-buried social dysfunction. In episode six, “Cherry,” once the passive-aggressive politeness starts to give away to truth-telling, you also get some unhinged wildness: ear-biting, some light incest, some heavy sociopathy, and a literal shit pit.

Yes, the intensity and the memories are ramping up for Camille as she revisits her hometown of Wind Gap, Missouri. But in “Cherry,” there are also some significant developments in the case, in case you were so distracted by all the sociopathy and incest you forgot there were murders to solve.

Sharp Objects’ fifth episode, “Closer,” followed the plot slowdown of “Ripe” by revving its engine and dropping some major hints about the killer.

It makes sense that this installment feels like the show is shrugging off its lull — we’re now more than halfway through its eight-episode season. And “Closer” is possibly the soapiest chapter yet.

So far, HBO’s Sharp Objects has meandered through its small-town murder mystery at a deceptively slow pace. On its face, this gives us time to pause and look around and enjoy the scenery: the bucolic locations, the flawless acting, the gorgeous imagery.

But as we’ve observed before, Sharp Objects is also giving us a much deeper interrogation below the surface into small-town politics, gender dynamics, and power structures. And while episode four, “Ripe,” may have seemed to be giving us very little by way of plot, it was actually imparting a parade float-load of information — just not in conventional ways.

Before it debuted, Sharp Objects was frequently compared to last summer’s Big Little Lies, due to both shows being splashy HBO miniseries with big-name casts. But Big Little Lies, among other things, told a story about its female characters’ struggle to prove their innocence in a town that knew better. And Sharp Objects’ third episode, “Fix,” is the inverse of that. It’s all about women who are fully capable of murder, and a town that doesn’t want to believe it.

“Women around here, they don’t kill with their hands,” Bob Nash (Will Chase) — the father of one of two girls that’ve been murdered in the small Southern town of Wind Gap, Missouri — tells Camille (Amy Adams), when she visits him. “They talk.”

On its surface, HBO’s Sharp Objects may seem like it’s terribly uninterested in solving its central mystery. That’s partly because, as we’re regularly informed, Amy Adams’s protagonist is not there to solve a mystery.

“Remember, you’re not there to solve a mystery!” editor (Miguel Sandoval) reminds reporter Camille Preaker early in the second episode, “Dirt.” Camille’s return home to the small Missouri town of Wind Gap isn’t to play Nancy Drew; she’s been sent there to contend with the demons of her past — a ritual every small-town Southerner knows well.

HBO’s Sharp Objects sounds completely irresistible on paper: written by TV veteran Marti Noxon and directed by Big Little Lies’s Jean-Marc Vallée, it’s the latest glossy prestige drama to be adapted from a bestselling woman-centered thriller — penned by Gone Girl’s Gillian Flynn, no less. The pitch, too, is hard to beat, with Amy Adams starring as Camille Preaker, a troubled, demotivated reporter who’s dispatched to her childhood home to cover a series of disappearing teenage girls.

So how well does Sharp Objects live up to the hype? So far, better than we’d dreamed.