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“Can ya blame her?” Helen asks, her tone heavy with years of grim societal insight. In an attempt to cover up his crimes, John tries to kill and frame his own brother, Billy, and convinces his stricken wife, Lori, to lie directly to Mare’s face in order to protect their family-a detail that an angry Mare brings up to her mother. John’s guilt goes well beyond even that, each layer more upsetting for Lori and for the community: He is also the father of Erin’s son, DJ, and not only was Erin a teenager, she was also John’s cousin Kenny’s kid. The reason for this particular disagreement: Helen’s vocal empathy for Mare’s best friend, Lori Ross, whose husband, John, has just confessed to Erin’s murder. In Easttown, there is a lot of lending a hand and a lot of taking a village, but also a lot of bristling and wanting nothing more than to be left alone. Mare is a member of the Sandwich Generation with an extra layer of pickle: She is responsible for a cusp-of-college daughter, Siobhan they both live under the same roof as Helen and they also raise Drew, the 4-year-old child of Mare’s late son Kevin, who ended his life in their attic. This is a pretty typical exchange in the irritable, four-generation household.

That’s what Helen Fahey, Mare Sheehan’s cutting, cackling cutup of a widowed mother played with boozy specificity by Jean Smart, indignantly reminds her daughter (Kate Winslet) in the series’ seventh and final episode.

And it is a reminder that, given a long enough timeline, we’ll all find ourselves yelling one day across the room at a grown-up kid: “I’m always on your side! Even when I act like I’m not!” Screenshots via HBO It pairs the unthinkable with the relatable, the moral with the primal. Mare of Easttown plumbs the contradictions and chasms of parenting. They can’t avoid passing their own trauma along to their children.

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They cheat and they grieve and they throw jugs of milk through windows to send “don’t mess with my daughter” messages. They call for their mother from a hospital bed, unable to bear the sound of a crying son. They sit next to their kids in police stations, nodding blankly. They raise one another for the future while saddling them with the past. The ‘Mare of Easttown’ Season Finale Exit Survey The ‘Mare of Easttown’ Season Finale With Creator Brad Ingelsby ‘Mare of Easttown’ Was Not a Show About MurderĬharacters betray one another while demanding loyalty.

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The series is a murder mystery and a cop drama and a character study, but mostly it’s a story about the staggering contours of familial love: those unconditional and uplifting expanses those claustrophobic and wretched depths those places where forgiveness meets the unforgivable.

And while the specific question of who killed the poor girl is what drives Mare of Easttown’s seven-episode plot, it’s the broad emotion behind Erin’s idle baby-babbling, her familiar in-too-deep mix of rashness and rationalization, that weaves the series together. “Your grandma used to say, ‘You’ll understand when you’re a parent,’” she continues, referring specifically to her own late mother but also echoing a near-universal koan, “and I was always like, ‘Yeah, whatever.’” (Also universal: the dismissive teen.) “But now it’s like, you can love someone so much it’s scary!” DJ gurgles at his mama in return.īy the end of the episode, Erin is dead. “Sometimes I wonder if you even realize how much I love you,” a doomed young single mom named Erin McMenamin tells her baby, DJ, in the opening episode of the HBO Max miniseries Mare of Easttown.