Now we know.
It wasn’t Dan, that much we knew. But it turns out it wasn’t Alex, faking her own death. Nor was it Beth, whom I’d locked onto as a suspect, despite Fatal Attraction Episode 8 cleverly nodding in that direction real hard several times before abandoning the red herring.
No, it was Arthur, the quietest of the core cast, and the least like a “type” compared to the cheating husband, the wronged wife, the other woman, the veteran cop, even the traumatized daughter. Some of that, as I’ve said before, is down to the casting of Brian Goodman. He looks more like a barroom tough guy than the sort who’d have brunch with Dan and Beth Gallagher after becoming besties with the latter during architecture grad school, then go on to platonically co-parent Ellen with Beth after Dan goes to prison and his own beloved wife, Julia (Holley Fain), dies after a prolonged struggle with ovarian cancer.
But that’s kind of the perfect smokescreen, isn’t it? Because Arthur is a bit hard to place in the world of the Gallaghers and the show, he’s also hard to suspect. Then the pieces start coming together. He has the means: His knowhow in construction allows him to break into Alex’s apartment, and to fake his way past her building’s super by claiming to be an elevator repairman during what amounts to a dry run. Plus, he’s got a boat with which to dispose of the body, loaned to him in order to take Julia on a little excursion.
He has the motive: Alex has already tried to kill not only Beth but him too via the arson at the construction site, so he knows she’s dangerous, indeed a direct threat to him as well as the people he cares about. Meanwhile, watching his wife slowly die and his best friend live in agony and fear…well, that’s simply watching one woman he loves suffer too many for him to take.
And he has the opportunity: With his wife knocked out on various drugs and old-fashioned exhaustion, plus “helping Beth” as an excuse, he can spend the night killing Alex and getting rid of her corpse, then walk back home in the morning carrying coffees like nothing ever happened.
Showrunner and writer Alexandra Cunningham (writers make it all happen, studios should treat and pay them fairly, solidarity forever) also takes the time to create a fairly compelling, even sympathetic, reason for why he never came forward. First, he has his wife to worry about. But when even that can no longer stave off his guilt, he has a lawyer who tells him the district attorney’s office would never dream of overturning the high-profile white-whale conviction of one of their own, the kind of case that makes careers. If Arthur were to come forward, the lawyer says, Dan would stay in prison, and Arthur would join him for perjury. Stay with your wife and be glad you got away with it, he says, though he doubts Arthur is even telling the truth.
Flash forward years later, with the whole surviving gang gathered for brunch at the palatial house Beth and Arthur share. What is he going to do now? Jeopardize the second family he built with Ellen and Beth? Forever destroy his friendships with Beth and Dan and Mike? And oh yeah, he can’t possibly be excited by the prospect of spending the rest of his own life in prison. So he’s created one of his own making.
I’m frankly stunned by how okay I am with this reveal. After spending most of the season convinced Alex faked her death, then going into this finale on the hunch that Beth did it, Arthur? Of all people? Based on how the story is presented, yeah, Arthur, of all people.
I’m equally surprised by how okay I am with the episode’s other big reveal: Something’s gone very wrong with Ellen. She destroyed her erstwhile friend Stella’s academic career by ratting out her juvenile record to the university, which disqualifies her for the financial aid she receives and ends her enrollment there. Worse, she breaks into the home of the professor with whom Stella had been having an affair, cheerfully splicing together audio snippets from their recorded lectures and conversations to create a semi-convincing confession of love for her, by him. She does this knowing he’ll come home and catch her in the act, and seems happy to see his confusion and anxiety. Remind you of anyone?
Again, I buy it. Actor Alyssa Jirrels has made less of an impression on me than her counterparts, but I think it turns out this is because she was hiding a major part of herself. Ellen’s trauma goes back not only to losing her father in such a horrible way, but to the day she spent with Alex, during which Alex dispenses what pass for hard truths about parents and lying and trust for someone as damaged as she is. Considering the time of upheaval during which Ellen receives these messages, which only compound the fact that she’s a highly impressionable little kid under the best of circumstances let alone these, yeah, I can see it doing major, lasting damage — the kind of damage you don’t let anyone know about until the compulsion to act on it becomes irresistible. It’s the same thing Alex did to, well, everyone she knew after a point. So in that sense, at least, Alex lives.
And through it all, the show still finds time to humanize its characters in surprising and thoughtful ways. What happens after Dan attacks Alex and leaves, issuing threats of prosecution the whole time? She calls her dad in a panic, like any frightened person might do. She’s not a supervillain, just a very badly broken person, and she’s still capable of acting normal, albeit during very abnormal circumstances. It makes her death sad rather than cathartic. She was, after all, going to leave him the fuck alone.
Similarly, we discover Mike is more than just a charming guy whose job didn’t work out the way he’d hoped in the sense that he got bounced from the force and lost his pension. At Julia’s funeral, he reveals to Arthur that the job never really worked out the way he’d hoped, because he hoped it would involve people working together as an institution to basically do the right thing. But, he tells Arthur, “there’s no institutions, no people. It’s just a fucking macine, that chews and fucking spits.” He actually begins crying, both for his friend Dan, who’s been swallowed by the machine — the reason he cut off contact with his family is because he didn’t want them to see what prison does to a person — and for himself, because his dreams of justice were a con. I have to reiterate how well Fatal Attraction handles the politically fraught occupations of Mike and Dan, where other shows would just take their basic decency for granted or else paint them as openly corrupt aberrations.
Plus there are all the little moments of grace and insight that have made Fatal Attraction such a winning surprise even when it’s not revealing whodunit. When Julia falls asleep one night, Arthur holds a glass beneath her nose to make sure she’s still breathing, clearly a habit of long standing, which is touching and sad. When Dan and Ellen get together and he regales her with a story of the dive bar he and Mike used to go to together, she asks if the place is still there, and he simply smiles and says “I’m gonna assume no,” since going there and discovering for certain that it disappeared during his lost years would be too painful. When Alex says “lions and tigers and bears” to little Ellen, the kid doesn’t catch that its a reference, since how many little kids are memorizing The Wizard of Oz anymore in the 2010s? When young Ellen has a heart to heart with Beth (who tells her that Alex lied, which no doubt reinforces Alex’s warning that Beth and Dan lie), Ellen stops it to go use the bathroom; she’s still just a kid, after all, but moreover she’s a kid who needs an excuse to get out of a difficult conversation, and what else is gonna come to mind?
In short, Fatal Attraction is a remake where the game is worth the candle, one that honors the anxieties that animate the original while jettisoning its thriller approach in favor of something both more expansive and more humane. And unlike the original, the story does not end when the monster is destroyed and the status quo is restored so that everyone can live happily ever after; the damage lives on, and another monster may have been born in the bargain. Filled with memorable performances from terrific actors, it’s one of the best-written shows of the year. Let’s hope it’s one of the best-written shows of next year thanks to a second-season renewal, too. It’s earned one.
Sean T. Collins (@theseantcollins) writes about TV for Rolling Stone, Vulture, The New York Times, and anyplace that will have him, really. He and his family live on Long Island.
