‘Dirty John’ Episode 2 Recap: “Red Flags And Parades”

Debra Newell is the definition of a woman madly in love. In episode 2 of Dirty John, Connie Britton’s furrowed brow plays an entirely different character than the rest of her face: it’s mapping out Debra’s mounting intuition that her new husband John might be a rotten catch, even as every other part of her works so hard to move past that intuition. Because, as the sun-dappled opening montage of blissful cohabitation makes clear, Debra Newell is a woman in love.

To marry a man you’ve only known for eight weeks—that’s a little bit mad. To look the other way at his claims to be a doctor who only brings home wads of cash, has never been heard of by other doctors at his alleged place of employment, and seemingly does nothing but run your errands all day—that’s mad. But to simply let it go when he jokes about shooting your daughter in the head from 100 yards away in front of your nephew whose mother was shot and killed in a tragic act of domestic violence? Oh, that is the maddest new level of Debra-you-in-DANGER-girl.

“Madly in love” is a phrase used so commonly it’s lost most of its meaning, but in Debra’s case, we’re reminded that its literal definition isn’t so far from common either. The ability to overlook logic, reason, and your own well-being to keep a relationship going where there was once some semblance of romantic love is highly common. And, as in Debra’s case, it also commonly leads to tragedy.

Episode 2 goes to sometimes-successful lengths to remind its audience that Debra might be responsible for overlooking enough red flags to outfit an entire Canadian embassy, but that doesn’t make it her fault that John Meehan is a manipulative, violent liar. A big part of listening to the Dirty John podcast was feeling so frustrated with Debra Newell for endangering herself and her children when the warning signs seemed so clear, and then immediately having to remind yourself that Debra Newell was being manipulated by a lifelong conman.

John may be living off Debra for free, hated by everyone in her family, and have boiling rage visible in is pupils anytime someone dares to question him… but he’s also squeezing out tears at Debra’s church services, running errands like a personal assistant, and doting on her so heavily it calls for a bedside smoothie montage.

John Meehan’s much more tangible presence in the television series versus the podcast, plus the visual of Eric Bana’s frequent flashes to and from bone-chilling malice, make these two conflicting points of knowledge—that Debra is both willfully ignorant and a victim of emotional manipulation—feel less mutually exclusive. Also, you’d have to go a pretty long way to be annoyed at Connie Britton.

Constant reminders that John is the villain lure the audience away from victim-blaming Deborah, but also surprisingly helpful in that pursuit is making every other character some variation of awful.

Because, let’s be clear: much in the way of The Bachelor franchise, there may only be one villain in Dirty John, but everyone in it its cast of characters is a wide-awake nightmare. It’s easier to understand why Debra wouldn’t take her oldest daughter’s concerns seriously when we see that Ronnie is a spoiled brat who has likely gotten a number of customer service representatives fired in her short life. It’s easier to understand why she would disregard sweet, fragile Terra when sweet, fragile Terra burst into tears every time she thinks about her mother’s sordid romantic history…

And it’s easy to see why Debra would go straight to her mother—who I actually do consider the second-most villain of this story—for validation of John, because Arlene would tell a mop it was good enough to marry her daughter as long as that mop wore pants with a button to Christmas dinner and wasn’t actively foaming at the mouth. This becomes even more abundantly clear throughout the episode as we’re introduced to the final main player in Debra Newell’s life: her nephew Toby (most likely based on Shad from the Dirty John podcast).

Played by Kevin Zegers, Toby is a rational-reprieve from the absurdity of Dirty John‘s other key players. His approach to meeting his Aunt Debra’s new “boyfriend” (don’t forget that no one knows she married this grifter) lives somewhere between the extreme open-mindedness of the older Newell women, and the extreme ferocity of the younger generation. That’s surely why Debra is eager to have them meet, y’know, just after John goes into a rage over spotting a “can’t wait for tomorrow night” text from “TS” on her phone, and then quickly explains his erratic behavior away because he’s Sicilian on his dad side, which leads to some light bragging about his mafia ties. Cool!

John does manage to endear himself to Toby in their first meeting though, shooting the breeze over sports and weaving harrowing tales of his time in Iraq as, presumably, a military doctor. But in their next meeting, John lets his true colors slip out…

Okay, well technically their second encounter is at Christmas when Debra has promised Terra she won’t let John interact with the children, and then has him enter the house in a Santa hat with two Santa-bags of presents for the children, and where Ronnie marches up to her grandmother’s house like she’s about to bury the hatchet on her John-ban, and then…puts a tracker on his (Debra’s, duh) car and books it back to The O.C.

But after that, surely high off the energy of someone actually liking her boyfriend (husband!), Debra invites Toby to the house for another charm session. But instead of charming Toby, John…says about the nastiest thing he possibly could. When the conversation turns to Ronnie, both Toby and Debra suggest that the way for John to win her over is just to prove that he’s sticking around. And John says: “Or I could take her out with a Winchester .30-06 and a thousand-yard headshot.” Debra and Toby stare at him. “Is that a joke,” Toby says. “I mean you told him what happened, right?”

Oddly, the facts about the violence in Toby’s past are never told to the audience explicitly, but rolled out to us through hints and clues over the course of the episode. There’s Debra’s brother-in-law who she avoids at a church service, but Arlene goes running to; there’s the unremarked upon absence of Toby’s mother; there’s the confused stare Toby gives John when he asks what his father’s drink of choice was.

We know what happened was bad; we know that John knows what it is; and we know that the horror of it hasn’t seemed to faze him enough to make him be sensitive to the situation. John stutters out that he wasn’t thinking about Toby’s mom when he suggested shooting his cousin in the head as a form of conflict resolution, and apologizes for making a “not funny” joke.

We can’t know if John really did just put his foot in his mouth this time, but throughout these first two episodes, we’ve seen him testing everyone around him, especially the ones who let him the closest. He explodes at Debra, and then apologizes; threatens each of her daughters, and then feigns joking; says he wants to put $90,000 in cash that she keeps in the house in a safety deposit box that only he has the key to, and then…does it because Debra lets him.

John Meehan is seeing how much he can get away, and apparently it’s a lot.

But two episodes in, the jig might just be up. Because Ronnie didn’t just put a tracker on her mom’s car, she sold one of her most valuable and beloved Chanel handbags (a milk carton bag! quilted sides! palladium hardware!) to hire a private investigator (always great Judy Reyes!). That immediately leads to John’s last known address: a trailer park that Ronnie and Toby drive to and nearly get laughed out of for suggesting that John was a military doctor in Iraq. They don’t know everything yet, but they know enough for Toby to take his aunt to lunch and tell her that she’s being lied to…

Of course, even Debra’s level-headed nephew coming to her with real concerns and hard facts isn’t enough to sway Debra. She just runs to her mother’s house and they coo about how this man who recently toyed with the idea of shooting her daughter in the head is so different than other men, so—I kid you fucking not—”chivalrous” and “courteous.” At the same time, we find out just why Toby found that statement about shooting Ronnie in the head to be particularly discourteous.

Toby shows up at Debra’s house looking for her, but finds John instead. John is still on his apology kick, but when it comes out that Toby knows John isn’t a doctor, knows he didn’t go to Iraq, that he doesn’t have homes all over the country, John’s eyes go black. Toby tells John that if he can just prove anything he’s said is true, he’ll let it go… but we all know that’s not happening. “You worry about your own sad life,” John tells him. “You don’t have an aunt anymore—I have a wife. We’re married.”

So that cat’s out of that bag, but what about the bag that holds John Meehan’s truest evil? Yeah, that one’s busting open at the seams too. John spits at Toby that he should be embarrassed for being such a loser: “You should be glad your dad killed your mom, so she didn’t have to be around to see this.” And he slams the door in his face.

So, now it’s just for Debra to figure out. The random woman showing up in their house earlier in the episode didn’t clue her in, and the rage didn’t clue her in, and the frequent suggestions of physically harming her daughters didn’t do it. But John violently grabbing away a letter sent from the Orange County Prison after Debra took it out of the mailbox did send up the tiniest of alerts in her brain. The next day after John makes her a smoothie, warms her bath, and drops her off at work, she heads back home. Skirting around the security cameras that John had installed all over her home and office, Debra sneaks into the drawers where John keeps piles of paperwork.

There, she finds police reports, arrest warrants, restraining orders, print-outs of women warning other women about John Meehan on websites for just that purpose, and a looooong list of prior charges including stalking, harassment, blackmail, and more.

Time to stop the madness, Debbie.

Jodi Walker writes about TV for Entertainment Weekly, Vulture, Texas Monthly, and in her pop culture newsletter These Are The Best Things. She vacillates between New York, North Carolina, and every TJ Maxx in between.

Watch Dirty John Episode 2 ("Red Flags and Parades") on Bravo