‘Dirty John’ Episode 7 Recap: “Chivalry”

In the penultimate episode of Dirty John, the series finally shakes the podcast-bumper-rails that have been guiding it thus far. Don’t get me wrong: I’ve enjoyed watching a pretty straight-forward recreation of the podcast. The podcast was very good! Connie Britton, Eric Bana, Juno Temple—they’re very fun to watch! But at eight episodes instead of six, the show was always going to have to stray eventually, and last week’s small deviations from the original source material showed that, independently, Bravo’s series is capable of injecting new color: revisiting a narrative it’s already shown us to be wild, and filtering it through a new, even wilder perception.

We’ve always known that Debra had on serious blinders when it came to John, but apparently we’ve missed a few things, too. This episode is a weird, non-linear, quick-cut hour of television; with its jumpy, revisionist-history lens, it’s also gripping and fresh. We spend nearly half the runtime revisiting scenes from previous episodes, but now they’re shown from a new perspective: John’s. What were formerly smoothie montages become stalking montages. Because that’s what John does the second the blender is soaking and Debra leaves the house: he starts monitoring her bank accounts, her iCloud, the tracker he put on her car. He doesn’t know exactly what he’s looking for—just something.

That’s the word we’ve heard John Meehan drop on both of his ex-wives when they’ve pleaded with him to help them understand how they can make him stop; why he’s treating him like this; what he’s doing, what he wants. “I don’t know,” he told Tonia, and Debra two decades later. “But it’s something.”

In episode 7, we find Debra Newell in a purgatory of sorts. She’s made the mental decision to leave John, but first: a reckoning. In between quick-cut flashbacks of what comprises John (deception, drugs, depravity), Debra tries to come to terms with who this person is that she married so that she can make sense of how to get away from him. At various points after leaving him, Debra tries to figure out if John wants 50 percent of her money, or if he’s still on drugs, or why he would torch a car that he loved so much. After bungling an almost-in-the-bag restraining order by meeting with John in person, Debra tells her lawyer, “I wanted to try to understand because if I understand, then maybe I can get him to stop.”

But you can’t apply reason to a madman; you can’t apply logic to a monster.

Debra thinks John will stop if she gives him what he wants, because Debra still doesn’t understand that her husband doesn’t just want money, or drugs, or cars. When John says he wants something, what he really means, is everything. He wants to take everything from Debra Meehan that made her life good and happy and whole before he came and broke it. And he won’t quit until he gets it—or until he’s stopped. I think Debra understands that now.

And not for nothing, a deeper focus on John also means we get to experience that sick thrill that comes with knowing just how bad a truly bad guy actually is. It’s basically why the true crime genre exists, and in the episode’s opening scene, Bravo is doing what Bravo does best: the most.

“SIX MONTHS AGO” flashes across the screen and we finally get some answers on how John Meehan went from Orange County prison to arriving on the doorstep of Debra Newell’s penthouse condo for a date. In quick cuts scored to rock music, we see that it was a simple combination of retrieving his R.V. from the impound lot, snorting a ton of pills, and juggling communications with a bevy of attractive middle-aged women he met online.

John throws a frozen burrito in the microwave as he tells one woman that he’s sorry he went AWOL, it’s just that he had to settle his father’s ample estate after he passed away suddenly: “High class problems, right?” He goes dark on a beautiful geologist after she mentions her old brothers: both cops. He tells a Debra look-a-like how his sickly younger brother inspired him to become an anesthesiologist over coffee. And in between it all, he has time to send nasty emails to the husband of a woman he slept with dirty photos attached. Hard work and dedication really can get you everywhere! If you consider “everywhere” a broken down R.V. in Cathedral City, of course.

But conning, that will get you somewhere if you’re deplorable enough to be good at it. After days of maniacally cycling through women, it gets John to Debra’s doorstep, and now, with a new lens on their courtship, we finally get to see how John pulled it off. On that first date that went all night and back to Debra’s condo, ol’ John popped a loose pocket-Viagra before they left the restaurant, and as you may recall, stormed out of Debra’s home like a little boy when she wouldn’t sleep with him. And that call he made to apologize? He made it on a bathroom break from his community service hosing down police cars in a rubber jumpsuit.

Two years earlier, in a different, oranger jumpsuit, we see John plotting with his cellmate in jail to buy a hit on the two police officers scheduled to testify in his trial—oh, and also his ex-wife. Part of that plan involves slicing his own stomach open with a shiv: “rocket-propelled grenade,” he tells Debra when she rubs her hand over the scars there. “The guy who was next to me in the Humvee died, so I guess compared to him, I feel blessed.”

Hashtag blessed, indeed. That’s the kind of sickly sweet messaging John is spewing at court-mandated group therapy back in Orange County, talking about how just two months ago he was “forgetting everything I learned in this room” on a first date, but he made amends, and now he’s married. The group leader looks notably disgusted during all of this, which I figure is just standard oh-this-guy-is-clearly-full-of-shit stuff, but no. The therapist is one of those who didn’t see through John at first, it seems. After session, when John asks the guy to sign his court card, the therapist tells him he’s disgusting, and John responds: “Well, you’re licensed to take care of people like me, not to do this to them.” Picture John showing a series of unsolicited lewd photos on his cell phone here> “I don’t usually like doing it with men, but oh man…did your wife teach you those moves, or were you just born knowing them?”

And then he hands the man an empty urine sample cup and tells him to “drain the dragon.”

All the while, he’s married to Debra! And that deranged looking-woman who showed up in their marital home? A drug friend of John’s that he paid to do it, presumably so there would be a reason to put cameras in the house. Oh, and that doctor overseeing John’s cold-turkey approach to quitting drugs? Really a doctor, but also a drug friend of John’s who, I guess, sells the drugs that John steals from various women, men, and hospitals. At this point, John is sucking on some kind of Fentanyl lollipop, the cons and crimes were flying by, and it finally all catches up with him in the form of that vomit-collapse combo we saw land him in the hospital a few episodes ago. That’s when Debra had the opportunity to move out, as we see John watch through the security cameras connected to his phone. But of course, we know she takes him back. We didn’t know he started taking testosterone-enhancing steroids during that time, or that he was listening to Debra’s calls somehow, or that the second she leaves the apartment, he pounces on her computer to watch her every move.

But eventually, Debra found out some of these things—the drugs, the tracker on her car—and she left.

And now we’re all caught up! We know the depths of John’s deception, the boundlessness of his entitlement, the nastiness lurking just under the surface, ready to unleash on anyone he cares to. But right now, as Debra attempts to escape him, she’s his main focus. Her lawyer arranges all the proof and paperwork to get a domestic violence restraining order, but when John shows up to the trial with a cane, and without a lawyer, the judge tells him they have to reschedule until he gets a public defender.

In the meantime, he fills Debra’s inbox with manipulative voicemails, sends nude photos of her to her active clients, and writes scathing reviews on every available website related to her interior design business. So while its naive of Debra to think that meeting with John to see what he wants would have any effect, you can also see how she would desperate to do anything to stop him. But that’s when John hits her with the line. What is it he wants, Debra asks.

“I don’t know…but it’s something,” John tells her, looking absolutely evil. Soon after, he torches her car and convinces the police that Debra is the crazy one. Because John doesn’t even know what he wants. Of course he wants money, and of course he wants power over this woman, and of course he wants revenge on her for managing to see through him. But he wants more than that too. We don’t know exactly what it is just yet, but we do know where this whole story ends; we’ve known it from the start, as Debra walked down a hospital corridor toward…something.

The episode ends with John laying out zip ties, duct tape, and every knife in his R.V. as Debra’s lawyer explains to her in voiceover why his plan to throw John off balance hasn’t worked: “He’s not off-balance, and he’s not just lucky,” her lawyer says. “He’s playing 3-D chess. The reason he never put his hands on you isn’t because he’s not dangerous.” John packs all of his gear up into a bag and exits the R.V.

“It’s because he’s got a plan.”

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.

Stream Dirty John Episode 7 ("Chivalry") on Bravo TV