‘Sharp Objects’ Episode 7 Recap: “Falling”

Sharp Objects Episode 7 opens with Camille awakening from a nightmare in which a tiny figure is moving about inside Amma’s dollhouse, but her waking life is scarcely less terrifying: Adora’s removed Amma to her own room, stripped Camille, put Camille in a nightgown, and is now trying to nurse Camille’s hangover, while Camille resists her — much, Camille recalls, as they both did when Camille was a child. Camille manages to get herself out of bed and get ready for work, Adora intoning, “Your health. It’s not a debt you just cancel. The body collects, Camille.”

A flash in the mirror reminds us how Marian’s body collected its debt from her.

On her way out, Camille stops to compare notes with Amma. “She gave you the blue?” Amma asks, referring to a syrup Adora has apparently decanted into a handsome blue glass bottle. Camille says she didn’t want it. Amma tells her, “You know what my favourite part about getting wasted is? Momma takes care of me after.” Camille says she thinks Amma can take care of herself, but Amma says, “I want Momma. And she wants me, like this.” Amma has also heard, “They’re arresting him today” — and it seems to be true, as Camille drives past the Wheeler house as Vickery serves his search warrant. In the carriage house where John has been staying, Ashley defends John for as long as it takes Vickery to suggest that her help will get her name in the paper; then she looks to the blood spot under the bed and whispers, “He’d never have sex with me.”

Richard isn’t present for the search: he has Marian’s hospital chart and has tracked down a nurse whose name appears in it. Beverly explains what Munchasen by Proxy is, that she suspected Adora had it, that Marian was her unwitting tool, and that when Beverly shared her suspicions, she got fired. But she still has friends at the hospital, if Richard has more questions: “Not about Marian. About the other one.” (“The other one,” meanwhile, is trying to make like Camille and fight back against Adora’s ministrations, even admitting that she’s hung over, not sick — that is, until Adora pouts that if Amma’s such a big girl, she doesn’t need Adora to do anything for her. Terrified of losing Adora’s love, Amma gets back into bed to play patient.)

Camille finds John in a makeshift bar in the Mexican farm employees’ neighborhood, bringing him a bourbon and trying to get him to say that he didn’t kill Natalie (adding, by the way, that she could understand if he’d killed Ann: “She was a nasty little cunt, she hurt your sister, I might’ve done the same thing”). Instead, John offers the theory of the crime that prosecutors will probably advance after he’s arrested: since she bit her nails, Natalie couldn’t scratch him; pulling her teeth was easy using tools from the hog farm. “I want to rape them but I won’t let myself because I can’t control the desire. So I kill them instead, destroy the desire. I thought Ann would be enough for me, but it was Natalie that I really wanted.” He leans forward: “See, I can tell stories too.” The true story is that John misses Natalie so much he wants to die: “But that’s boring.” Of Natalie’s nails, he adds that someone painted them, which Natalie never would have done. But he ends by giving Camille the quote she needs: “I didn’t kill Natalie.” “I know,” she replies.

Richard’s just found out from her chart that Amma formerly had a feeding tube, allowing Adora to put nutrients directly into her stomach, when we cut back to the Crellins, Amma asking whether Adora thinks she’ll have kids someday. Smiling fondly, Adora says that’s years off. “Do you think I won’t grow up?” Amma asks. “Is that why you want me to stay little? So I’ll be like Marian?” “You are like Marian,” Adora replies. “No, I’m not as good,” says Amma. “You can never be as good as someone dead.” Adora just demands Amma’s secret phone, and assures her, “Camille leaves tomorrow, and then things will go back to the way they were.” Amma, having been denied a news update on John when Adora turned away her roller-skating pals, later sneaks out of her room to try to get on Camille’s computer, but — extremely on-brand for Camille — it’s dead. But there’s no turning off the physical folder she finds, and opens to closeup crime scene photos of Ann’s and Natalie’s toothless mouths.

Since John can’t turn himself in while drunk, Camille brings him to a motel to recover, but as she’s handing him a bottle of water, he takes her wrist and reveals that he’s already seen one of her scars: “Can I look?” “Nobody sees,” she tells him, in a daze, but he replies, “I do,” and with a mix of reluctance and relief, she lets him undress her. “Laid. Drain. Cherry. Sick. Gone.” “You’re reading me,” she murmurs. “Wrong. Wicked.” Off that text, sex ensues.

In Adora’s kitchen, we learn that “the blue” is a special concoction of Adora’s own recipe, and that apparently nothing makes her as happy as whipping up a batch. “Go relax,” she tells Alan, hovering in the doorway. “Play some music.” Alone with her brew, she dances and beams.

Post-coital Camille finds a bite mark on John’s arm, which he readily admits Natalie gave him: “I never thought she was bad. She was just completely herself. The town hated her for that.” No one cares about Natalie except Adora, who never gave up her efforts to befriend her or Ann, including when they physically fought her and even required her to get stitches (though the assailant, in that case, was Ann). “She never gave up, like she was going to solve them,” says John. “I never let her solve me,” muses Camille. “Maybe I should’ve.” She’s getting dressed when the cops show up to arrest a still-naked John — who, fortunately for Camille, is 18.

By now, Richard has joined the posse (despite his doubts about the farm worker’s claim to have seen John dumping Ann’s bike in the lagoon, given that said witness works nights; Vickery doesn’t care, since he only needed evidence sufficient to get a search warrant), and Vickery leaves Richard alone to confront Camille. She tells him the cover story about helping John sleep it off, which Richard doesn’t buy: “This room fucking stinks of you.” Camille tries to tell him John is innocent, but Richard is too angry to hear reason — “Is that what you discussed when he had his dick in you?” — and convinced by the blood evidence in the carriage house, which Camille didn’t know about. Desperate, Camille tries to keep Richard from leaving the room, even dropping to her knees in front of him, but he pulls her up: “I don’t think you’re bad, okay? I think one bad thing happened and you blame the rest of your shitty life on it. People really buy it, your sad story. But really, you’re just a drunk and a slut.” Anyway, she doesn’t have time to blow anyone (else): Richard has left Marian’s chart in her car.

Camille, recalling happier times goofing around with Jackie and Adora on the porch, heads straight to Jackie’s to ask her about the autopsy she had requested and been denied. Jackie — already drunk before she brings out Bloody Marys for herself and Camille, and with an assortment of pills in a decorative box — recalls Marian’s funeral: “Your mother never looked more beautiful than that day. She cried and cried. And then she burned her.” The meaning strikes Camille all at once, as she pictures Adora as James Carpini’s woman in white, beckoning Natalie into the woods. “You don’t like my Bloodies,” Jackie remarks. “That’s ’cause they’re shitty. I know. But every time I ask you to drink it, you do. Why is that. ‘Cause it’s easier. Easier for Marian. You made it hard.”

Camille accuses Jackie of complicity and flees, finally pulling over to call Frank and sob, “My mother did it.” Frank blames himself for sending her to Wind Gap and orders her to come back immediately, but Camille can’t leave now: “She’s doing it again, and I need to take care of it.”

Adora is, in fact, doing it again, giving Amma another dose of the blue, which makes her vomit up chunks before Adora gathers her up and cradles her, whimpering, like a baby.

Racing home, Camille remembers watching Adora through the staircase railing as Adora cradles Amma, then an actual baby, and bites her cheek to make her cry; Adora then laments, “God’s given me another sick baby.”

Driving through town, Vickery is surprised to hear from her friends that Amma is too ill to come out.

Alan plays “The Willow Garden” by the Everly Brothers, and remembers dancing and singing to it with Amma at various earlier points in her life.

Upstairs, a feverish Amma approaches the railing in a flower crown as the Everly Brothers croon:

“I had a bottle of Burgundy wine /
My love she did not know /
So I poisoned that dear little girl /
On the banks below.”

Writer, editor, and snack enthusiast Tara Ariano is the co-founder of TelevisionWithoutPity.com and Fametracker.com (R.I.P.), as well as Previously.tv. She co-hosts the podcasts Extra Hot Great and Again With This (a compulsively detailed episode-by-episode breakdown of Beverly Hills, 90210), and has contributed to New York, the New York Times magazine, Vulture, The Awl, and Slate, among many others. She lives in Austin.

Watch Sharp Objects Episode 7 ("Falling") on HBO Go