‘Sharp Objects’ Episode 8 Recap: “Milk”

The Sharp Objects series finale picks off right where the penultimate episode left us, with Camille, full of dread, making her way into her mother’s house. Amma, though still very lethargic, has made it down the stairs for a special dinner celebrating John’s arrest and, by extension, Amma’s safety in Wind Gap hereafter — though apparently Adora’s compulsive need to baby Amma doesn’t extend so far as to shield her from the facts about Missouri’s determined commitment to capital punishment. Adora eventually changes the subject to Camille’s imminent return to St. Louis; Camille suggests that maybe Amma could come stay with her for a while; Adora rejects the idea on the grounds that Amma’s about to go back to school, and expresses suspicion that her daughters colluded before asking Adora about it. Perhaps it’s noting this new closeness between Amma and Camille that has Adora suddenly decide Amma’s been out of bed long enough, but as Adora’s leading Amma back to her room, Camille jumps on the grenade, moaning in pain and yelling for Adora to take care of her instead.

Upstairs, it’s obviously such a rare honor for Camille to be invited into Adora’s room that she has to be asked twice before removing her boots and socks and crossing the famous ivory floor to Adora’s bed, Adora collecting Camille’s shed clothing and dropped phone and putting her in one of Adora’s nightgowns. “You see how nice it is not to have to worry or fight?” coos Adora, as Camille swallows a spoonful of the blue concoction. “Just to let yourself be looked after?…This will be good for both of us, don’t you think?”

The next morning, a power outage makes Vickery late to John’s interrogation. Richard tries to get John to say what evidence Ashley led the cops to find, but John’s shocked to learn there was blood in the carriage house: “Really? It happened there?” He resists the cops’ pressure and refuses to confess. During a break, Vickery says he’s sorry about Camille, telling Richard she takes after her mother: “Adora’s not as dramatic about it, but that woman loves her attention. Then scolds you if you give her too much.” “If you listen to all the talk around here, everyone’s some kind of crazy or evil,” Richard remarks. “Only half of it’s true,” cracks Vickery. “That’s what I’m worried about: we’re looking at the wrong half.”

Camille wakes up to a vision of Marian perched on her bedside asking, “Get it now?”

Downstairs, Adora’s cheerfully mixing up a new batch of her special medicine, telling Alan Camille already finished a bottle. “Don’t go overboard,” Alan warns Adora, saying she should let the girls rest and their bodies recover naturally. She tells him she’s just “helping nature along,” and Alan folds: “This is your area.”

When Camille gets out of bed in search of her cell phone, Amma’s in the doorway, guiding Camille through the experience of being doped. Amma’s better since Adora’s lavishing all her “nursing” on Camille, who tells Amma to find Richard and bring him back: “If anything happens to me, you tell him that Momma took care of me.” However, Amma is derailed when Alan stops her at the bottom of the stairs to offer her the cake she didn’t get the night before.

By nightfall, Adora’s put Camille in the tub, blissed out that Camille’s finally allowing Adora to help her, and purring that, of her three girls, Camille’s the one who’s most like her. She blows through Camille’s questions about what’s in the blue bottle and how Marian died, instead telling her the story of her own mother waking her in the middle of the night when Adora was a pre-teen, driving her into the woods, and leaving her there to find her way back: “We all have bad childhoods. At some point, you have to forget it. Move on. Anything else is just selfish. Time for more medicine!”

And then Richard is at the door! Alan cranks the stereo — “It’s Impossible,” by Perry Como — before coming to the door, so that Richard can’t hear Camille upstairs trying to get his attention while she’s too weak to come down herself and disprove Alan’s claim that she’s out with her friends. Camille makes it as far as the hallway before she sees Amma in her room, still in her nightgown, not having gone anywhere; she wanted to be “a good girl.” But Richard knows better than to believe Alan and, just as Adora’s returned with more of the blue, she notices the lights from the police cars on her bedroom ceiling.

The rest happens fast: Richard and Frank — the latter appropriately alarmed by Camille’s call the day before and newly arrived in Wind Gap — run in to tend to Camille, giving Richard his first view of Camille’s scars. Adora’s barely told Vickery that he can’t believe Camille, who’s “mentally ill,” when a uniformed cop shows Richard a pair of pliers. Then Richard is handcuffing Adora. EMTs are examining Amma and Camille. And Amma makes it to the top of the stairs to scream in protest as Adora is led away.

We next see the sisters in neighboring hospital beds while Richard updates them: the pliers from the house match marks on Ann’s and Natalie’s bodies, so they’ll be charging Adora with those murders as well as the attempted murders of Camille and Amma, and possibly Marian’s murder, since there’s a strong likelihood that Adora, having arrived at a “medicine” recipe she liked, hasn’t altered it since Marian’s death. The cops have found the ingredients she’s been hoarding: “Antifreeze, prescriptions. Rat poison.” The doctors think Amma built up a tolerance to it over the years, but that it hit Camille a lot harder. He also tells Camille what a good friend she has in Frank, since Vickery was deaf to Richard’s concerns about Adora, but Frank practically broke the door down demanding action. “I’m sorry for your— I’m sorry, Camille,” says Richard. “For everything.” Camille’s sorry too.

Then it’s on to a montage of Camille and Amma’s new life together. They meet a neighbor girl whose name, we’ll learn, is Mae. They go back to Wind Gap to see Adora’s arraignment. Amma teaches Mae to roller skate in the alley beside their building, jokingly pretending to strangle herself with a hanging cord. Mae shows Camille the dollhouse quilt she’s made, a copy of the one on Amma’s bed. Amma goes to visit Adora, both tearful as they press their hands against the glass between them.

As they leave this last stop, Camille and Amma run into Jackie, out of her caftans and aiming for country club respectability in a twin set and pencil skirt, asking about a card she sent Amma and musing about (or threatening) a trip to visit them. Once they’ve parted, Amma forbids Camille from hosting Jackie. Camille says Jackie tries, but that she’s unhappy. Amma disagrees: “She’s a pig in shit now that Momma’s out of the way.”

Then we’re at Frank’s, where he’s reading Camille’s last dispatch about the case, and about the defendant prosecutors painted as a “warrior martyr,” whose rage was particularly female, leading to her “killing with kindness.” Adora still hasn’t explained the teeth, Camille notes, before turning her analysis on herself, and whether her own care of Amma is motivated by a need for praise, or by kindness. For now, she thinks the latter. Frank approves the story, and reluctantly tells her when she asks that he’s doing better — much as Amma seems to be, even though she can’t sleep without Camille: “She misses Adora.”

Dinner at the Curry house is homey, though when Mae says she wants to go into politics or journalism, Amma calls her a “kiss-ass” and jealously accuses her of wanting to impress Camille.

Sometime later, Camille’s home alone when she throws out a milk bottle and finds the quilt Mae had made in the trash. She’s on her way to put it back when Mae’s mom comes to the door looking for her — not overly concerned not to know exactly where Mae is, though she makes sure Camille knows Mae and Amma seem to have had the first little fight of their friendship, probably over something unimportant. Camille promises to send Mae home as soon as she and Amma return, and goes to replace the quilt. Then she notices something strange in Adora’s miniaturized room.

First, a loose molar. Then, proof of how determined Amma was to replicate Adora’s house exactly.

Amma couldn’t get ivory for the floors, but she could get teeth. Amma appears in the doorway just as Camille has made her grisly discovery. “Don’t tell Momma,” she says.

A quick-cut mid-credits montage shows us what no cop, judge, or journalist had suspected: Amma and her squad killing Ann in a stream; Amma killing Natalie in the carriage house; Mae desperately shaking the chain-link fence while Amma chokes the life out of her with that convenient cord. Maybe Adora’s incarceration will give her the time and space to reflect upon which of her girls was really most like her after all.

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 8 ("Milk") on HBO Go