We still don’t know who knows what anyone did last summer. But with the murders piling up in Wai Huna, Chief Lyla and Bruce preside over an angry town hall meeting. “This is a small town,” the chief tells the surly gathered crowd in I Know What You Did Last Summer Episode 5. “Someone must’ve seen something.” But there is no chill here. (*”It’s the cult!” hollers the chief’s own mother.) As for the O.G.’s, the fissures in their interpersonal relationships seem to be expanding and contracting in real time. Margo, whose chronic depression is once again manifesting in humiliating filmed eating sessions, confronts who she believes is Lennon about the iffiness of their sometimes amorous relationship, and complains to Riley about it, too. “Look, I know Lennon’s a cunt,” Margo says, not mincing words. “But she’s still my BFF. I just hope she remembers that when the police start coming.”
With the law still circling, the group seizes on Clara as their own prime suspect. Dylan, just casually carving Alison’s name into the walls of the cult cave, had a close encounter of the screwy kind with the former cult member there; not only that, she was brandishing a bloody knife. “There is no redemption in this life,” Clara told Dylan, and with that cryptic weirdness to go on, the O.G.’s descend on Clara’s property to find themselves some evidence. Evidence? Howabout an entire abandoned cult compound, instead? This place has everything: creepy dormitories, weird chains, an abandoned amphitheater, discarded medical equipment, a machete rusty with dried blood, wolf spiders in an incubator. Traipsing around the muddy grounds, Riley and Dylan argue about their own fractured friendship, Alison gleans info about the cult members themselves from mildewed old Polaroids, and Margo mostly complains about the damage to her fancy white heels. But in classic teens-in-a-horror-movie fashion, they spend too long at this trough of information. What good is gathering evidence if you’re too dead to share it?
What can we say about Bruce? On the one hand, he seems truly invested in being some kind of Conscious Dad of the Year. (He also drives a forest green and utterly bitchin’ vintage Toyota Land Cruiser.) Bruce is proud of the trust that having had no parental controls on his daughters’ devices represents, though that also means he missed Lennon establishing her OnlyFans porn account in Alison’s name. On the other hand, the difference in how he treats Lennon versus Alison is apparent during another flashback to that fateful night and the big graduation party. We already know that Bruce and Clara have a connection that goes way, way back. What else is Dad hiding? Might he know more about the murders around town? That would certainly create friction with Lyla and their toy-and-lube sexcapades. Might Bruce even know how all of this bloodshed hooks back into the O.G.s’ little circle? Bruuuuuuce! What’s your deal?
By this, its fifth episode, I Know What You Did Last Summer is still on a roundabout meander to clarifying its title. But it’s also sufficiently distanced itself from comparisons to the 1997 movie. Whatever the resolution to all of this blood spilled, culty behavior, and digital stalking, IKWYDLS will stand on its own. And part of that stance comes from some fine work by its young actors. At least once an episode, Madison Iseman manages a dynamic flex between the competing personas of Alison and Lennon, While Brianne Tju plays Margo as someone whose rich girl princess act belies a conflicted and much more complicated young woman. Ashley Moore and Ezekiel Goodman, meanwhile, navigating as they have the shifting moods of Riley and Dylan, have settled into their roles, too. Given the jarring second episode death blow of Johnny (he’ll never be the “head” of a major corporation…), there’s no guarantee that any of these people are gonna survive an eight-episode run. But the chemistry they’ve developed as friends with plenty of ammo to use on each other — “I’m not worried about poor sensitive spectrum boy,” Margo says derisively of Dylan — is making their sputtering, improvisational attempts at figuring out who knows their secret and is willing to kill about it that much more watchable.
Johnny Loftus is an independent writer and editor living at large in Chicagoland. His work has appeared in The Village Voice, All Music Guide, Pitchfork Media, and Nicki Swift. Follow him on Twitter: @glennganges
Watch I Know What You Did Last Summer Episode 5 on Prime Video
This post first appeared on Nypost.com
ncG1vNJzZmhqZGy7psPSmqmorZ6Zwamx1qippZxemLyue82erqxnmWK4r7vWZq6hmaRixrDBjJ2gnWWclsC1edKupKadomKysbXSqJueZWViv6avwKlkpq2bl66vs44%3D