This is what happened before Apple TV‘s Cape Fear, as best I can make it out. Years ago, when he was a severely abused and unwanted child, Max Cady fell in love with his comparatively privileged half-sister Crystal Delilah, who treated him poorly. When he grew older and became handsome and charming, he deliberately targeted, seduced, impregnated, and psychologically destroyed her, leaving her with a child, a debilitating mental illness, and a lingering fixation on Max.
Lingering, and murderous. Crystal murdered his pregnant wife Melissa out of jealousy, believing she didn’t deserve the good life to which Max was treating her. True, everything we’ve heard indicates he treated Melissa like garbage, but it wasn’t like whatever he did to Crystal Delilah Cady. (After all, he’d had years to plan his revenge on Crystal.) She leaves him to take the rap, and Anna Deveraux and Tom Bowden play their unwitting roles in making sure he goes to prison for a crime he didn’t commit after all.
Apple TV
Anna Bowden finds most of this out from, of all people, Crystal herself. In a delightful pairing of actors I never really thought of in tandem before, Amy Adams and Juliette Lewis pair off for most of this episode. Unable to find Crystal’s houseboat on the river, Anna ties one on at a local dive, where Crystal finds her.
She wakes up the next morning on the houseboat, gun missing but otherwise no worse for wear. The two turn into erstwhile detective partners, snooping around in the old trailer belonging to Amy, Max’s former girlfriend who killed herself after confessing to the murder. She, too, had been driven to obsession with Max as a friend of young Crystal, it seems, I’d imagine for the same reason.
Inside, Anna finds pictures with two key clues. First, she sees that Crystal is wearing a necklace stolen from Melissa in some of them, indicating a trophy. Second, she notices that the baby Crystal is playing with has a massive scar along his side; Crystal admits it’s her kid but says she gave him up for adoption.
Anna actually passes a lot of this info along to, get this, Max Cady himself. Finally, Anna has something to offer in exchange for him leaving her and her family alone. Drawing her gun, she imprisons Crystal in the hold of her boat; she now has Melissa’s real killer, neither Max nor the dead woman he convinced to frame herself, but the honest-to-god murderer.
Then Crystal’s phone buzzes, and it’s Max, demanding to know what the fuck is going on. She’s supposed to have Anna in the boat when he arrives, you see.
Just like that, Anna realizes she was wrong when she told Crystal, “You’re not gonna win him back. You don’t have anything he wants.” Oh, she’s right about the first part, he’s using her like he’s using everyone else. What’s it to him? He intends to die when this is all over, and it’s not like he likes or cares about anyone else to begin with. But Crystal did have Anna.
With the help of her family, she regains the upper hand, too. Bob the patriarch shows up, having previously nearly assaulted Anna when she came to his house looking for Crystal. He and Crystal bicker like the Cook and the Hitchhiker in another Southern gothic about a fucked-up family, The Texas Chain Saw Massacre.
During a botched escape attempt, Anna notices that Luke (Max Mattern), the weird kid who tends the Cady family’s dogs and tried to kiss Natalie during her visit with Max, has a big scar along his torso. Realizing he has no idea, she tells him Max is his father, causing him to violently turn on his grandpa — and prompting Crystal to stab her right through the hand with the knife she uses to filet fish. It’s gnarly.
By the time Max pulls up, it’s like the darkest-timeline meme from Community. Anna slips away in the confusion, swimming in the river to find safety. We’re in Cape Fear now, baby!
Apple TV
But you may have noticed that Max is getting backfooted for the first time in a long time. Anna’s call to him comes as a surprise, since she’s supposed to be Crystal’s prisoner by then. Her information, that Crystal killed Melissa while pregnant with a child of Max’s all her own, is brand new to him, and unpleasant enough that at least at first, he refuses to believe her. Finally, Max Cady has lost some control.
It gets worse for him. Whether it survives her dip into the river is unknown, but Anna secretly steals a USB drive containing Amy’s recordings of her incriminating conversations with Max.
Natalie similarly swipes the phone his daughter Neveah has been using to communicate with him, convincing the girl to lower her guard by seducing her and drawing out that her feelings for Natalie were sincere. The same, apparently, was not true in the other direction — it was a cold survival play, the kind of move we’re accustomed to seeing from, well, her parents. The whole storyline is steamy, sleazy, and vicious — the show in microcosm (complimentary.)
For her part, Noa bravely stands up to Max when he shows up at her office. Tom, too, tells Max off at first when he has a noose and a cell phone delivered to his cell and offers to spare Natalie and Zack if Tom kills himself. Max’s reaction, like so many of Javier Bardem’s choices in the roll, is hilarious, like he’s a little disappointed in Tom’s anger.
Apple TV
But by the end of the episode Zack has disappeared from his mental hospital, which Tom knows Max had been casing. Max may or may not have kidnapped Zack — it’s just as possible Zack, his old self again, broke out to try and get back to his family, who he doesn’t know are scattered to the four winds — but Tom thinks he did, and that noose beckons.
Suddenly I wonder if the tables will be turned in the finale. In previous iterations of the story, Max Cady assaults the Bowden family at Cape Fear. But Tom is in prison, Natalie is with Noa, and Zack is who knows where, possibly in Max’s trunk but most likely not given the timing. That leaves Anna alone with Max, Crystal, Robert, Luke, and mama Hester (Jill Larson). (Granted, she’s busy breastfeeding dolls she believes to be Crystal, but she’s still out there.) Will the finale, which I fully expect to be batshit insane, feature Anna as a one-woman army, an unstoppable force destroying the Cady family before it destroys hers?
Sean T. Collins (@seantcollins.com on Bluesky and theseantcollins on Patreon) has written about television for The New York Times, Vulture, Rolling Stone, and elsewhere. He is the author of Pain Don’t Hurt: Meditations on Road House. He lives with his family on Long Island.
