‘Bad Sisters’ Season 1 Recap: What To Keep In Mind For Season 2
Another season of Bad Sisters from creator Sharon Horgan, based on Malin-Sarah Gozin’s 2012 Belgian television series Clan, is underway on Apple TV+ with all five Garvey sisters returning alongside newcomers Fiona Shaw and Thaddea Graham.
Following the wild pattern of events that unfolded in the first season, a murder mystery still haunts Eva (Horgan), Grace (Anne-Marie Duff), Ursula (Eva Birthistle), Bibi (Sarah Greene) and Becka (Eve Hewson) Garvey. The suspense and — at times — silliness as well as sisterhood continues with the first two episodes arriving Nov. 13 followed by one per week through December 23.
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Read on for what to remember from Bad Sisters Season 1 ahead of Season 2.
The Prick, aka Grace’s Husband, Is Dead
Season 1 of Bad Sisters builds up to the death of John Paul (JP) Williams (Claes Bang), husband of Grace (Anne-Marie Duff) one of the five Garvey sisters. The story weaves a back and forth narrative that shifts between before he died and after he died, getting closer and closer to the truth behind his death. He is called “The Prick” because of his unforgivable behavior not only towards the Garvey sisters, but especially toward Grace, his wife. He made her feel small, and he restricted both her activity and that of their daughter Blanaid (Saise Quinn).
As the season unravels, viewers learn that first Eva and Bibi alone tried to kill JP by creating a gas explosion in his and Grace’s vacation cabin, but that didn’t work because he happened to be outside trying to call Eva when the conflagration took place. Bibi and Eva then roped Ursula, who is a nurse, into the plot. Urse tried to contribute various substances like poison and pentobarbital to smother the Prick, but the failed poisoned liver experiment ended up taking the life of Oscar the family dog instead of JP, and the pentobarbital somehow didn’t take him out. In fact, he tried to drive with the drugs in his system, and he went to the nearby harbor to try and get on his boat, but he fell in the water. Eva’s coworker Gabriel (Assaad Bouab) saved him from drowning.
Once Becka got in on the plans, she created an elaborate plan to lock John Paul in the basement freezer at his parents’ house, where he happened to be storing the dead body of his father George. Eva did not want Becka to go through with this plan, but she attempted it anyway, and she thought she was successful because somebody went in the freezer, but it turned out that that had been JP’s mother Minna (Nina Norén) with whom Becka had bonded.
Grace Did It
In the finale of Season 1, titled “Saving Grace,” viewers learn that Grace and Grace alone killed her husband by choking him to death after he was particularly nasty to her and revealed that he had raped Eva. Inspired by the film Isadora starring Vanessa Redgrave, Grace knit a red scarf and placed JP on their ATV with the scarf wrapped around his neck and caught in the wheel of the car to make it look like he got choked by accident.
Her neighbor Roger Muldoon (Michael Smiley) helped her arrange the body, and he kept the secret as well.
All Five Garvey Sisters Had Motive To Kill JP
Eva worked with Jon Paul, and he beat her out for a promotion unfairly when he hinted to their boss that she might be unfit for the role because of her relationship with alcohol, only hinted at by one photograph of her passed out on the boat the morning after Grace’s 35th birthday party. This is also when JP raped Eva, which also resulted in her miscarriage of a pregnancy that she had tried so hard for. In the more present time of the show, she has given up trying to conceive, and viewers learn that this came between her and a man she loved, who she runs into one day with his wife and children.
JP was the reason Bibi lost her right eye. They were driving home one rainy night, and he sped on the road in a mean-spirited way. Suddenly when he braked, Eva’s face came down on a religious statuette he had on the dashboard of his car.
Ursula was having an affair with a man named Ben (Peter Coonan), who was her “photography teacher.” JP discovered this early on, and he threatened to tell her husband Donal (Jonjo O’Neill), but she prevented that. JP even went as far as to put his number in her phone under Ben’s contact information and got Ursula to send him a nude, which he texted to Donal. She rushed to the hospital where they both work to delete the messages from his phone before he could see them. There was a moment last season when Donal questioned why Ursula wasn’t home all the time.
Becka was screwed over financially by JP. He offered to fund her massage business, but then he took back his word, and he made Grace go tell Becka. Becka signed the deposit she wanted to put down on a studio for work before JP reneged.
Claffin & Sons Insurance Dug Up All The Details
Thomas Claffin (Brian Gleeson) and his half brother Matt (Daryl McCormack) drove the investigation behind the death of John Paul Williams at first because Thomas knew that his father’s life insurance company couldn’t pay out the claim for John Paul’s policy. Even though they had no real jurisdiction to do so, the pair questioned all five sisters to poke holes in their narrative and find grounds to avoid paying out.
Thomas’ wife was pregnant last season with a baby on the way, and Matt fell hard for Becka Garvey with neither of them realizing the seriousness of their flirtatious connection until a few episodes into Season 1. Thomas weaseled his way into persuading Inspector Gergal Loftus (Barry Ward) to exhume John Paul’s body by tricking Grace into signing the paperwork without realizing what she was doing.
Matt is the one who fully figured out what Grace did when he put the puzzle pieces together at the cabin, and after Becka couldn’t drug him with pentobarbital, which he never realized was a possibility, he agreed to keep all the information a secret if Grace dropped the life insurance claim.
JP Hid His Father’s Dead Body at the Bottom of the Backyard Pond
Before he met his end, JP decided to hide the frozen dead body of his father, who was not a nice man, at the bottom of their large pond in the backyard of his parents’ home. He watched his father die choking on an acrylic eyeball that he used in his taxidermy of animals in the basement, and he didn’t do anything to stop the moment. He poured the whole bowl of eyeballs from his dad’s hobby into the lake after the suitcase. This marks the connection for Season 2.
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