Sweetpea Recap: Ella Purnell Goes From Meek to Murderous in Starz Series’ Premiere — Plus, Grade It!
Exactly how far do you have to push a wallflower before she turns into a Venus flytrap?
That’s the question at the center of Starz’s Sweetpea, the dark comedy starring Ella Purnel (Yellowjackets, Fallout) that premiered Thursday. In a moment, we’re going to want to hear what you thought of the new series. But first, a quick recap:
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We meet Purnell’s Rhiannon as, via voiceover, she’s listing all the people she’d like to kill. The tally is long and includes “manspreaders” and “Norman from work,” but also her mom, who left when Rhiannon and her sister were children, and her dad, who’s dying. The possibility of Rhiannon carrying out any of these murders is highly unlikely: She’s a milquetoast low-talker, an administrative assistant at a small newspaper who can’t speak up in her own defense even when her boss throws his coat at her head every morning on his way into the office.
Rhiannon’s father, who is terminally ill, dies within the episode’s first few minutes. Before he goes, though, he encourages her to “learn to stand up for yourself.” The lesson doesn’t take root for a while, though. We watch her struggle through the funeral service (where she’s repeatedly referred to by the wrong name) and the reception afterward, an affair in which she makes awkward conversation with a guy she seems to fancy — but who doesn’t fancy chatting with her — and then dies a little inside when she realizes that her high school bully, Julia (Sense8‘s Nic?le Lecky), is in attendance.
Through flashbacks, we learn that Julia and her friends were so mean to Rhiannon back in the day that she developed crippling anxiety and started pulling out her own hair, so much so that she was forced to wear a wig (which Julia and her pals pulled off at a school dance, laughing and pointing). Julia’s on Rhiannon’s mental kill list, too, “for making me forever invisible and afraid.”
Rhiannon’s sister, Seren (The Musketeers‘ Alexandra Dowling), is unsympathetic to her plight and instead piles on by announcing that she wants to sell their father’s house… where Rhiannon still lives. Even worse? Julia is the real estate agent handling the sale.
At work, Rhiannon approaches her boss, Norman (Ted Lasso‘s Jeremy Swift), and asks to be considered for a junior reporter position; he patronizingly calls her “sweetpea” as he informs her she doesn’t have the “killer instinct” for the job. He then immediately hires AJ (Bridgerton‘s Calam Lynch), which throws Rhiannon into a rage-filled spiral. She follows AJ out of the office, knife in hand, but is brought up short when he engages her in conversation and apologizes for taking a job that he’s surmised she wanted.
Things go downhill from there (which is saying something). While walking her dog that evening, Rhiannon gets distracted by a giant billboard of Julia; the dog runs into traffic, is hit by a car and killed. She buries him, drinks a lot, then makes her way to a club where Seren said Julia would be that evening. “Stop pretending you don’t know what you did! You ruined my life!” Rhiannon yells at her former tormenter, who has been civil and polite to her to this point. “I don’t know who I am. You made me nothing!”
That’s when Julia’s true nature comes out. “You didn’t exist to me then,” she says coolly, “and you don’t now.”
Rhiannon leaves the club, sits under a nearby bridge, and cries. A guy taking a leak doesn’t realize she’s there and pees on her; when she protests, they get into a scuffle. She winds up cutting him with the switchblade she’s been carrying around all episode, and once she’s drawn blood, she snaps. She repeatedly plunges the knife into his neck, killing him. “Do you see me now?!” she wonders. When she realizes what’s happened, she rolls his body into the nearby river, buttons up her raincoat and leaves the scene.
At home, covered in her victim’s blood, Rhiannon washes her face and then roars as she gazes at herself in the bathroom mirror.
Now it’s your turn. What did you think of Sweetpea‘s premiere? Will you come back for Episode 2? Hit the comments with your thoughts!
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