SPOILER ALERT: This post contains spoilers for all eight episodes of “All Her Fault,” now streaming on Peacock.
In the final moments of Peacock’s twisty limited series “All Her Fault,” Peter Irvine died as he lived: misguidedly believing he was still the hero of his family.
Across eight episodes — the series from creator Megan Gallagher, based on the 2021 novel by Andrea Mara — slowly but intentionally contradicted its own title by absolving the women at its center for the perceived failings of their families, which they often bear no matter who is actually at fault. Marissa (Sarah Snook) is accused of negligent parenting when her son Milo is kidnapped during a playdate she’d casually scheduled over text. Jenny (Dakota Fanning) is charged with letting her job cloud her judgment by failing to properly screen Carrie (Sophia Lillis), the nanny who used her family to get close to Milo. Carrie, meanwhile, is villainized for her admittedly deluded quest to reunite with her biological son in a world that has dismissed them. But in the end, their stories were deeper than the aspersions cast upon them. Instead, the blame for the botched kidnapping plot, the shocking revelation of a long-held family secret and a soapy baby swap all landed on the shoulders of Marissa’s husband Peter (Jake Lacy), who was the lynchpin in it all.
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By the season’s end, in fact, more than a few travesties are laid at Peter’s feet. First, it’s revealed that the whole kidnapping was rooted in a car crash five years earlier on the night he and Marissa brought their newborn son home. Peter was driving when their car collided with the one carrying Carrie and her own newborn. The Irvines’ son died in the crash, and Peter used the cover of the most inexplicably desolate street in Chicago to switch his body for Carrie’s healthy son while the two women lay unconscious. Years later, Carrie figured out what had happened and kidnapped Milo in the hopes that forcing Peter and Marissa to reveal the truth might get her son back. But through a series of (further) unfortunate events, Carrie’s plan unraveled thanks to her own unpredictable father, whom Peter killed during a failed ransom drop and then staged the miraculous return of Milo. This all happens while Peter has been at home playing the role of concerned but aloof husband. Further complicating matters are the tidal wave of family secrets exposed by the strain Milo’s disappearance put on Peter and his siblings, Brian (Daniel Monks) and Lia (Abby Elliott). Just as Peter is trying desperately to conceal his shared history with Carrie, Brian and Lia come to realize that the original sin of their family –– the time when Brian was injured and permanently disabled as a child –– was not actually Lia’s fault, as Peter had always led them believe. Rather, he was the one who accidentally hurt his brother, setting up a lifelong lie that led to Lia’s drug addiction, Brian’s struggle to live independently — and Peter’s demonstratively needy and controlling behavior, which has turned murderous.
When the gunsmoke finally clears, Peter had killed Carrie in front of Marissa to silence her; their family friend Colin (Jay Ellis), who was secretly sleeping with Lia, has also been shot and killed (by Carrie) in the struggle; and Peter is left to continue (unsuccessfully) gaslighting his family into thinking he is the good guy for spilling blood in the name of protecting them. It is a massive amount of guilt to lay on one character, but Gallagher liked muddying up a man with needy emotional baggage for once.
“I see it so often with scary or bad female characters that are scary or bad because they, as women, are obsessed with relationships or need love in some way,” Gallagher tells Variety. “We don’t see male characters, who are our bad guys, operating from a place of needing love. So I was enormously excited to develop a male character who is the root cause of our problems in this series, and all of his decisions and poor decisions at that come from needing to be loved and needing people to need him. He just can’t function without that.”
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For his part, Lacy found the fatty layers of lies that Peter has added over time to be a fascinating character study in not only narcissism, but also the struggle of a compulsive liar trying to keep the charade of his life going after one self-induced tragedy after another.
“He fully believes in his own existential innocence in each of these situations, and that lack of willingness to accept responsibility or accountability is really the most damning thing in the end,” Lacy says. “He can’t see or hear another person’s perspective outside of his own. I think it is what drives Marissa to kill him. There is no path forward with this person in their lives, and his reality and her reality are getting further and further apart from one another.”
Marissa does, in fact, kill her husband in the final episode, not because she is just as cruel as he is but because she has no other choice. She knows telling the truth about why Carrie kidnapped Milo might get him taken away. But by not turning Peter in, she also becomes somewhat complicit in his opportunistic murder of poor Carrie, which he can dangle over Marissa should she try to leave him. With no other options, Marissa uses Peter’s vulnerabilities against him as he did so many others, specifically his soy allergy. With just a touch of it on her lips from the hors d’oeuvres at Colin’s funeral, she induces an allergic reaction and, wouldn’t you know, she happens only to have an expired EpiPen. In Mara’s book, Peter’s death is revealed in a newspaper-clipping coda at the end of the story. But Gallagher couldn’t bear robbing the audience — and Marissa — of the satisfaction of his downfall.
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“It’s too big of a moment to be off screen,” she says. “Marissa is the heart and soul of the series, and it’s such a great way to end a book, with the newspaper clipping, which I absolutely love. But in a series, we want to see it, and we want to be with her during the decision making. We know what’s going to happen, really before it happens, we just don’t know how. That’s the fun of it. You love this character so much after eight episodes, and you know she’s not an irrational person, or an evil or bad person. But she’s still gonna do this thing, because her back is truly up against the wall. What is Option B? There isn’t one, really. So it’s about wanting to be with her, this relatable woman, doing this thing that feels bananas to us, but we think we might also do in her position. I couldn’t bear to have it off screen.”
Right to the end, Peter fights not only the soy that is tightening his throat with each passing second, but also the loss of control that he so desperately clung to since he was a child cleaning up his horrible mistakes. Even up to the moment he has to untie his tie and face the reality of the situation, Lacy notes that Peter is still playing the diplomatic husband role, telling Marissa it’s OK she might have touched soy or forgotten his epipen. It’s only in her quiet, unspoken glare directed at him as he suffocates that he realizes the trap he’s fallen into.
“Peter knows it’s the end of the road,” Lacy says. “I mean, obviously, he’s dying. But to the last breath, I think he is sure that he will find a way back. That the medics will show up and they’ll put the paddles on and then he’ll be back. I don’t think that ego, or that belief in his own infallibility, ceases in the end or that he succumbs to any of it. He fights right to the end, and there is a fury in him at the person, who he believes he’s done all of this for, who is now killing him.”
Those who read Mara’s book prior to watching the series might feel like Lacy’s Peter is even more unforgivably cruel, in part because of the additions Gallagher and her writers made to the story. The biggest change is the deepening of the Irvine siblings’ story, specifically with the inclusion of Brian’s disability. From a character perspective, Brian’s need for support puts him in a place where he doesn’t feel like he can reject Peter’s constant, selfish supervision. Peter has trapped his sibling in a vicious cycle of need, one meant to foster some form of absolution for his secrets.
“Peter’s goal is to keep Brian on his feet,” Lacy says. “Whether that’s an experimental surgery or pain meds or whatever it takes to keep him up and mobile, that’s Peter’s goal because that represents a kind of quote-unquote normalcy that somehow undoes the damage he’s done to his brother.”
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From a storytelling standpoint, Gallagher saw the necessary expansion of Mara’s book as a unique and personal opportunity to represent the spectrum of disabilities. In addition to Brian’s story, Michael Peña’s Detective Alcaras is working to place his son, who has severe learning disabilities, into a specialized school.
“I had the space to develop the Irvine siblings a lot more, so putting that storyline there really tells us a lot about Peter and who he is and what he’s capable of,” Gallagher says. “But the deeper, emotional thing behind it all, especially when it comes to Michael Peña’s storyline, is that I have a disabled child. It just seemed like this was the kind of story that allowed me to put two different kinds of disability on the screen. One being cognitive, which his son is grappling with, and, as a parent, dealing with how to navigate work and how to protect a child that is going to have needs for the rest of his life. And there’s the disability of Brian, and just being to be really truthful about all of that in some meaningful way, and try to capture it correctly. In other words, it came from my heart.”
Beyond representation, the deeply rendered stories of living with a disability provide just one more means of indicting Peter’s character in the end. It’s a different kind of villainy not only to blame his family for his actions, but then to use the prison of that guilt and shame to reap love from them at his discretion. It’s all Peter knows, and that’s why he’s so desperate to hold onto it when Carrie finally confronts the family in the house in Episode 8. For Lacy, Carrie’s death (which unfolds “off screen” in the book) is the moment that sealed Peter’s fate.
“That scene — and maintaining the reality of the Peter that we’ve built to that point — hinges on grabbing this gun and saying, ‘Let go!, as though Carrie is holding this weapon,” Lacy says. “Even though she’s saying, ‘Take it, take it, take it!’ She is trying to get her hands free of it. But instead, we see him both overpowering her and then simultaneously building the narrative of self-defense as he moves in to kill her. It all hinges on that, because then you move right into some severe gaslighting, or an attempt at gaslighting, in which he’s telling Marissa that the thing you saw is not the thing you saw.
“That’s not a sane person. There’s no living with that person.”