Elephant in the Room
Season 1
Episode 3
Editor’s Rating
4 stars
****
It turns out that Nile’s psychotic and violent tendencies run in the family.
Photo: Chris Saunders/Netflix
Nile Jarvis’s psychopathy had to come from somewhere, and that somewhere is his father, Martin Jarvis (Jonathan Banks, whom you might recognize for his turn as Breaking Bad’s Mike). We had a brief glimpse of Martin in the last episode, when Aggie first looked up Abbott’s involvement in the Jarvis investigation: Father and son co-own MHJ Real Estate Corp. As it turns out, Martin is also Rick’s (his actual name, confirmed) older half-brother. We learn this when Rick goes over to Martin’s palatial estate to tell him about Aggie’s book.
Exactly what kind of twisted family is this? Well, it’s the kind in which 8-year-old twin brothers are encouraged to fight, literally, over their iPad. Martin lets them have at it. “Survival of the fittest,” Nile explains to Aggie over an interview, “that is my father’s dogma.” Martin is a tough, no-nonsense, Logan Roy kind of patriarch, inclined to making his children squirm. And having children he can torture is what matters to him. While Nile is driven by the desire to impose his phallus on the New York City skyline for posterity, Martin is driven by the desire to populate the earth with little Jarvises. The most disturbing (and telling) story Nile tells about Martin involves Nile’s late mother, whose cervical stenosis led her to miscarry literally a dozen times before her first child. “The pregnancy nearly killed her,” Nile says, and the doctor advised her to not have any more children. But Martin wouldn’t have that, and he wouldn’t have an adopted child, either. So his wife miscarried five more times before Nile and died of ovarian cancer. When Nile decided he wouldn’t have children of his own, Martin remarried and had IVF twins with “a new Mrs. Jarvis.”
So that’s the kind of guy we’re dealing with. He makes Nile seem like Mr. Rogers. In fact, he is the only person who can make Nile seem small. Nile was putting off telling his father about the book because he knew he would react badly. In Martin’s office, Nile seems actually scared. He even stutters. Martin can’t see the advantage of indulging a journalist’s scrutiny before Jarvis Yards is finished. As if this day couldn’t get any worse, Phineas — a councilman of New York and the Jarvis’s puppet in City Hall — comes by to tell them that Benitez has been able to flip some votes against phase two of the construction in the housing subcommittee by “exploiting Nile’s situation.” Phineas, who owes his seat to Jarvis’s contributions, looks on the verge of shitting his pants any second, but he assures them for now.
Seeing the way Nile carries himself around his father — like a bratty teenager who knows his superiority ends where his father’s begins — proves that Nile has his own vulnerabilities. And seeing the way his father speaks to him makes me believe him when he tells Aggie that the reason he won’t have kids is because he would love them too much. “Is that possible?” Aggie asks. “You tell me,” he replies, knowing that Aggie’s own intense love for her son has, in the past, gotten in her way. In the way of her marriage, for example. Nina wasn’t just paying lip service when she said she liked Shelley’s painting — she liked it so much that she schleps to Bushwick to check out Shelley’s open studio. She introduces herself as the owner of the Jacon Gallery, a place where artists get made before being scooped by Gagosian. Though at first, Shelley is suspicious that Aggie asked Nina to go there, Nina assures her that she’s there on the strength of Shelley’s work.
The notion that Aggie is spending her time trying to advance her career is a delusion on Shelley’s part; what Aggie is really doing is reviewing Teddy Fenig’s case file with Abbott. She meets him in his six-year temporary apartment, where he absconded after things with his ex “unravelled epically” in the wake of the Jarvis case. Again, she tries to convince him of Nile’s potential involvement in Teddy’s death. Every aspect of the case, from the note (“I’m sorry for the pain I’ve caused”) to the fact that no one saw anything, points to suicide. But Madison Jarvis left a note, too. What if Nile forced Teddy to write his? Doesn’t his handwriting seem kind of shaky? Nina was upstate that night, so Nile was free to come and go as he wished. (Aggie looks increasingly ready for the tinfoil hat as she suggests these theories.) When Abbott points out that there’s no way to know where Nile was that night, Aggie remembers that he wears a smart ring that tracks his every movement and stores it all in his laptop, to which Aggie has clocked the password.
Abbott thinks Nile would’ve been smart enough to turn the thing off before committing murder, but Aggie knows that the ring activates automatically when the wearer’s heart rate shoots above 90 bpm. Surely, strangling someone to death, you’d break a sweat? But if Nile is really as cold-blooded as Aggie thinks, maybe he wouldn’t have; especially if all that jogging has him in decent cardiovascular shape. The only way to know is to look at the data, so Aggie decides that she will steal it from Nile’s computer. At first, Abbott is resistant to Aggie’s beckoning him to the rabbit hole, but a demented twinkle gradually appears in his eye. None of what they find — if they even find anything — would be admissible in court, but he knows a digital-forensics analyst. This turn in the plot is as good a PSA against wearing these data trackers as any. (For complimentary reading, this piece by Andrea González-Ramírez freaked me out a few months ago.)
For his part, Nile wants to know what possessed Rick to tell Martin about the book. We learn some important information through their conversation, namely that Martin had a heart attack after the whole Nile-Madison debacle. Rick is so hellbent on avoiding the possibility of his older brother having another episode that he took it upon himself to snoop around Aggie’s office, which clears Nina’s name of collusion. What exactly Rick’s whole deal is continues to be unclear. Okay, he’s an ex-felon. But what does he do at Nile’s house? Is he a security guard? A butler? Just a sweet, dog-loving man trapped in a scary guy’s body? When Aggie asks Nile this same question later, he only shrugs that Rick “takes care of the dogs.” Nile is unfazed by Rick until the moment he tells him that Aggie has been talking to Abbott. Then, he nearly loses it.
Nile calls Aggie and demands that she meet him at Jarvis Yards. Abbott advises her not to go, but Nile leaves her no choice; so they all end up going, Abbott included. He gives Aggie a number for a burner phone and tells her he’ll wait nearby. The ensuing sequence is the tensest in the show so far. Nile takes Aggie over 20 floors up in the half-constructed building onto a ledge with an insane view of Manhattan and no protection against the steep drop. He asks her if she’s been talking to Abbott. She tells him yes; he’s one of her sources. For two years before Madison went missing, he investigated Jarvis for financial crimes. The man is obsessed, and a crucial part of the story. Besides, Nile has no right to meddle with her process. When Nile says maybe the book is not such a good idea, you can feel Aggie getting bigger. If he won’t talk to her, she’ll write the unauthorized version of the book, one that relies mainly on the accounts of people like Abbott, who are dead set on his guilt. It seems Nile has forgotten that, however brittle she may seem, Aggie is not scared of him. He can’t threaten her into having “editorial control.” Ultimately, she agrees to let him read the first hundred pages, in secret; and to attend Nile’s twin brothers’ birthday party the next day.
Aggie is shaking like a leaf by the time she gets back to Abbott’s car, but at least they laugh about the fact that the Jarvises are renting an elephant for the party. Also, Abbott has started speaking in the first person plural: Her going to the party is “an opening for us.” As laser-focused as she is on her own aims, Aggie can’t see how harmful this could all be for Abbott. The only person who has that perspective is Erika, who calls him just as he’s about to break into Nile’s house the next afternoon. He calls in sick to work and lies to Erika about the extent of his involvement. It seems unwise for him not to give her the time of day; she has her own stuff going — directing Frank to their daughter’s EpiPen through the phone, for example — and might not always be there to cover his ass.
But if people were reasonable, we wouldn’t have television! Aggie waits to see that Nile and Nina have left to give Abbott the go-ahead and drive to the party herself. Abbott throws roofied treats to the Shepherds and covers the security cameras before Inspector Gadget–ing his way into the house. It’s impressive recon work on Aggie’s part to get Nile’s password right — Abbott gets into the computer and downloads it to a thumb drive. It’s amazing that no matter how far technology goes, there will always be a thumb drive in a show like this. We’ll be watching TV behind our eyelids and crime plots will still involve a thumb drive. As the info downloads, Abbott looks around. A picture of Madison and Nile throws him back to a traumatic memory of when she confronted him as he arrested Nile, however many years ago.
The party for the twins rages on. The theme is less “safari” and more “British people in Africa,” given that the kids are playing cricket and dressed as characters in Tarzan. Seeing all of those kids reminds Aggie of yelling at Cooper as they were getting ready to go somewhere, and the memory so rattles her that she absconds behind a wall to smoke a cigarette. A woman working the party tries to tell her she can’t smoke, but Nile arrives in time to save her a couple of drags. When she tells him that she hasn’t been around kids since Cooper died, Nile seems genuinely affected. He tries to lift her mood by wise-cracking about the party and the people in attendance. He tells her a story about a time when he was a kid and jumped out of his bedroom window, just to see what it was like.
Nile introduces Aggie to Martin, but he is not in the mood. His bad vibe only plunges further with Phineas’s approach, who has come to tell them that he is flipping his own vote in the housing subcommittee against the Jarvis Yards development, in an attempt to save his seat in the upcoming elections. “We’ve lost the PR war,” Phineas manages to get out, sweating bullets. After Martin reminds Phineas that they have funded his campaigns for over a decade, Nile instructs him to get the fuck off their property. When Nile comes to pick Nina up, Nina tells Aggie that she has offered Shelley a show at her gallery. Nina is surprised that Aggie is not happy with the news. We know that something deeper is going on, obviously — jealousy, resentment — but Aggie is not wrong when she says that Shelley working with Nina presents a slight conflict of interest for the book: It can’t look like the Jarvises are trying to positively influence the way she sees them. Nina’s look here is the most malicious she’s ever had. And she won’t forget it: When they get home, she tells Nile that they need to talk about Aggie.
Their conversation has to wait, though, because Nile hears the dogs barking in the backyard. They are barking at Abbott, who just managed to jump over the wall after getting his leg destroyed by one of the very much awake Shepherds in his escape. I know the dog is being violent and everything, but it was still sad when Abbott punched him. Maybe he could have avoided both getting bitten and having to punch a dog if he had left when Aggie told him to, which was as soon as Nile and Nina left the party. (By the way, does she think it’d be a good idea to maybe change Abbott’s name on her phone?) But by the time he got her call, the download was still at 72 percent. He waited for the 100 percent. It cost him a piece of his thigh, but he made it out with the thumb drive.
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