Nearly four months have passed since the last episode of Under the Bridge, and the wheels of alleged justice are turning quickly. Josephine, Maya, Laila and Dusty have been sentenced for aggravated assault, all now residing in the Youth Detention Center of Victoria. Rebecca’s taken a kind of center stage in trial discourse, appearing on a news report as a “writer from New York City” (oh, the simple glamour of being a Writer From New York City!) who’s working on a book about the murder for Simon & Schuster. Warren’s trial is days away, and Kelly’s will commence after that.
But the respective outcomes for Warren and Kelly seem pre-set. Rebecca tells reporters that true “justice” for Reena can’t be accomplished without acknowledging the disparity between Warren and Kelly’s circumstances; that Warren has no familial support while Kelly’s got two loving, wealthy parents who’ve hired “BC’s best lawyer” (played by the same guy who straightwashed Lez Girls in Season Five of The L Word, just saying) to represent their deranged daughter.
Rebecca can’t square Warren’s personality with what he’s been accused of — and honestly, can we? He comes off so vulnerable and guileless, and not in the way that a terrible person hides their true nature beneath an innocent veneer. He does come off innocently, but someone else will have to decide how much that actually matters.
In “Three and Seven,” we get, at least, a much clearer picture of what happened in Warren’s life on the day of Reena’s murder. Warren’s day began with his Dad calling him to say he’d met a woman and was staying in Vegas, a city impossibly far away from Victoria. Then, another blow: they’re getting evicted from the trailer where Warren’s been living. In five minutes, he looses his family and his home. Becca’s voiceover, the words she’s (handwriting?) in the draft of her book, sums it up thusly: “Warren, like most kids, didn’t know how to describe what he was feeling. Warren did not know there were words like humiliation and shame. So, he thought it was maybe anger. This emotion that he felt when he did things he would later regret.”
While Rebecca’s overwhelmed by her desire to protect Warren, Cameron’s continuing to edge away from her father’s black-and-white version of justice and protection and towards her own gut, which aches for Dusty. Cam is sent to juvie to convince Dusty to testify. Dusty’s been keeping to herself and reading a lot, staying away from the other girls. Her innocence, too, is heartbreaking. Her hurt is right there at the surface where Cam can touch it. Cam doesn’t convince Dusty to testify, instead she simply lays out her options.
Dusty can refuse to testify, and be held in contempt. She can admit she lied in the statement she signed asserting that Warren confessed the murder to her, but that could add more time to her sentence. If she sticks to the untrue story, that’s perjury. She’s screwed no matter what. Dusty breaks down crying. Reena was her friend, she admits to Cam. Reena trusted her. She should’ve protected her and she didn’t. So whatever happens to Dusty, well, she just wants to do the right thing.
Cam can’t sit with this. She knows that Dusty deserves mercy. Maybe she sees some version of her life in Dusty’s. The rules that have created a quagmire around Dusty, that have given her a list of equally terrible options, exist to be followed but will do nothing to help Dusty, or Reena, or society at large.
So Cam goes to her father’s place, where he’s working out in the garage. Cam tells him she’ll testify that the confession was coerced if they force Dusty to take the stand. She is willing, and maybe, at this point, even eager, to lose her badge for it. For the entirety of this scene, Cam is literally holding the punching bag. The symbolism!
“You’re starting to sound a lot like Rebecca Godfrey,” he tells her. She doesn’t respond to that. While Cam is still resistant to Rebecca’s overall mentality, and Becca’s compassion for Warren, she’s smart and empathetic and can see the situation just as clearly — that losing every one of these kids won’t make Reena’s life any less lost.
Dusty’s situation is not solely a result of her own actions but also a result of being a kid with limited options. She had to falsely accuse Warren to remain a member of Josephine’s family, because that family was all she had left.
During Warren’s testimony, we’ll see snatches of what he remembers from that wasted evening by the bridge, the one he barreled into overwhelmed with frustration and confusion and sick. We see the awful moment in which he chose to kick Reena. It’s mostly predictable, but one detail stood out for me — that after the initial assault, Warren had laid down on a bench by the river to sleep, having no actual home in which to do so. That’s where he is when Kelly walks by, in search of someone stronger to help her finish the job with Reena, although of course she doesn’t tell Warren she wants to kill Reena, only that she wants to make sure she’s okay, and make sure she’s sorry. Perhaps if he’d had somewhere else to sleep, he wouldn’t have been there at all, perhaps if he wasn’t shitfaced and angry and sad, he wouldn’t have believed Kelly, or followed her, lacking any feasible or immediate reason why not. Perhaps Reena would still be alive.
For Dusty, Josephine’s acceptance is the bench Warren had decided to sleep on.
“People can do horrible things and that doesn’t make them inherently evil,” Rebecca says to her father when he reads pages of her gradually-forming book and asks why she’s so focused on Warren. She wants to challenge the reader to see, as so many criminal justice reform and prison abolitionists want society to see, “that the worst thing he did isn’t who he is.”
Becca’s Dad also makes the very valid point that there’s not a lot of Reena in Becca’s book thus far. So Becca goes to see the Virks. She nervously smokes a joint in her car beforehand with the windows closed, then sprays herself with perfume like a teenager in a school bathroom, delusional about the powers of obscurification provided by a bottle of Bath & Body Works Plumeria. Again, Suman’s hardened pain and Manjit’s pure love are so clear it makes me want to cry to even remember it.
When they ask Becca what Reena’s friends said about her, she has little to offer. She didn’t know Reena, hasn’t talked to many people who knew Reena. It’s perhaps the episode’s most painful, fumbling moment. (It’s no wonder that in real life, Manjit wrote his own book, too: Reena: A Father’s Story.)
As for Cam and Rebecca, it’s unclear what’s transpired between them over the past four months — seemingly, not much, and with so much left to wrap up next week, it feels unlikely we’ll get a repeat of that electric bathroom scene. When they pass each other at the Detention Center — Rebecca is loading Warren’s commissary account after a visit when Cam’s on her way to see Dusty — they acknowledge each other tersely, through abbreviated and quickly withdrawn eye contact. I’d assumed this was simply how they had to react to each other in public, lest their association jeopardize Cam’s authority.
But a scene later in the episode, after the conclusion of Warren’s trial but before sentencing, seems to suggest the two may have been estranged for the past few months.
Becca, losing what is likely a familiar fight with insomnia, ends up at Cam’s, where Cam is sleeping on the couch (generally an objective sign of unwellness). Becca shows up in her grandpa pajamas, telling Cam she can’t sleep like it’s a problem Cam has no choice but to solve. Their psychic bond is clearly unconditional, there’s some kind of muted understanding between them that transcends any circumstance, and a comfort they provide each other that enables them both to finally get some rest.
The next morning, Becca wakes up in Cam’s bed, and Cam enters carrying Gabe’s suit. She says Warren gave it to Cam when he was arrested, asking her to return it to Becca. This is the moment at which I wondered… how is this the first opportunity Cam’s had to return this suit??? They haven’t hung out or hooked up in FOUR MONTHS? Or did Cam just not want to give it to her until now?
“Becca, I can’t pretend to know what’s going on in your mind,” Cam says, perhaps an evergreen statement. “But you know that Gabe and Warren are nothing alike.”
Becca then explains something we’ve discussed in the recaps and comments before — that Becca doesn’t see Gabe in Warren. She sees herself, and doesn’t understand why it’s so crazy to see the side of Warren that isn’t “the one horrible mistake he made in his life.” Cam wants her to stop calling it a mistake. Becca wants to know if Cam still believes something she apparently told Becca a while ago, that Gabe would still be here if it wasn’t for her. She feels like Cam still looks at her like the person who killed Gabe.
Cam doesn’t say yes or no, if she still believes what she said back then. She can only cry and shrug and tear up: “I don’t know.” Cam could give Becca peace of mind on this but in this moment, isn’t ready or willing to do so.
It aches how we do this, how we try to give mercy to others because we don’t know how to give it to ourselves — but also how we hurt people because we don’t know what to do with our own hurt.
The judge gives Warren a life sentence. Rebecca hugs him as he leaves the courtroom as Reena’s parents look on, dismayed. In real life, Manjit wasn’t present for Warren’s trial. My grief had sapped my body and soul of all vital energy, he writes in Reena: A Father’s Story.
Meanwhile, throughout the episode, Kelly has been working her parents, her lawyer and the system to further screw over her friends while ensuring her own freedom. Kelly coos to her lawyer that “it’s not fair, I’m just a little girl,” after sharing a letter reading KEEP AWAY FROM ELLARD that she claims was taped to her door. She clearly wrote it herself. She provokes her friends who’ve already been sentenced to hit her so she can flail dramatically on the floor, moaning for help, claiming victimhood.
It works. Kelly’s wealth and privilege earns her the ability to manipulate the system into giving her a pre-trial release. She hugs Josephine goodbye, lying that she’s definitely gonna get Josephine out too, before literally skipping down the hallway. The person at the dead center of all of this, the most dangerous, twisted person of all, skips down the hallway, leaves the building, free as a bird.
