Mr. Mercedes recap: 'Willow Lake' 

Every unforgettable moment, every gorgeous dress.

Well all right! After weeks of buildup and maneuvering,

finally exploded this week, with tragic results for several characters.

As usual, Bill Hodges starts this episode by trying to make up for whatever he messed up last week. This time, it’s his relationship with Jerome. Bill approaches his young friend in the middle of lawn-mowing duties in order to explain his behavior. He knows the Mercedes killer is dangerous so he wants to keep Jerome away as much as possible, but he also really needs help with all the computer stuff. Once again, it’s hard for Jerome to turn down the excitement of working on this high-stakes investigation, so he agrees to help Bill hack into Olivia Trelawney’s laptop.

When he gets to the diner, he meets the newest member of the team: Holly Gibney. It turns out that Holly, too, has a knack for computers, and saves Jerome’s skin when he first tries to hack the laptop. She points out that his method would lead to the hard drive erasing itself (stupid Apple) and suggests a different, more effective method. Bill, of course, is totally lost, so he goes off to help Janey prepare for her mother’s funeral while the whiz kids get to work. Eventually they are able to hack through her laptop, but all they see on her desktop is an encrypted text file labeled “Sessions.” Holly points out that Olivia didn’t know how to encrypt files (she wasn’t any better at computers than her old nemesis Bill, apparently), so someone else must have put it there. Was it something Brady sent her?

Speaking of Brady, it’s an eventful day at work for him. When he arrives at the shop, Lou informs him that a manager is there, and he’s called a company-wide meeting. Once that meeting actually happens, we get our first real look at one of this world’s major villains. Since the moment Brady murdered all those people waiting in line for a job fair,

has been drenched in the miasma of the Great Recession. Bill has driven down streets listening to speeches from President Obama saying the recession is over, even while the dilapidated houses and miserable people he drives by indicate that it has not. A few weeks ago, we got Brady challenging his mother’s nostalgia for her parents’ world of secure jobs and comfortable lifestyles. Where did that world go?

Here’s where it went. To this guy. The electronics executive is about as wicked a caricature of predatory late capitalism as you could find. He separates the world into “winners” and “losers.” By that ideology, he labels Frobisher (a spineless ladder-climber) and Brady (a merciless serial killer) as “winners” because they give him profits, but Lou (a sensitive soul who cares about people and is offended by prejudice) is a “loser.” Since the company made 1 percent less profit than expected, Lou gets fired to make up the difference. Obviously that difference would never come out of this besuited executive’s own massive salary, and obviously Frobisher and Brady do absolutely nothing to stick up for her. 

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