The Luminaries Season 1, Episode 3 recap: Anna’s downward spiral

In The Luminaries Season 1, Episode 3, “Leverage,” we find out what started Anna’s downward spiral and how she came to work for Dick Mannering (Erik Thomson). Crosbie causes significant problems for Lydia and Francis.

Caution: The following article contains spoilers for The Luminaries Season 1, Episode 3. 

The third hour of The Luminaries fills in many of the blanks between the present-day Anna and the one we met in the past. We know that Anna eventually ends up at Crosbie Wells’s murder scene, but we were previously left in the dark about how she would find herself in such a precarious predicament.

“Leverage” demonstrates that Anna’s downward spiral happens swiftly. One of the critical things to remember is that Anna has no money and no place to go outside of Lydia’s hotel. So if she loses her good grace with Lydia, then she’s out on her own. That’s exactly what happens in this episode.

Things go terribly awry during Lydia’s big Tuesday night party when Francis and Crosbie come face-to-face. They get into a physical fight, with Crosbie almost killing Francis. Instead, he leaves him with a severe facial scar and then takes off into the night, leaving Anna to fend for herself. The next day, Lydia throws Anna out of the house, blaming her for what happened to Francis.

The Luminaries Season 1, Episode 3 recap: Anna starts working for Mannering.

When she no longer has Lydia’s hospitality to take care of her, Anna is forced to turn to Dick Mannering. A gun-toting pimp, Mannering is just as slimy and sleazy as one would expect. He takes Anna to the goldfields to work as a prostitute. There he happens to find those mysterious dresses washed up ashore — the ones with gold sewn into the seams.

That’s how Anna comes to be in possession of the pink dress she’s seen wearing in the future. It’s also this occupation that leads Anna to become an opiate addict. She starts taking it to cope with the horrors of her new job. And while she’s there, she runs into Mr. Sook, who has also become an addict.

He says it’s Anna’s fault because she gave him laudanum for his pain, and he was later arrested for public intoxication and shipped off to work a laborious job in the fields. They seem to become allies by the end of the episode. In the final moments of the episode, it’s revealed that Anna is pregnant. When asked who’s child it is, she responds, “Mine.”

The Luminaries Season 1, Episode 3 recap: Crosbie crosses paths with Emery.

So, back to those dresses that Lydia filled with gold. She and Francis used them to blackmail Lauderback into giving them possession of his ship Godspeed. But when Crosbie fled, he immediately went to the ship and boarded it as a stowaway. He knew that Lydia had taken the gold there but didn’t know where it was, so he tried to get the captain to let him find it.

That doesn’t go as planned. Instead, the captain takes Crosbie as a prisoner. Crosbie jumps overboard and washes up ashore the first chance he gets, where he runs into Emery and Tauwhare. Tauwhare helps him get out of his handcuffs.

We know that Tauwhare will consider Crosbie to be like a brother to him later on, so this is the beginning of what will become an important friendship. And this meeting brings us one step closer to Emery and Anna reuniting, along with the reasoning behind Emery and Tauwhare being present alongside Anna at Crosbie’s murder scene.

New episodes of The Luminaries Season 1 air Sunday nights at 9:30 p.m. ET on Starz.