The Sinner Season 4 premiere recap: Part I
By Ariba Bhuvad
The Sinner Season 4 officially premiered this week, and dare I say, we’re right back into the thick of what makes this show work so well. However, I will say that Harry Ambrose (Bill Pullman) probably needs to retire from getting caught up in weird situations. And I say this because Season 4 feels like it’s going to get really weird.
Things pick up about a year after the Jamie Burns (Matt Bomer) debacle, and in that time, Ambrose has retired from the force. However, visions of him shooting and killing Jamie haunt him every single night. But he is in a relationship with Sonya (Jessica Hecht), the strange painter from last season.
Sonya and Ambrose jet off to Hanover Island in Maine to get some relaxation time, but on cue, things take a weird turn upon their arrival. Ambrose meets a young woman named Percy Muldoon (Alice Kremelberg), the heir to her family’s fishing empire. They have an interesting encounter, and later that night, it gets stranger when Ambrose ends up seeing her walk off a cliff.
However, the real mystery here is whether or not Percy actually fell to her death–more on that below in this week’s recap of The Sinner Season 4!
The Sinner Season 4 premiere recap: A strange run-in
Due to his insomnia, Ambrose goes out for a late-night walk. While out on the walk, he sees Percy talking to someone distraught and then walking right up to a cliff. He sees her walk off the cliff and assumes that she committed suicide.
The local police department comes out to investigate, but instead of taking Ambrose seriously, they suspect him. And I don’t blame them either. Here’s a new guy in town, walking around the middle of the night, claiming that someone just jumped off the side of a cliff.
Percy’s body is nowhere to be found, so that doesn’t help matters either.
Chief Lou Raskin (Joe Cobden) shows up to the scene, but he’s clearly not the man for the job. He’s a hot mess and can’t make sense of anything. Honestly, Ambrose is the better detective in this situation. Percy’s family also shows up, including her grandmother Meg (Frances Fisher), her father Sean (Neal Huff), and her uncle Colin (Michael Mosley).
None of them believe that Percy would have killed herself, and Meg is convinced that Ambrose just imagined seeing Percy walking off the cliff. And as time goes on in the episode, it starts to appear that Percy may not actually be dead.
The Sinner Season 4 premiere recap: A strange ritual?
Ambrose learns that Percy was seen about 30 minutes after he thought she jumped. He decides to retrace their steps and recalls Percy looking over her shoulder before she jumped. Was it the person she was talking to the night before? Not sure, but it does get weird when Percy looks back in the direction Percy was and finds odd things in the forest.
There was a cross and a fishing rope right underneath a tree stump, perhaps indicating that there was some ritual involved? According to someone at the local pub, Percy was there the night before singing and hanging out, but there was a moment where she came out of the bathroom with a bloody head.
A bit later in the episode, Ambrose goes to the Muldoon home and learns from Meg that Percy was hiding something. She had been out a lot, was collecting random things, and even had a book called The Lunar Goddess: Connecting to the Spirit of the Earth.
As the investigation continues, Ambrose uncovers video footage of Percy bowing down to someone wearing a hood. We don’t see the person’s identity, but it all seems to connect back to some weird cultish situation (which is semi-confirmed later when Ambrose hears chanting in the darkness and people howling up at the moon).
I’m not sure where this season is headed, and I’m not sure how I feel about it, but it’s just been one episode, so I will hold off any judgment for now. But what the heck was that ritual, though?!
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Welcome back, Detective Ambrose!
What did you think of this week’s episode of The Sinner Season 4? Tell us in the comments below!