This post contains spoilers from Paramount+'s Happy Face episode 4, "Controlled Burn."
One of the things I’m loving about Happy Face is how each episode ends: with a bombshell. We learned last week that Melissa’s (Annaleigh Ashford) brother was with their father in Texas when Heather Richmond was killed. In this episode 4 recap, Shane (Philip Ettinger) enters the picture, as does someone unexpected, Melissa confronts her ex, and Happy Face (Dennis Quaid) gets to Hazel (Khiyla Aynne) then drops some bombshells in his attempted controlled burn, which is a tactic firemen use to prevent bigger fires. Jesperson uses them to start them, though, so only he can control them.
With Happy Face now out of solitary, he’s free to do what he wants… mostly. So, he reaches out to his granddaughter again, this time at school. It’s fair to say Hazel, who did sell the drawing Happy Face sent her, is becoming obsessed with knowing her grandfather. She’s caught off guard but feeling special when she’s pulled out of class for a delivery in the front office: a yellow smiley face balloon. She notices a card that reads, “CALL ME, M-F BETWEEN 12-2, [a phone number], GRANDPA [smiley face] .” She softly smiles and tucks the balloon away in her locker.
Melissa and Ivy visit Shane and meet someone unexpected
When we meet Shane, he’s working as a fireman out doing a controlled burn. He’s still out burning when Melissa and Ivy (Tamera Tomakili) show up to his house. While waiting for him, she calls home and learns Hazel read the OP-ED article and is upset. This adds to the guilt she already feels about being away from her family.
Suddenly, the door opens, and an unknown woman steps out and hugs Melissa. She introduces herself as Gillian (Jenn Lyon), Keith’s girlfriend. She says she met him on a prison pen pal site 2 years ago and have been dating ever since. Shane allows her to stay with him when she comes up to visit Keith in prison. She then reveals she was the first to know about Happy Face’s ninth victim, that she’s the one who insisted he come forward.
“I’m helping him become the man he wants to be,” she says. “His body may be in prison, but his soul is free to evolve.” She then agrees to an interview after Ivy brings it up.
When Shane arrives, he’s shocked to see Melissa. We learn he visits their father a few times a year, and this serves as the perfect segue for Ivy to bring up Texas and Melissa to ask what he remembers about traveling with Happy Face. Shane clams up and denies knowing anything, but it’s clear he’s hiding something.
The next day, Melissa gets a first-hand look at how sharing their family secret has affected her brother. He’s been selling off their old furniture with no problem, but once the secret got out, sales stopped. No one wants furniture that belonged to a serial killer. Furthermore, she learns from Ben that Max’s friends from school are being forbidden from playing with him because he has “bad blood,” leaving Melissa wrought with guilt.
Melissa confronts her ex
At 15, Melissa was impregnated by a guy named Brendan (Kyle Rideout). We learn in episode 4 that her child was the product of sexual assault. As soon as she lays eyes on Brendan, she flashes back to the incident and grows very uneasy. She wants an apology, but he denies what he did. When she brings up the abortion and the OP-ED, he denies telling anyone and says he has never breathed a word about it. Melissa quickly leaves. It wasn’t Brendan who blabbed.
Shane and Melissa reveal their truths
While having a drink at a bar, Melissa and Shane get real with each other. She tells her brother that the night their father was arrested, she’d just found out she was pregnant. The more she asks questions about their father, the cagier Shane grows. The two fight outside about her appearance on TV, and she tells him she had to go on “Dr. Greg” because she was wrought with guilt: “I could’ve stopped him in the beginning, but I didn’t,” she says then tells him about the blood she saw on the ceiling fan at her dad’s house the first time she slept over.
Shane admits he also could’ve stopped Happy Face but didn’t. “Of course, I remember Texas,” he tells her. “I woke up in some random motel and he wasn’t there. He was in the truck, not moving.” Jesperson had eaten over 100 sleeping pills in an attempt to commit suicide, but Shane intervened and called 911. After his release from the hospital, “He was mad at me and wouldn’t look at or talk to me,” Shane says. “We got back on the road and that’s when he saw the church. After that, he killed 2 more women.”
Shane takes the blame for those murders because if he’d not tried to save their father, those women might still be alive, and now that his sister is telling him it was 3 more women, not 2, he doesn’t know what to do with that information or how to feel. The siblings cry and embrace, then go home to burn all their old furniture. In that process, Melissa remembers there was one other person who knew about her abortion and flashes back to the time when she went to see Happy Face in prison after his arrest. He apologized, comforted her, reminded her he’s still JUST DAD, then flashed a creepy smile and made a joke about looking great in orange. Fifteen-year-old Melissa then told him she did something bad and doesn’t know who else she can tell.
“You can tell me. I’ll love you no matter what,” he said.
So, revealed her pregnancy and subsequent abortion. In that moment, her father pulled away from her in disgust and quickly changed his tune: “So, you’re a killer, just like me. You deserve to be right there in the cell next to mine.”
Happy Face drops a bombshell
Melissa confronts her father and tells him she knows he talked to a reporter, and she’s done. He won’t see her anymore after this. So, what does he do? Manipulates her.
“Well, I guess Elijah is gonna fry then,” he says, to which she responds she’s done trying to understand him. “You get so high and mighty sometimes that I have to remind you who you really are. You’re a killer just like your old man,” he spits at her before she hits back with the revelation that she aborted the baby because she was raped.
“What you did to those women you killed—beat, raped, and terrified them—well, that happened to me too. I’m not like you AT ALL. I’m like THEM.”
Happy Face is sad to hear this and apologizes for not being there to protect her. As she gets up to leave, he drops a bombshell: “Don’t you want the murder weapon? The one I killed Heather with?”
It is indeed a somber moment when Melissa and Shane find the wrench. Armed with hard, physical evidence, this might be exactly what is needed to clear Elijah’s name.
Happy Face episode 4 review
Happy Face episode 4 is heavy on the guilt for Melissa. This entire ordeal is clearly difficult for her, not to mention painful and overwhelming. All the investigating, traveling, arguing, distance from her family, public scrutiny, and tracking the footsteps of the Happy Face Killer is wearing on her, and it shows. She’s trying her best to stay strong and keep herself together for everyone involved, but at some point, levees break.
While relationship dynamics have been a major theme in the series so far, episode 4 steps up and focuses heavily on family dynamics while enforcing the theme of the search for the truth. Bombshells are coming with each episode, but so is progress. Will the location of the murder weapon be enough to free Elijah? And will Hazel reach out to her grandfather?
Happy Face is currently streams new episodes Thursdays on Paramount+.