THE 10 REASONS I HATE MARE OF EASTTOWN
By Armen Pandola
Now that the series is complete, take a step back and look at the mess you’ve been watching. There are SPOILERS since almost every five minutes some phony suspect was being unmasked.
1. Not everybody in lower Delaware County, Pennsylvania is a low life. But according to the writer of Mare, Brad Ingelsby, who grew up in Berwyn, Pa, part of Philadelphia's Main Line suburbs, there are nothing but beer guzzling losers who live in houses full of junk, junk food, booze, empty pizza boxes, Chinese food take-out, etc.
2. Mare ruins people’s lives with abandon - for example, her ex-husband, a local high school teacher. She asks him if he had contact with his former student, Erin (the murder victim) and he says no. In fact, he had helped her buy food and necessities for her baby. When ‘a rumor’ spreads that he is the father of Erin’s child, Mare immediately suspects him of the murder. Why didn't he just tell her the truth when she asked, that is the real mystery, but he doesn’t and she decides to accuse him of having sex with his former, murdered student in front of his new fiance and her teenage son.
3. A local girl has been missing for over a year when a new one goes missing. At first, you are led to believe that they are dead but in fact they are being kept as sex slaves by - ? The audience is shown just the lower pants and shoes of the man who has captured and is abusing the young girls, leading the audience to think the man is a character that the audience knows. In fact, he is not a character in the show, just a convenient plot device. This whole subplot about the missing girls is baloney.
4.Erin is a young mother who needed money for surgery to fix her young child’s ear problems. Does she turn to CHIP, the Pennsylvania public medical insurance program? She would be eligible. No, she decides to become a prostitute for a day or two to earn the money. Really Brad, is that what the young girls from Berwyn would do or is this just another Main Line fantasy you have about poor teens from Delco?
5. Mare decides to plant drugs on the mother of her dead son’s child so she can keep custody of her grandson. Instead of going through one of the many drug ‘informants’ most detectives have, she steals drugs from an evidence locker and plants them WITH THE EVIDENCE MARKERS STILL ON THEM. Then surprise, surprise, she gets caught. Yeah, she’s a great detective.
6. Then she gets ‘suspended’ and not fired. Not only would Mare be fired, she’d be prosecuted. Remember, she admits doing this when she gets caught so there is no doubt about what she did.
7. After getting suspended, she finds a young street prostitute who is able to give her the partial license plate of a man who tried to strangle her. The license plate and description of the car matches only seven suspects and instead of getting back-up and visiting the various suspects, she gets her partner/wannabe lover to go with her to investigate. When they find the culprit, she is unarmed and her partner gets killed. She almost gets killed when she struggles for a gun with the sex predator who is a large man - even though she has only one good hand - then pushes him off and is able to grab her dead partner’s gun and kill the culprit.
8. Instead of getting fired for causing her partner’s death and almost her own by refusing to follow proper police procedures in tracking down a demented sexual predatror, Mare is not only reinstated but is hailed as some kind of hero. Sure, she found the missing girls, but she should have let the police do their job instead of getting her partner killed all because she had to make the arrest herself.
9. Erin is killed with a Colt police gun - and when her adult lover confesses, he says Erin had the gun and he killed her trying to stop her from killing herself. But nobody asks where Erin got the gun from. Then, miraculously, almost a year after the murder, the owner of the gun decides to call her and tell her how the gun went missing on the night of the murder and the only person who had access to it besides him was the kid who mows his lawn who just so happens to be ….
10. When Mare finds out that Erin’s murderer was the teenage kid of the man who actually was having an affair with Erin and fathered her child, does she go to his house and wait for him to come home? No. That would be too easy. She seeks him out at a playground and he runs. When Mare goes to get him at his house, she brings a squad of police cars - as she should have done when she went to the house of the sexual predator. At the house, she has to arrest her best friend’s son - she already had arrested her husband who confessed to the crime to protect his son. AFTER Mare does this, her best friend has an emotional scene when she tells Mare she shouldn’t have done that. But the scene is all after the fact so there is no substance to it - like it might have had if Mare had done it before she arrested the kid. I mean, it’s not as if Mare is some kind of super cop who has to abide by the law no matter what - she breaks procedure and the law throughout the series.
BONUS REASON
I think Kate Winslet is one of the best actresses on the planet, but in this show, she is reduced to making faces. Really. Look at her stare in open-mouthed amazement when she is surprised or frown in constant chagrin as she ruins almost everyone’s life in this sad excuse for a thriller.