Twisted 1.12 “Dead Men Tell Big Tales” Recap

The police have gathered outside the Desai home, with Kyle taking charge of the search for Danny. When Karen goes to talk to him, she mentions that she knows Marilyn due to having suspected Vik of cheating years ago; it turns out, though, that the two were business associates. Kyle then tells her that he thinks Vik’s alive and asks to use the landline, just as Lacey stops over at the Masterson house with the intention of talking to Kyle about the scratches on Regina’s arm and the black vehicle that she got into the day she was injured. However, Kyle isn’t there and Lacey learns that Danny ran, a move that Jo takes as an acknowledgment of his guilt. She argues that innocent people don’t run away from stuff like this and that Danny should turn himself into the cops sooner rather than later.

Tess receives a call from Kyle where he warns her and Jo to stick close to the house and though Jo claims to not care about Danny’s well-being and the state of the case anymore, she goes up to her room and finds that he’s hiding out from the police. Danny tries to get her to listen to him, as he overheard Kyle and Karen talking about the possibility of Vik being alive and knows that Marilyn Rossi has a connection to his father, but Jo wants nothing to do with him and calls out for her mother as a way of driving him out of her room and back onto the streets of Green Grove. While out driving, Lacey sees a figure running in a hoodie that she thinks is Danny, only to discover that it’s Charlie, a guy who just transferred to Green Grove High. The two then get sent home by a police officer who wants all the streets clear for the search for Danny.

The police have already dug into the interview process required to help find Danny, including having a chat with both Rico and Lacey. However, they still haven’t found any leads that could bring Danny home and Rico joins Lacey for some coffee and relationship talk, as the two commiserate on how Jo doesn’t know what she wants and how Lacey only wants to help Danny right now. Meanwhile, Karen goes over to the Masterson house when she learns that Danny was up in Jo’s room earlier; she comes down on Jo for driving him back into the night without figuring out where he was going and when she leaves, Jo confides in Karen that she slept with Tyler, whose phone call she ignored earlier. Tess comforts her by telling her that when the right guy comes along, she’ll be able to have something of a first time all over again and that hurt isn’t necessarily a bad thing. The next morning, Lacey goes to Chief Masterson and Eddie with word on the scratch marks and the black Mercedes with Connecticut plates, a description that matches Marilyn’s vehicle, and instead of immediately jumping on her theory, the two play it cool and send her off to school. The reason? Marilyn is watching in the parking lot and they don’t want her to know that they suspect she had something to do with the murder. They agree, though, to begin looking into her as a person of interest.

At school, Lacey runs into Charlie before Rico tries to get her to come over to his house for stippling, only to be interrupted by Jo. She tells Lacey that Danny came to her room last night and that she didn’t help him out because he’s a killer on the loose and she’s tired of him getting by not telling the truth. That afternoon, Rico drags Lacey to his house and reveals that Danny is staying above his garage for the time being, since he had nowhere else to go. Though Lacey tries to apologize for how she acted about their relationship and how she let what her friends thought have too much impact on the way she acted, Danny is more concerned about tracking down his father and she promises to help him do what he needs to do. Elsewhere, Karen goes to leave the house and runs into Tess; the two have a conversation about the possibility of Vik framing Danny, which Karen doesn’t think is likely, and how Vik was able to keep his faked death a complete secret for as long as he did. Karen then makes it to the marina where she comes face-to-face with Jack, a former employee of Vik’s and an old family friend with whom she has a romantic past. Though he’s initially apprehensive about helping her, since he doesn’t want to always fall at her feet, he ultimately agrees to help gather information on Vik and ask around about whether he’s been seen or heard from recently.

While the paper work on the weapon purported to have been used by Danny to kill Regina hasn’t come back with anything yet, Kyle comes up with an idea on how to get Marilyn away from town long enough to run a search on her hotel room. He gets Eddie to drive her 45 minutes out of the way on a Danny goose chase using a fake tip and once the two leave, Kyle gets a warrant and quickly goes through Marilyn’s belongings without leaving much of a trace. The biggest lead that he finds is a briefcase with a compartment full of money, money that he doesn’t know the origin of and money that she could have gotten funneled to her for doing what she needed to do to obstruct the case. Meanwhile, Rico talks to Danny about how panicked he is following the initial adventurous rush that harboring an alleged fugitive brought on; he then questions why Danny was able to break Jo’s heart so easily and Danny argues that it’s because he knows something could never happen between them. He saw how hurt she was when he came to her room and there’s no way she would be able to trust him like that. As Rico’s dad comes home, causing Danny to have to go silent, Lacey runs into Jo at the diner while picking up food for herself, Rico, and Danny. Lacey lies about how the food is for her mother and how she hadn’t seen Rico, except she’s a horrible liar and Jo quickly puts the pieces together and tracks Danny down to Rico’s.

She threatens to call the authorities on him and changes her tune when he confesses that the reason he’s so confident that his father had something to do with Regina is because he had been framed before. The day of Tara’s murder, he came home to find Jo and Lacey already playing in the backyard and Vik standing in the dining room with the jump rope, Tara’s body motionless on the ground. Vik then put the jump rope in his hand and made the scared, numb little boy take the fall for the murder, convincing him with a flurry of pleases and the promise that his sentence would be very light. However, a few months turned into five years and before long, Vik went from visiting regularly to visiting every once in a while to completely disappearing on Danny, leaving him to fend for himself in juvie. All he knows about the murder is that it happened because Tara held secrets and when he returned, he couldn’t elaborate on anything because the only witness to what actually happened was presumed dead. The police show up outside Rico’s home and before Danny makes his escape out the opposite window, he convinces Jo to do him a favor. She goes to the diner and tells Marilyn that while Danny is looking to turn himself in, he wants to have a word with his father beforehand. Marilyn, whose money looks to have come from a dummy account of Vik’s (the same account that paid off Regina), plays it cool and continues denying that Vik is alive; Jo then leaves an address that the meeting between Danny and his father would take place in.

Jack reports back to Karen with the news that Vik has yet to hit up any of his old haunts. However, she finds a soggy box of legal documents that belonged to her husband that she wants to take to the police to aid the investigation. While the results on the murder weapon prove that the evidence had been tampered with and that Danny’s prints were not on it, Lacey goes out to the stables where the horse she shared with Regina resides. She hoped to talk to Gloria, only she finds Charlie and the two eventually admire the trophy case of ribbons, medals, and photos. One photo, in particular, includes Vik, who used to ride horses, and Charlie mentions how he thought Vik was Gloria’s husband. The meeting between Danny and Vik is set to take place at an abandoned church in the woods and Vik arrives shortly after his son; Vik claims that people are trying to kill him, but Danny doesn’t care, not when he gave five years of his life for something that he didn’t even do. He wants his father to pay for what he did to Tara and to him, while Vik offers to take Danny under his wing and disappear with him into the either, something Danny doesn’t want to happen. All he wanted was a second chance and now he’s running from the cops over something that his father did, so when Vik tries to go after Jo for calling for help, Danny gets in his way and gives Jo enough time to run out into the woods. Vik chases after her and the two end up on the edge of a cliff, only for Danny to intervene and get tossed by the wayside. When Vik goes after his son, though, Danny takes a giant stick and knocks his father off a cliff and to the ground below.

Additional thoughts and observations:
-“I’m not Danny. But hey, I could be.”
-“Hey, new guy. Bye, new guy.”
-“Now I’m starting to puddle.”
-“He’s not in the box, Karen. I checked.”
-Hey, everybody! Happy to have you back for KSite’s coverage of Twisted. We’re reconvening a little later than what I expected, since ABC Family decided to air the last five episodes of Ravenswood‘s winter season rather than premiere this show in January, but what matters is that we’re all back together and can get down into this mystery.
-The revelation that Vik was the one who killed Tara and not Danny was some Vampire Diaries-level mindfuckery. I mean, it’s not a super complicated twist and it does make sense, but it was such a cool misdirect that took advantage of how much the idea of Danny as a killer (and what that means for him now) has been pounded into our heads already. Plus, it allowed Avan Jogia to devour the most emotional monologue of the show thus far and whenever he gets let off his leash, he brings a heck of a lot of depth to an already interesting, complex character.
-Let’s talk about how (comparatively) fast this episode was with the summer season and how much ground was covered. Although I like the summer episodes, I think this is about the pace that a show like that thrives at; it can’t stay like this, as keeping the foot on the gas pedal will burn through too much plot and leave the show with nowhere to go, but it was nice to see the show hit the ground running rather than spending an episode setting things up.
-Do you think that Vik paid Marilyn the $100,000 to kill Regina or to get involved in the investigation and steer it away from him after he killed Regina?
-So, Jo’s the pits, right? I mean, I understood her emotional state – she’s upset about losing her virginity to Tyler, she’s sad that Lacey and Danny hid their relationship from her, she’s dejected at the idea of not being able to be with Danny in the way that she wants to be, Danny’s very presence still reminds her of the trouble she had moving on for the past five years – but oh my goodness, she needs to take a breath. How are you going to be so bitter that a boy doesn’t like you that you’d be willing to turn him into the police? And news flash: as much as she wants to get herself away from the case, it’s literally in her living room due to her father’s occupation so like it or not, she’s in this thing for the long haul.
-Good for the show for walking back the “Danny’s prints are on a weapon he’s never touched” thing, because I don’t know how they would have explained that going forward, especially if there was a trial.
-I loved the dramatic irony of the ending. As much as I think Vik would add to the show’s atmosphere and pacing, his character has only a short shelf life in present day interactions and instead of overusing him, they brought him out in a cool abandoned church and made Danny the killer that he never was. Assuming, of course, that Vik died, which, judging by that cliff, looked like a very likely possibility. Also, who do you think was behind them and watched the whole ordeal?
-Cool shots: Danny looking into one of the church windows while waiting on Vik had some interesting lighting. The shot of Vik holding the jump rope in the dining room was the most unnerving thing the show has done thus far.
-What could Charlie want with Lacey? He’s already giving me major stalker vibes by showing up to the stables at night, but he didn’t seem to have any violent tendencies. (Yet.) Wild speculation: could he be someone hired by Gloria to keep Lacey from getting too close to the truth about Regina?
-On my list of hopes for the winter season – a friendship between Rico and Lacey. For some reason, every one of their scenes is either horrifyingly awkward or delightfully odd couple-y, but I like their dynamic and I think she can help bring him out of his shell.
-Judging by the way Tess talked to Jo about finding a new guy and not hurting forever, I’m going to venture a guess that she was the one cheating with him and not Marilyn. I mean, the fact that she’s the only one he was in contact with after faking his death tells you how close they are and I don’t know if the show would have Karen mention her cheating suspicions without them coming up later. With how she looked when Karen mentioned Vik keeping his disappearance a complete secret, you know the guilt is eating Tess alive and that she’s going to come clean about what she knew sooner rather than later. Could that include information about her past with Vik?
-Speaking of, I like how Jack was not surprised at the thought of Vik still being alive. That’s just good ol’ Vik, faking his death and all. His usual level of shenanigans, this is. Also good: his “Hello, Karen,” which immediately put me in mind of “Hello, Clarice.” Less chianti, though.
-I think my favorite character on this show is the diner waitress who said “Whatever” to Rico. More of her, please.
-Next week on Twisted: Danny wonders if he deserves a second chance, while Lacey tries to find the link between Gloria and Vik and the hunt for Regina’s murderer uncovers a connection to Mayor Rollins.