Five years ago, 11-year-old Danny Desai strangled his aunt Tara with a jump rope while she was babysitting for him and two friends, Jo and Lacey. After serving a sentence in juvenile hall and five months removed from losing his father Vikram in a boating accident, though, he’s been released and will be returning to the town he once called home, reopening old wounds in his former best friends and putting himself in the spotlight of the sleepy town that only wants to forget his existence.
While tomboy Jo holds a grudge against the boy she calls a “lunatic freak”, even with her mother defending him, Lacey goes on the news and proclaims that she doesn’t want Danny to come near her school, becoming Twitter famous around her town in the process. The first day of the school year finds news vans and reporters stalking the premises looking for a story, tension that Jo’s friend Rico (and Lacey’s friends Sarita and Regina) try to defuse in their respective cliques. It’s not long before that tension manifests itself in front of them when Danny makes his first appearance at school, causing his peers to grow silent and stare at the person they used to know. He goes up to Jo and Lacey in hopes of beginning to reconnect with them, only to be escorted to the office by Principal Tang, where Danny’s mother Karen is waiting. Principal Tang tries to stress that the faculty is having difficulty in accepting the new situation and offers Danny empty advice before hitting on Karen and sending him on his way.
Danny finds Jo, who just rejected a party invitation from Lacey that she assumed to be out of pity, in the hallway and the two have a brief conversation that consists mostly of Jo mentioning her bouts of PTSD (which include dreams) and burning the letters Danny wrote her from juvie. However, she can’t shake him quite yet, since they have the same psychology class, whose topic for the day is semantic vs. episodic memory. The students are more interested in Danny, though, particularly Arch, Lacey’s jock boyfriend who calls Danny a psycho and tries to provoke him during class. The topic then turns to the idea of sociopathy, defined as having no conscience or concept of empathy; while sociopaths can’t connect with their fellow man on that level, they are experts at mimicking human emotion, to the point where telling if someone is sociopathic is extremely difficult.
At lunch, Regina makes good on all her talk about wanting to hook up with Danny (or Dr. Lecter, as Sarita called him) by openly flirting with him and inviting him to the party that Lacey invited Jo to. Ironically, the purpose of the party was to blow off steam from the reemergence of Danny and all the emotions that it dredged up in the student body. Danny doesn’t exactly give Regina the answer she’s looking for, but he does decide to ask Jo if she’s like to come with him when they find themselves in the same diner after school. Danny was there picking up a pie, while Jo and Rico were studying, the chance meeting getting under her skin and causing her to lash out at him again. When he tells her that she was the one person who he thought would give him half a chance and leaves, she tracks him down and apologizes for what happened to his dad, accepting the invitation in the process. She may not want to go, but she wants to have a story to tell her grandchildren about the time she did something stupid in high school.
Once they arrive at the party, again drawing a reaction, Regina drags Jo away and grills her about what’s going on with Danny; Regina thinks there’s something between Jo and Danny, Jo denies it, and the two start drinking right away. Meanwhile, Danny goes up to Sarita and Lacey, insulting Sarita’s 5th grade facial problem and getting her to go away so he can try to talk to his former best friend. However, Lacey isn’t warming up to him yet and calls Jo his “puppy dog”. Speaking of, Jo ends up doing body shots off of a boy named Scott’s navel and when he gets too rough with her afterward, Danny steps in and nearly gets in a fight to save her. Rather than become violent, even after getting shoved, he pulls Scott in close and whispers something that makes the jock back off long enough for him and Jo to leave.
While walking home with (a very drunk) Jo, he mentions that he said something about suing Scott for assault, though that’s obviously not what went down. Lacey then pulls up in her car and offers to drive the both of them home, with Danny taking Lacey to her parents, who aren’t quite sure how to react to their daughter’s change in attitude vs. that morning. (Or the fact that she came home drunk with a known murderer.) When Lacey gets in front of Danny’s home, he invites her to come inside and hang out, (figuratively) dangling blue ranch potato chips in front of her as incentive. Lacey accepts the offer and the two end up spending much of the night talking, where she claims the main reason she dropped Jo as a friend was social survival. Middle school is already hard enough and she didn’t want to go through such painful years being known as the girl who was friends with a murderer, so she decided to sever all ties with the situation and make the ostracism she suffered as minimal as possible. She asks Danny if he regrets killing his aunt and although he doesn’t give an answer beyond “the past is the past”, he does say that his main regret is that he didn’t get to grow up with her and Jo.
The two end up talking so long that Lacey falls asleep on the floor (clutching the chips, of course) and Danny covers her up, allowing her to stay the night with him. It’s then that he gets a text from Regina, who cornered him at the party and made her intentions very clear; she wants him and she doesn’t care what she has to do to get him. The messages begin by inviting him back to her home, where the party was thrown, and when he rejects her twice, end with her claiming to know the reason he killed his aunt. He doesn’t go over, though, and while Lacey is spotted leaving his house by Karen, Regina’s housekeeper comes in at 6:30 that morning to find that Regina had been beaten to death and was left on a rug in the living room.
Of course, the kids at school think that Danny was behind Regina’s death and they waste no time in heckling him during an assembly dedicated to Regina. Officer Kyle Masterson (Jo’s father) comes into the auditorium looking to bring Danny in for questioning, causing Jo to make a statement about how nobody knows if Danny did the crime and they should give him a chance. Getting no backup from Lacey, she waits for her former friend outside the auditorium where Jo tries to get her to give Danny the benefit of the doubt; she argues that there could be someone out there with a reason to kill Regina and that the timing of the kill, right when Danny arrives home, is suspicious. Lacey, however, merely wants Jo to quit defending Danny and save herself the trouble that she’s causing herself.
During the questioning with Officer Masterson, Danny claims to not have left his home after 12:30 that night, something that can’t be corroborated because Lacey doesn’t want anyone to know that she spent the night, even platonically. He does confess to Jo about the texting with Regina and again doesn’t budge about revealing the real reason he killed his aunt, opting to be the town pariah rather than potentially get the heat off his back. After a conversation with his mother that night where Karen admits to not being able to selling the house (or even get buyers inside for an open house), Danny reveals that he has something of Regina’s – a gold necklace that she reportedly never took off and the one thing missing from the crime scene.
The necklace that once belonged to his aunt.
Additional thoughts and observations:
-“Her hair makes me sad.”
-“Yes, mother. You’ll be running the PTA again by spring.”
-“They let you watch Glee in prison?”
-“Didn’t you hear? I’m a bitch now.”
-“I even offered to bang her if she was itching to get banged.”
-Is it strange that I was saddened by Regina’s death? I thought she could have been a delightful addition to the show and someone to bring a little comedy to such dark subject matter, but alas, her fate was not to get banged by Scott Jock and live to see episode two. RIP, you hot mess.
-Alright, it may be early, but who do you think killed Regina? Considering how they deliberately tried to make us sympathize with Danny, I don’t think the show would tip its hand this early re: him being a sociopath, so I doubt that he had something to do with it, despite the necklace. (My guess is that he did sneak out and go over there but when he left Regina’s again with the necklace, she was still alive. Maybe they did bang?) And it obviously wasn’t Lacey or Jo, so (pretty much) everybody else is a possibility. I’d keep my eye on Sarita, considering that her temperament isn’t exactly even keel and she’s close enough to Regina to where I could see her committing the act for a non-convoluted reason.
-Second question: why do you think Danny killed his aunt? I’m kind of leaning toward her sexually abusing him and him lashing out (strangulation is very personal, considering that it’s not instantaneous and he’d have to be touching/very near her when she died), but honestly, I have no idea. Perhaps the reason has something to do with his father, whose body was never found after disappearing from a company yacht? (Another thought: could Danny’s 4th birthday, the picture he was looking at before he got the necklace out, come into play?)
-You guys, Kathy Najimy! Part of me is disappointed that they didn’t have her as the Spanish teacher, mostly because I love me some Peggy Hill broken Spanish.
-Although I liked everything that came before it, the moment that Danny grabbed Scott and whispered something to him made me decide that I’m in for the long haul here. I hope we eventually find out what was said, though not knowing makes it all the creepier.
-I’m glad that they offered a reason as to why the Desai family didn’t move after Danny was released. It’s like a haunted house movie where there’s no feasible reason why the family doesn’t just, y’know, leave, so that was a good detail to toss in, especially since it allowed Danny another moment with his mom.
Next week on Twisted: A grief counselor is brought in for those still reeling from Regina’s death, while Jo sets out to prove Danny’s innocence and Lacey has to deal with a former frenemy.
