‘Mare of Easttown’ Episode 1 Introduces the Most Sympathetic Murder Victim Since ‘Twin Peaks’ Laura Palmer

MARE OF EASTTOWN EPISODE 1 SPOILERS AHEAD

HBO’s Mare of Easttown Episode 1 “Miss Lady Hawk Herself” follows two women living wholly different lives in Easttown, Pennsylvania. First is the show’s eponymous character, Mare Sheehan (Kate Winslet), a hardened detective, former high school basketball hero, ex-wife, mother, and grandmother. Mare suffers no fools and can more than stick up for herself. The other woman is a teen mom with a heart of gold named Erin McMenamin (Cailee Spaeny). Erin is besieged at all sides thanks to an emotionally abusive father, terrible baby daddy, and vindictive frenemies. However we love her deeply from the jump because she so obviously loves her infant son. All Erin wants is to love and be loved, and she could not find a more tragic end.

Erin ultimately is murdered at the end of Mare of Easttown Episode 1, kicking off a brand new mystery for Mare to solve. But because we’ve spent so much time with Erin (and Cailee Spaeny’s spectacular performance), her death is truly upsetting. Mare of Easttown makes the victim central to a murder mystery, instantly elevating the story to the likes of Twin Peaks‘s treatment of Laura Palmer (Sheryl Lee) and pulling us in emotionally.

Mare of Easttown is a brand new crime thriller on HBO starring the likes of Kate Winslet, Jean Smart, Guy Pearce, and Julianne Nicholson. The series’s first episode follows Mare as she tries to juggle the demands of her job, the expectations of her town, and the disappointment of her family. Mare is haunted by one massive professional failure: her inability to close the case on young Katie Bailey. The drug-addicted young woman disappeared a year earlier and now her mother, who is Mare’s old teammate, is causing a media frenzy crying out for answers.

The first episode of Mare of Easttown also follows a day in the life for Erin. She’s introduced lying in bed, wistfully telling someone how much she’ll miss them. “Who’s gonna sleep next to me? And hold me and kiss me and snuggle me? Hmm?” Erin coos. The camera cuts to a sweet baby boy surrounded by a court of toys.

“Sometimes I wonder if you even realize how much I love you,” Erin says before getting ready to hand him off to his delinquent father Dylan (Jack Mulhern). The rest of the day unravels like a nightmare. Her father is cruel to her and the handsome boy she thought she was meeting for a date is revealed to be a nasty trick played by Dylan’s vindictive new girlfriend Brianna (Mackenzie Lansing). She’s beaten and mocked on video before stumbling into the dark forest. The next morning, she is dead in a river.

We don’t know who killed Erin or why. We don’t even know if her death is directly related to Katie Bailey’s disappearance. All we do know is a bright light has been extinguished and a sad life met an even sadder end. Mare of Easttown director and executive producer Craig Zobel told Decider it was “important” to introduce the audience to Erin as a person first and victim second.

“We had a unique opportunity in being able to introduce you to the victim,” Zobel said. “Even back in the day with like, Laura Palmer in Twin Peaks you don’t know who the victim was. They are the sort of the MacGuffin that starts the story.”

While it’s true we didn’t know who Laura Palmer when her body was found dead and wrapped in plastic in Twin Peaks, the rest of the show takes care to slowly reveal who she was to all sorts of different people. Mare of Easttown definitely does that more in subsequent episodes, but first we see Erin as a totally alive, loving person.

“In trying to tell a story about a community and tell a story about a town, it felt important to us to be able to let you get to meet the victim and it would have more impact if we did it that way,” Zobel said. “I have to say Cailee [Spaeny] is a movie star, she really impressed me so much. This could have been a person that you kind of remembered but she elevated the role even more than maybe it was on the page.”

“[Spaeny] really did make [Erin] a valuable character in the story even though she’s only in the first episode,” Zobel said.

So now we know what the primary murder mystery of Mare of Easttown is: who killed Erin McMenamin? Could it have been Dylan or Brianna, the last two people to terrorize her? Or is whomever is responsible for Katie Bailey’s disappearance at fault? Or could there be an even bigger, more insidious answer to the question of who killed Erin on Mare of Easttown?

We’ll have to tune in next Sunday for Mare of Easttown Episode 2 to find out…

Where to stream Mare of Easttown