‘I Know What You Did Last Summer’ Episode 7 Recap: “If Only Dogs Could Talk”

I Know What You Did Last Summer has made a habit of extreme closeup openers, from that wolf spider skittering down a channel in football star Johnny’s recently severed head and Margo broadcasting online mukbangs as an act of humiliation and rebellion, to this seventh episode, when Creepy Clara is seen in flashback, dressing Lennon’s corpse in the honey that will preserve her like a prehistoric fawn forever locked in amber. “Purity for the next life,” Clara murmurs, and inserts a live ant into Lennon’s ear canal. And that’s in closeup, too.

Remember when Lennon’s body suddenly surfaced in the water right next to Alison? Well, Riley’s remains take a different path, joining Clara’s cave bound menagerie of honeyed tributes to her culty belief system, as Chief Lyla soon discovers after Bruce tips her to the cave’s location. But what’s this? Clara herself is in there. too, dead, and while the town of Wai Huna takes this as grounds for celebration, the motives of Dylan as they relate to Alison and Margo and the tragedy of last summer are still unclear. He tells them he escaped Clara’s clutches in the cave, even admits he saw Riley’s body there — “It’s over,” he says with a finality that Margo rightly calls out as flimsy — but even as he’s accepted back into the O.G. fold and gets increasingly chummy with Lennon/Alison, Dylan’s distant eyes are brimming with unspoken intentions. Still, whatever he’s hiding, it’s pushed even deeper into a place of anger when Alison reveals her true identity in a blush of confessional post-coitus honesty. “You had so many chances to tell the truth!” says the guy who may or may not have a Case Logic zipper case full of emo-core CDs and murderous revelations of his own.

While Alison was hooking up with Dylan and fessing up to her charade, Margo was searching up Dylan’s sex tape with Lennon from the night of the big grad party. Thus sated, and just returned from the fancy sanitarium where her controlling mother periodically sends her to stem those habitual eating binges, Margo clowns a tub of Cool-Whip before she’s summarily pushed through a plate glass sliding door by an intruder wearing a black sweatshirt. Cut to Bruce, clad in a black sweatshirt. He receives the news about Margo’s sliced up face via a phone call from Alison, but cuts the call short because he’s got bigger fucked up fish to fry: a clandestine meet-and-greet with his not-dead, suddenly-resurfaced former wife out at the cult compound, which is for sale now that Clara bought the farm. “You should’ve told me our daughter died,” Alison and Lennon’s mom tells Bruce, as if what befell Lennon wouldn’t have been a social media firestorm in the close-knit island community of Wai Huna where she apparently still lives. Obviously, Bruce has been in somewhat regular contact with this woman in the years since she left. What’s less obvious is why, and why Bruce is suddenly so gung ho to marry his situationship partner Chief Lyla. Bruce, you’re just a bundle of weird bearded mystery.

There’s only one episode left of Amazon’s I Know What You Did Last Summer reboot. The cast of characters we’ve met since the night of drunken vehicular manslaughter that started it all has been steadily thinned, some in satisfyingly gruesome fashion. IKWYDLS is still slasher movie-adjacent, after all, even though it often feels more like a commentary on digitally stratified Zoomer discord. And for our money, the Episode 6 sequence that murked Courtney with a Google Maps pin drop from her dead daughter’s phone still stands as the series’ best death blow. So far, that is! Who’s out here tossing Margo through plate glass? Is that some kind of precursor to another elaborately staged execution? And as Dylan arrives at the Wai Huna cop shop, intent on blabbing Alison’s secret to Chief Lyla, will her reveal doom her to a fate matching that of her wild sister? And what about Bruce, with the long tail of fallout from his previous marriages. While she once chose self exile, the mother of his twins is now in the open. But with Clara’s death — she was his first wife, remember — Bruce becomes the most tangible link to the cult activities that once rocked Wai Huna. Has he been the real cult keeper all along? I Know What You Did Last Summer has splattered a lot of blood on the walls. With its final episode imminent, let’s hope for some clarity amongst all the carnage.

Johnny Loftus is an independent writer and editor living at large in Chicagoland. His work has appeared in The Village Voice, All Music Guide, Pitchfork Media, and Nicki Swift. Follow him on Twitter: @glennganges

Watch I Know What You Did Last Summer Episode 7 on Amazon Prime Video