Copper's eighth episode was titled "Better Times Are Coming", but it was nothing but sullen and jarring. This season has had a handful of turning points. Mrs. Haverford trying opium with Robert Morehouse, child whore Annie killing two people, and of course, Detective Corcoran further turning into some sort of avenging crime-fighter.
Last night's developments blew all of those away.
The producers of the show and their social media machine have done a good job of feeding memes and graphics onto Facebook, and they even helped dub Copper fans as Copperheads, which is cute.
As other TV writers have said, not all Copper episodes are built the same. Some are bloodier than others, while some are snoozers meant to push the season plot along. Last night's ending may have just catapulted the show into something deeper.
More mindfuckery is afoot. And we still have two episodes left this season.
We open up on Election Day 1864, as Lincoln is fighting for a second term in the middle of the Civil War, while the whole land is sewn up in strife. There are glancing parallels to the 2012 election season, but they are only skin-deep. Things are of course funny at the ballot boxes and people voting multiple times with wigs and funny hats.
Fun for Tom Fontana fans: one of the fake voter names is Tim Bayliss. Bayliss was the name of a detective on Fontana's Homicide: Life On The Street.
Meanwhile O'Brien and new bitch Byrnes are in Central Park trying to steal sheep for an O'Brien family dinner when Byrnes stumbles upon a corpse, that of Mary Lockwood, who has been shot in the chest. This won't make her former squeeze Maguire happy, or it shouldn't, but he seems kind of nonplussed by the news.
We see Mrs. Haverford (When can she be Ms. Haverford again? Hubby has been dead for a few months now) and Morehouse flirting on the street, either alluding to sex or opium use. She wants Corcoran to apologize for being vicious to her, and wants Morehouse to "confront" him and use their new romantic arrangement against him.
Haverford already looks sorta druggy and out of it already, which is exciting for me.
Mr. Freeman has found out more about the "Greek Fire" explosive from the last episode, which is set to help burn down the city with the help of Morehouse's rebel spy buddies. Corcoran and Freeman assume that Morehouse wants to burn the Big Apple himself as some sort of retribution for losing his leg for Lincoln.
Mr. McLean is the main suspect in the Lockwood case, and McGuire bullies a doctor attending to Ms. Lockwood's autopsy to hand over the bullet lodged into her body. Fishy, par the course for Maguire lately.
Elswhere in Child Whore Land, Annie is telling Miss Eva about all the housework that she has been doing for Corcoran since she came back from "California" in this creepy deep and breathy voice. Apparently he "likes a handful" when they bed together. They don't and he doesn't at all.
Corcoran and Morehouse have a confrontation about Mrs. Haverford, and somehow Corcoran get Morehouse to almost spill the beans on the rebel plot. What is Corcoran, a Jedi? This ends up happening later on too.
Maguire shoots McLean in an foot chase, destroying a huge part of the Lockwood case in the process, "saving the city the cost of a trial". Maguire then disappears.
Morehouse, still involved with the rebels. No way that he will put profit in front of country, right? Morehouse will probably sabotage the transit of the Greek Fire into the town right, being a good Union man?
Yes, he will, and he will also save some horses, because he's not a monster.
Things begin to unravel late in the episode as Corcoran finds that the same bullet that killed Lockwood killed McLean, which means that Maguire killed the same both with the same handgun.
Corcoran tracks Maguire to a local women's hospital slash mental home, and ends up beating up a security guard there to get into a separate room. Only to find...
Understand that this whole season we have dealing with the assumption that Ellen Corcoran is dead, deceased no more. And so has Corcoran, having fully shacked up Eva and a host of other women.
Now that we know that Ellen has been inside a mental home, barely conscious BUT VERY ALIVE and blind to the outside world, what happens to Corcoran and this while path of destruction he has undertaken?
Things will get really interesting now that he has a madame girlfriend and a live-in child whore who wears his "dead" wife's clothes. The episode nine teaser showed Freeman working on getting Ellen to speak again and attempt to tell Corcoran what happened to their daughter and where they have been.
Expect a body count the next two weeks.
