Evergreen – As the second episode of Shining Girls begins, Marcus (Chris Chalk) hugs Kirby (Elisabeth Moss) who seems distraught about what has happened. She asks about her mom, but Marcus says she isn’t here because they agreed not to invite her tonight. He asks whether she talked to Jewel and where the stuff is at. As someone knocks at the door, Marcus makes plans to call and get what they need to be delivered. Kirby opens the door before Lakshmi Awad (Sadieh Rifai) enters and hugs her. She tells Kirby that Jules is likely coming tonight too, but Miles is on deadline. Abby (Erika Alexander) wants them to finish up with the flood story. Kirby looks at a picture of her wedding to Marcus on the wall above her. Lakshmi offers to grab Marcus’s camera and snap some photos to give him a break.

Other guests arrive as everyone continues celebrating Marcus’s birthday. The guests learn that they don’t have a cake. When Kirby is asked to speak, she admits she doesn’t know how she got here and being married to him just doesn’t seem real. Kirby tells him happy birthday before they hug. She sneaks into her bedroom to check what she has written in her notebook. Dan (Wagner Moura) meets with Howard (Marc Grapey) at the arcade. They begin talking about Kirby as Howard says he probably shouldn’t have brought her into the morgue. It is hard to say whether her scars match Julia’s because they’re pretty old. Howard says he can’t check Julia’s autopsy report because police made an arrest so they’d have to release it.

Dan asks whether anything was left inside her. They go back to the morgue to check. Howard shows him a picture of Julia with her father. He says there were broken blood vessels under Julia’s armpits because the killer dragged her far before dumping her body. He swept inside the cavity and found nothing there. Dan looks through the debris they found at the site. He says it is radium ore from the Midway Chemical Company. Howard says radium has been off the market since the 50s so it has been down there a lot longer than Julia was. Dan is allowed to take pictures of it but not publish the pictures. Then, Dan asks if he can bring Julia’s body out and insists he is up for it. Once Howard pulls the body out, Dan turns off the light and tells him to look again.

They see radium glowing inside of her. Harper (Jamie Bell) goes into a house that has many boarded-up windows. He sits down with coffee and newspapers. As he flips through the newspapers, he finds a story about the murder of Julia Madrigal that was written by Dan Velazquez. In 1990, a man, Leo Jenkins, says it wasn’t until Cantigny that he heard a horse scream when the gas moved in. Leo (Christopher Denham) talks to Harper about the gas moving in and the dogs noticing it first. Harper tells him that they have to stop now because she is coming in. Although he is there to see Julia (Karen Rodriguez), Harper admits she isn’t his girl. Harper runs into Julia as she signs in. She asks whether he is visiting someone he served with. When he asks why she’d say that, she says his gig line and it takes training for a man to match his buttons to his buckle.

Harper tells her she shouldn’t wear her hair like that at work. He nearly touches her, but she pulls back and tells him not to touch her. She walks away when Gordie (Torrey Hanson) calls her name. Julia returns home that night and finds no voice messages. She joins her father (Juan Ramirez) and tells him that they keep denying her client’s benefits. Julia sees the Los Solitarios tape sitting on the counter. Her daughter claims she liked it before. She finds a picture from Glencoe while unpacking their belongings. She finds it odd because she never goes there. Her father admits it didn’t seem like she was having a good time. As Kirby cuts out newspaper articles, Dan comes over to say he was looking for clips on her assault.

She says there won’t be much to pull since they ran a blurb on it and there was a beat-up in the Reader. He asks for a police report so he can compare it to the Madrigal autopsy. She asks what was found inside Julia. Dan says it is problematic that she works here or that they work together. She can’t be his colleague and source because he needs to be able to ask questions and vet the answers. Dan wants to know what she meant when she said he left something inside of her. Kirby takes him elsewhere before she reveals that he left matches inside her. She goes on to say it was a matchbook from the Bee Happy bar with this address. She checked the city records but found there was never a bar at the address in question.

He shows her a picture of what was inside Julia. Dan sits down and asks Kirby to walk him through what happened to her on that day. Kirby says she was by the North Avenue Beach while walking her dog. Dan asks whether she was living with Marcus at the time and if they walked the dog together. She says she was alone before Dan learns that she still has her mother. Kirby believes they’ve already talked about Rachel (Amy Brenneman), but Dan doesn’t think so. He thinks she is hiding something from him. Kirby says she just doesn’t want to get it wrong though. It would be helpful for Dan to know anything that could corroborate her story. Later, Kirby goes to the well where she is told she can make donations inside.

She finds a group of people singing a religious song inside. She is surprised to see her mother on the stage and her mother is surprised to see her too. Kirby tells her she just came to get her stuff including her hospital records and photos. Her mother and everyone else thank God for bringing Kirby back. After that, Rachel gives her daughter some of her stuff. Kirby quickly looks through the photos and says these aren’t what she needs. Instead, she wants photos and journals from after the hospital. Her mother thinks she might’ve tossed them. Her daughter says another woman has been killed and it could’ve been the same man. Kirby looks through her old suitcase while telling her mother she wants to do this. Her mom shows her a video of one of her past performances.

Kirby joins her mother on stage to sing with her. She asks her mother why they don’t talk anymore only to be told that was her call. Dan meets with Gordie to ask about the radium and whether Julia ever talked about friends. Gordie says she never talked about herself and primarily focused on everyone else. She didn’t know to be scared until it was too late. She changed a few weeks before she stopped coming. Gordie describes her as a woman who could nut-kick a linebacker so it didn’t make sense to have to follow her to her car. He believes Julia thought someone was following her. Dan speaks to Detective Shawn Lynsky (Kevin Gudahl) about Julia, but he won’t comment. Dan asks about the second victim who believes they have the wrong person.

Shawn acts like he doesn’t know about a second suspect. He shows Dan a folder for Sharon Leads and asks whether she is Dan’s source. He goes on to say she might be Sharon, Kirby, or whatever she is calling herself now. The detective warns him that he’ll have to print a retraction if he builds a story on Kirby’s word. Regardless, Dan says their wounds were similar. He learns that Kirby barely had any memory after the assault. She broke down and had to be admitted to Chicago-Reed for observation no longer after that. Shawn tells Dan how Kirby was brought into the station to identify the suspect. She blanked on him but connected to the victim. She must’ve gone with that. When asked about Julia’s stalking complaint, Shawn says she was being stalked and he is locked away for her murder now.

Dan is told to read up on his source before he starts speculating. When Kirby returns home, Marcus is testing some new film stock. Her mom told him that she was upset when she left. Marcus thinks something is up since she messed up his birthday and visited her mom for the first time in months. Kirby isn’t ready to talk about it. One night, Julia hears something outside her window. She finds the picture of herself sitting in the chair nearby. Julia goes downstairs where she finds another picture on the floor. She begins freaking out so she grabs a box cutter.

She finds another picture of her in her house like she is now. Julia runs over to grab the phone only for it to ring before she picked it up. Harper tells her that she doesn’t need that in the house. He claims she let him in and will know him. Harper says the pictures are from tomorrow although she might not be there. After warning her to watch her step, Harper says he closes his eyes and doesn’t know where the memories are anymore. Back at work, Dan tells Kirby to pull everything she has on Sharon Leads. He likes to get his source’s names right. He looked at her employment application which said she went to U of I and worked at the Tribune, but she didn’t lie to get this job. Kirby asks if she wants him to walk him through what the police left out.

They sit down and Kirby begins showing him the pictures she took after she left the hospital. She thought she was paralyzed. Dan says the PD write-up is pretty light for this type of assault. Kirby says it would be since they took her statement when she was on pain meds. Although they said they’d come back, they never did. Dan asks what he is missing here. He questions whether she was still living in Wicker Park back then. She says yes. While she wanted to be a reporter back then, she was out for too long. This was all she could get. The attacker came up from behind her so she couldn’t give the police an ID. There were so many people that she doesn’t understand how no one else saw him. Dan finds no witnesses listed. Kirby says there were many people there before they weren’t there.

She is asked whether there were any break-ins or wrong numbers before it happened, but she says no. Kirby knew something was off because it felt like someone had just left when she got home. Dan tells her about Julia being stalked. Dan questions whether there is anything else she needs to tell him. Kirby doesn’t want anyone else in the office to know she is the source. While driving to see Julia’s father, Kirby finds alcohol bottles in Dan’s car and learns he has one kid. Dan says his 12-year-old has his stuff together better than he does. Kirby and Marcus haven’t really discussed kids. She asks Dan what he thinks about Marcus. Kirby calls him kind while Dan says he is a martyr. He is all decency without any compassion. When she says he isn’t married, Dan says he is highly eligible.

Once they arrive, Dan tells Kirby she might have to hang back since he told said he was coming. Outside, a woman talks to the media about Julia being baptized. Julia’s father doesn’t want to talk to Dan because he is tired. Dan wonders if the family made a statement. Kirby walks through the alley before going around back where she tells a man she worked with Julia and they were friends. She goes inside and pretends she is returning earrings Julia let her borrow. While she enters one of the bedrooms, Dan sees Harper speaking to media members nearby. He tells Harper he’ll take his statement. Harper claims he is a reporter with the Daily News, but Dan knows that outlet went out of business a long time ago. Harper remembers his name since he wrote about Julia. Kirby finds a tape while Harper tells Dan he heard they arrested someone.

Harper suggests he shouldn’t be standing around talking to him before asking why everyone else is gone. Kirby plays the tape which contains a 911 call of Julia saying someone is in her house. Then, she gets a call from someone as she tells them to stop because she called the police. Harper responds by saying they’ll be there in 18 minutes. He claims he is already with her when they arrive. He is with her every moment and through everything that has happened. She rushes out and tells Dan the voice on the tape is the man. Back at the office, they let Abby listen to it. Dan admits they can’t refer to the tape without the family’s permission.

Abby says CPD needs to know since they didn’t look hard for exonerating evidence while Kirby says she’ll talk to Julia’s father. She claims Julia hid the tape because she knew he was coming and that is all she had time to do. When Dan is asked about his source, he tells Abby that she held up just fine. Harper goes home and lays down. It looks like radium is next to him in the shape of a body.

 

Shining Girls Review

After the second episode of Shining Girls, I have more questions than answers. The plot is difficult to follow because it is hard to know when the characters are in the present or past. Then again, I am not sure if there has been time jumps at all. Someone who’d read the books would likely understand this a lot better, but this was probably meant to be accessible to everyone.

The pace is already getting bogged down with so little pushing the story forward each episode. The characters are pretty shallow at this point but that could be a side effect of Kirby changing timelines. Truthfully, I am just indifferent to the story and characters although this could change. The second episode scores a 6.5 out of 10. Recaps of Shining Girls can be found on Reel Mockery here. Find out how to support our work at this link.