Bad Monkey Ep. 4 - "Nothing's Wrong with It, I Just Don't Need It Anymore"

Stepping back to move forward, we find a Lady Macbeth behind the curtain

Not to get too highfalutin on you, but we’re visiting “Macbeth” territory today as we turn back to “Bad Monkey,” with varying degrees of success.

We’re going to get right down to it here, so here’s your warning: Spoilers follow. Right now.

We pick up right where we left off, with the big reveal that Christopher (Rob Delaney) is actually Nick, or vice versa, but we don’t stay there long, as we are told we need to veer off course to fill in the story from Nick’s side, and pick up some background on Yancy (Vince Vaughn) along the way. 

Yep, we’re doing a flashback episode, everyone. 

On the whole, I don’t love prolonged flashbacks, since they necessarily arrest the forward motion of the story, and everything we see leads up to stuff we’ve already learned or figured out for ourselves. Such is the case with much of Episode 4 of “Bad Monkey,” and as such, this one drags a bit at times, but it finds some redemption in providing us with a new perspective on key characters that changes how we see the overall story. And we get answers to a couple of those questions I teed up at the end of Episode 3. 

First, the “Macbeth” part. In this episode, we learn who the driving force has been behind the growing bloodbath surrounding Nick Stripling, and it is . . . Eve Stripling (Meredith Hagner). At first, Eve seemed mostly just vapid, insincere, and materialistic – and she is all that, but with a “borderline sociopathic” streak (according to the narrator) that catalyzes the ruin of everyone around her. 

When Eve first meets Nick, it’s five years before the present story of “Bad Monkey.” She’s a hopeless wannabe actress (who can’t summon tears in an acting class, remember that bit for later), stuck serving up shots at a Miami club, where Nick just happens to be bringing his daughter for a party to celebrate the beginnings of his daughter Cailtin’s (Charlotte Lawrence) modeling career. At this point, Nick seems like a sweet, naive single dad just trying to look after his kid, but let’s not forget that he’s already deep into his Medicare-scamming career with his partner Izzy O’Peele (Zach Braff, back again). Nick activates Eve’s need to be the center of attention when he recognizes her from a commercial, and the basis for their entire relationship is established then and there. 

Nick is quickly wrapped around Eve’s finger, and by the time he realizes that he’s married – or has he created? – a monster, it’s much too late. Soon after the wedding, Nick ends up recruiting Eve to help with his fraudulent company, while Izzy tries unsuccessfully to keep his family life above the fray. Eve gets the feel of the business and really gets a feel for the nouveau riche lifestyle that it affords them. So, when the Feds come knocking and Nick is ready to skip town, Eve is not at all ready to go back. She pushes Nick into the desperate scheme that we all had figured out at the end of Episode 3: He’ll cut off his own arm – or rather, get Izzy to do it – and with it as evidence, he’ll get to die on paper, and escape to the Bahamas to create the resort that Eve somehow convinced him to build for her. 

The things we do for love.

But faking your own death turns out to be hard, and secrets have a tendency to come out, so everyone who’s in on the plot is now a liability. At this point, if you are familiar with “Macbeth,” the rest will fall into place. “It’s a lot harder to stop than it is to keep going,” the narrator tells us superfluously, as Eve first convinces Nick to kill the ship’s mate Finny to stop his nascent blackmail, then the murders just start piling up.

Let’s take a detour to track the deterioration of the shady doctor Izzy O’Peele, probably the most poignant narrative reframing of Episode 4. Izzy still holds some core belief that he is still the good doctor he used to be, and his anxiety over his best friend’s schemes is eating him alive. By the time he ends up agreeing to amputate Nick’s arm, he’s already plunged far over the edge into pills and booze, living in the squalid apartment where Yancy will soon find him, without his family. Sadly, his resurgent conscience begets his demise. Nick hears him say that he is ready to spill his guts to Yancy, and decides to spill his brains all over the apartment instead. In this moment Zach Braff reveals, with a single expression, the sheer weight of Izzy’s regret as he realizes simultaneously that he’s about to die, and that he believes he deserves it. 

This incident shatters Nick, already bitter and angry with a few regrets of his own. He has lost his daughter along the way, too – Caitlin sees more clearly what Eve is all about, and runs away to lose herself in substance abuse for a while, too, until she gets religion. And even life with a Bahamian resort just isn’t as easy to enjoy with one arm, but Eve keeps pushing Nick to build her own personal heaven as he descends into his private hell. 

Oh, here’s the part where we find out what happened to “Heather with the Weather.” She’s just in the wrong damned spot at the wrong time, when she overhears Nick agonizing over Izzy’s murder in a parking garage, and Eve empties her pistol’s magazine into her in cold blood. 

Meanwhile, the back story we get on Yancy is less interesting, telling the story of how Officer Mendez is tied to his career troubles – he’s a crooked cop who’s embarrassed when Yancy reveals that he’s been scamming the “crime busters” hotline. But crooked cops always have cover from higher up, so Mendez gets denied a promotion while Yancy gets booted straight out of Miami. 

The only other significant part of Yancy’s background here - besides just a wee bit about how his history with Bonnie, “a bad decision in an orange dress” - is meeting Yancy’s dad Jim, played by Scott Glenn. Glenn brings instant, leathery gravitas to the role by being Scott Glenn. In a short scene with his son, Jim tells a tall tale about a strange encounter with a manatee, and mentions, in a line that screams “foreshadowing!” that “animals have messages for you, you just have to be open to hearing them.”

The last 15 minutes back in the present seem a little perfunctory after the prolonged flashback, but they move the ball just enough to set up an episode 5 that promises to be unpleasant for Andrew Yancy. First, though, he at least gets to have his inevitable hookup with Rosa, albeit in a morgue. (For such an obnoxious guy, he’s got an enviable sex life.) But trouble is approaching on two sides. On one, Officer Mendez gets a sudden, unexpected opportunity to frame his rival Yancy for the murder of Izzy O’Peele. On the other, Nick is now truly desperate. Eve intimates that even Caitlin knows too much herself, now that Yancy is sniffing around her, so it’s either take down Yancy or . . . 

(Kudos to the music producers here, who pay off Eve’s acting ambitions by bringing back the same cheesy music cue from her earlier acting class scene, when she is finally able to summon tears while manipulating Nick into going after Yancy. The music and scene are from “Ghost: The Musical,” yes, an actual Broadway adaptation of the Patrick Swayze movie that the New York Times called a “thrill-free singing theme-park ride.” It’s just the right kind of schmaltz to highlight the banality of Eve’s evil. I’m still skeptical of the musical choices in general, but this one made me laugh out loud.)

Anyway, back to Yancy . . . looks like the winner of the race to mess up his life so far is Nick, who introduces his crow bar to the back of Yancy’s head as we appropriately black out and await episode 5. I hope we get more of Neville, Driggs, and the voodoo ladies next time.