With “The Fallow Interval,” Grosse Pointe Backyard Society reaches its deliciously twisted penultimate crescendo, one crammed with burial plots, burning secrets and techniques, emotional wreckage, and simply the correct amount of darkish comedy to maintain you grinning whilst you gasp. This episode is much less about motion and extra about rot: ethical rot, relational rot, and the sort of rot that comes from burying our bodies beneath hydrangeas. And but, it is perhaps some of the poetic and painful hours of the present so far.
The episode picks up instantly the place final week’s jaw-dropper ended: Keith is lifeless, and the foursome: Alice, Brett, Birdie, and Catherine, are standing over his physique, reeling. Catherine’s voiceover, mild and haunting, introduces the metaphor of a fallow backyard, soil that should lie dormant to finally develop once more. It units the tone for an episode the place everyone seems to be metaphorically (and actually) digging themselves deeper, not towards redemption, however towards one thing darker, one thing irreversible.
The panic in these opening moments is pitch-perfect. Alice is fraying on the seams, determined to do the “proper factor,” and Brett, now firmly the group’s de facto injury management knowledgeable, is aware of an excessive amount of about how the justice system works to allow them to go that route. Birdie, ever the unfiltered realist, calls it what it’s: “We actually slaughtered a person.” The state of affairs is unthinkable, and but, it unfolds with a disturbing logic. Their resolution to bury Keith, to erase their tracks, to start out mendacity. One selection snowballs into the following with a terrifying ease that feels totally believable.
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In the meantime, Alice and Brett are deep in a unique sort of disaster, one which blends ethical collapse with emotional awakening. Their chemistry, beforehand buried beneath marital guilt and social pretenses, lastly combusts right into a stolen kiss when a police officer almost catches them on the backyard heart. The kiss isn’t only a cowl. It’s charged, actual, and confirms what we’ve all recognized: Alice is in love with Brett. However this isn’t a love story, it’s a guilt story, and Alice is drowning in it. Her scene with Patty, the place she tries to delete the incriminating texts whereas enduring an extended, meandering monologue about marriage, is masterclass tv. Patty, blissfully unaware, waxes poetic about how a lot she loves Keith whereas Alice, barely holding it collectively, fights again tears and disgrace. It’s tragic. It’s twisted. It’s precisely why this present works.
“The Fallow Interval” – GROSSE POINTE GARDEN SOCIETY. Pictured: AnnaSophia Robb as Alice and Ben Rappaport as Brett. Picture: Mark Hill/NBC ©2025 NBCUniversal Media, LLC. All Rights Reserved. |
Then there’s Joel. Poor, bitter, wronged Joel. Birdie’s plan to admit to him as a type of injury management takes a flip when she drops the “I’m pregnant together with your child” bomb. The confession results in a really ethically murky cleanup operation and, naturally, a kiss. Due to course you make out with the murder detective serving to you cowl up a homicide you simply confessed to. Actually, Birdie is perhaps the present’s MVP: chaotic, unapologetic, and wildly compelling.
And should you thought that was the extent of the fallout, oh no. There’s additionally Marilyn recognizing the notorious quilt protruding of Keith’s automotive, the non-public investigator snapping pictures of the burial (then gleefully plotting to blackmail the group to pay for his daughter’s tuition), and, most chilling of all, Joel texting Patty from Keith’s cellphone, pretending he’s nonetheless alive. Each lie requires one other lie. Each secret provides one other layer of threat. And somebody, someplace, is at all times watching.
“The Fallow Interval” – GROSSE POINTE GARDEN SOCIETY. Pictured: Ben Rappaport as Brett, AnnaSophia Robb as Alice and Aja Naomi King as Catherine. Picture: Matt Miller/NBC ©2025 NBCUniversal Media, LLC. All Rights Reserved. |
“The Fallow Interval” is perfection in tone, equal components suspense, confession, and quiet devastation. It’s a reminder that even the most effective intentions rot when buried. Each character is circling a reckoning, and with only one episode left, we’re not questioning if the backyard will burn, we’re simply ready to see who units the match.