While using a combination of forensic clues, skilled observation and relentless questioning of those who knew Lucy at the end of her life, Nancy unravels what happened the night Lucy died. While her detective work succeeds in some ways, it also reveals a devastating truth.
Tropes:
- Archnemesis Dad: Not only did Everett impersonate his son via email to drive Lucy off. He also spread nasty rumors about her and had an huge part in her mom losing their source of income. It got so bad that it caused an pregnant Lucy to start planning suicide and when her initial plan was foiled. She had to give her daughter up using her Last Request to not let the Hudsons near her child because she was Properly Paranoid that they would kill her.
- Cassandra Truth: Bess answers John's question earnestly about how they got Lucy's skeleton. He says ok I don't need to know the real story then. Hilarious enough that was the story of how they got her bones.
- Clothing Combat: Lucy turns the remains of her Sea Queen dress into a large attack something to stop Ryan and Nancy from investigating.
- Determinator: Not even Lucy at her most violently despairing can stop Nancy from investigating her house. Of course, Nancy has no way of knowing at this point that Lucy won't hurt her.
- Did Not Think This Through: Karen entered Lucy in the Sea Queen contest to cheer her up, then switched the ballot boxes so she'd win. Of course everyone assumed that the girl with the slut reputation had slept her way to the top.Nancy: You entered a social pariah into a popularity contest?
- Driven to Suicide: Lucy because of the whole town being against her because of Everett Hudson.
- Exact Words: Nancy asked for a mother-daughter match on some hair...
- Expository Hairstyle Change: Ryan has a Dawson's Creek haircut in the flashbacks, appropriate for the time and for how much older he is than a high school senior.
- Gilligan Cut: "I assume you kept the bones in a sanitary, sterile environment in keeping with basic scientific guidelines?" Cut to a bin of Hanukkah Decorations.
- Hide Your Pregnancy: In-Universe, this is even possible with very loose clothing. The extreme poofiness of the Sea Queen ball is also not unrealistic. Her being obviously pregnant would have contributed to her Slut-Shaming, but there's no way that information wouldn't have made it into the town legend. If it was also a somewhat premature birth, that could contribute to her ability to hide it.
- Pulling the Thread: Bess tracks down the clues to figure out that Nancy and Owen slept together.
- The Reveal:
- Who murdered Lucy Sable? No one. She died of suicide. But that's not why she's been haunting Nancy...
- Lucy Sable was pregnant. She gave birth on the bluff. The baby was adopted by the only people in town who had shown her kindness: Kate and Carson Drew. His fingerprint was on the knife because he used it to cut the umbilical cord. She threw herself from the bluff, and all Carson could find was the dress. That wasn't blood on the bodice, it was amniotic fluid from the birth. Carson hid it because it was the only way to hide it from the Hudsons.
- And this is why Lucy has been haunting Nancy. She never wanted Nancy to solve her "murder", she was trying to get in contact with her daughter.
- On a different front, newly introduced Detective Tamura has the skull fragment Bess hid in the sink.
- Revealing Cover Up: Lucy trying to stop Nancy from entering her childhood home just convinces the latter more and more that this is where she'll finally learn the truth.
- Slap-Slap-Kiss: Early in the episode, George invites Nick to join her in bed that night. Then they spend the episode fighting over the response to the cops investigating the restaurant. Then they agree him sleeping on the sofa is best. Then they kiss.
- Slut-Shaming: The trope name is dropped. The town got vicious.
