Sharp Objects Milk Season 1 Episode 8 Editor’s Rating 5 stars * * * * * « Previous Next Photo: Anne Marie Fox/HBO As we grow older as women, are we only destined to repeat the sins of our mothers and replay the stories of their lives for which they never were able to find resolution? Or can we step out of their shadows to craft a narrative of our own making? It’s these questions that power the transfixing and powerful final hour of Sharp Objects. If you’re expecting the series to present a finale of polished twists and simple resolutions, you’ll be disappointed. Instead, it doubles down on its most beguiling quality, subverting our expectations in order to present a bruising character study about how women grapple with intimate abuse and violence, in the process becoming a towering achievement for each of its leads. The finale, “Milk,” begins only a few moments after the last episode. Camille is plagued by the dark knowledge of her mother’s history and cruelty. The voices of Jackie, Marian, and others echo in her mind. But she has no reprieve. When she walks inside the home, she’s plunged into a claustrophobic scene that trades in one of the most fraught domestic spheres: a family dinner. Adora, Alan, and Amma, still looking like a wayward Ophelia, sit around the table eating their meal as if their family isn’t unraveling at a breakneck speed. Adora has the uncanny skill of ignoring anything unwholesome or gnarled even while most of her actions could be described as such. She looks at Amma lovingly, somehow not noticing that she’s terribly ill and hovering near death. What she can’t ignore is Camille’s haunted, mascara-smudged gaze. Camille wants to save Amma. It’s why she asks if Amma can come back to St. Louis with her. It’s why she eats this dinner and drinks the poison milk, collapsing on the floor soon after. But there’s something beyond altruism behind this decision — a desire to feel her mother’s love for the first time in her life. If you knew nothing about the dynamic between Adora and her children, her scenes caring for Camille may seem sweet. This is the first time she’s let into the hallowed ground of Adora’s master bedroom. She lets Adora dress her, caress her cheek. “This will be good for the both of us,” Adora says, beaming with a mother’s love. “You are such a good girl.” When Camille swallows the poison she simply replies, “More, mama.” The scenes within the Crellin estate are spiky and grotesque in ways that left me feeling as haunted as Camille looks. That such cruelty is occuring in such a beautiful estate feels like a contradiction that fully exemplifies the lives of these women — their gorgeous faces masking the rot and hurt underneath. Even though I understand why the scenes of Vickery and Richard interrogating John Keene — stubbornly reminding them of his own innocence — are necessary, I kept wanting the episode to return to those women nudging at their old wounds and creating new ones. Watching Camille, I realized that Sharp Objects is offering what no other dead-girl drama on TV has been able to do quite as effectively: place us in the mind of a woman grappling with trauma who narrowly missed becoming a dead girl herself. It’s as if her life is trapped in a liminal space infused by this fact. She’s between the life she’s currently living and the fate that could have befallen her as it did Marian, yet she futilely tries to help Amma, imploring her to escape the home and find Richard. “If anything happens to me, you tell them mama took care of me. You go and you don’t come back,” she warns. Amma is stopped by Alan cooing about getting her a slice of cake. In many ways, the first half of the finale is completely Adora’s story. Patricia Clarkson makes a meal of her scenes. Her physicality is as beautiful and deadly as the edge of a freshly sharpened blade. She swans around the home, the tray of her elixirs and poisons tinkling with her delicate steps. Her best showcase is when she’s giving Camille a bath and we are allowed an unvarnished window into her mind. She’s humorous splashing water on Camille’s face. Her touch is kind. I understand why Amma, Marian, and now Camille get swept up in her desires. If you could bottle the warm, loving gaze she bestows on Camille in these scenes, I’d drink it in one fatal swoop. The most revealing look into Adora is when she speaks of her mother, Joya. “Once Joya woke me in the dead of night. I was seven, eight. She didn’t say a word,” her eyes are glassy as if fixed on some distant horizon. “She drove me to the woods. Walked me in deep. Sat me down and left me there.” If there is any complaint I have of the finale, it’s that I wanted more of Adora. I haven’t spent much time in these recaps paying attention to Chris Messina’s acting, but he has a tremendous moment when he comes in to rescue Camille. As the garish police lights flood into the home, he finds Camille crumpled on the floor. She can’t move, can barely speak. But the comfort he offers is short-lived. He sees her scars and he recoils. It’s as if the gravity of her mental illness is only coming into focus for him right at that moment. My heart broke for Camille. Soon, I was crying. The look he gives Camille and his paltry apology in the hospital exemplify one of my greatest fears: that my struggle with mental illness and the scars it has carved into my identity will define me so wholly, no one will be able to look beyond them. At least, Frank can. As he rushes to Camille’s side, putting a blanket over her, I felt thankful she has at least that genuine care to turn to, especially with Adora’s arrest marking the beginning of a difficult new chapter — one predicated on healing. Camille and Amma quickly reorient each other to life outside of Adora’s shadow, leading to a spritely, bright, and hopeful montage sequence of sisterly connection. We watch as Amma wishes her close friends and Alan goodbye. Camille makes room in her life in St. Louis for Amma, even granting her the bedroom. Amma becomes friends with their neighbor, Mae (Iyana Halley), gliding on roller skates in the narrow alley that leads to Camille’s apartment. This is the closest Sharp Objects comes to not quite a happily ever after, but something like it. The sequence ends when Amma visits Adora in prison. The final image of this former queen of Wind Gap is a jarring contradiction to the elegant, refined woman we’re used to seeing. It looks like she’s been drained of color entirely. She’s out of place in the orange jumpsuit. She doesn’t look like a killer, but a grieving mother aching to be by her daughter’s side. That’s the point though, isn’t it? That violence within women doesn’t take on the form we expect. It’s more mercurial, more difficult to pin down. But this rhythm of sisterly connection and new friendship sours. The first signs occur when Camille brings Amma and Mae over to Frank’s home for dinner. Amma seems annoyed by Mae mentioning that she wants to be a politician or a journalist, as if she’s trying to suck up to Camille. One afternoon, Mae’s mother comes over asking where her daughter is. Camille notes that they went off to hang out by the closed, local pool. Mae’s mother asks if she knows about the tiff they got into. Then there are a number of portents — the framed picture of Camille and Marian falling from the wall, the dollhouse bedspread that Mae helped make in the garbage. When Camille goes to replace it in the dollhouse, she finds something she wasn’t expecting that turns her carefully recreated new life on its head: teeth. There is a molar under the bed.<doc-sep>Warning: Spoilers for Sharp Objects episode 8, "Milk," ahead. All's well that ends terribly...for pretty much everyone in Wind Gap. The creepy finale of HBO's Sharp Objects takes a sharp turn from thriller to straight-up horror in the final stretch. The first 35 minutes of "Milk" is paced agonizingly slow—filled with many shots of Camille (Amy Adams) vomiting, Alan Crellin (Henry Czerny) looking regretful, and Adora (Patricia Clarkson) practically preening. To prevent further poisoning of Amma —and possibly to prove the extent of Adora's Munchausen by proxy—Camille feigned sickness, finally allowing her mother to poison her like she's always wanted. The aftermath of this decision could have easily played out in 15, but I'll give director Jean-Marc Vallée this: watching Camille drag her body from the bathtub to the stairs while salvation in the form of Detective Willis (Chris Messina) waited just downstairs, yet excruciatingly out of reach, made my heart pump a mile a minute. Miguel Sandoval Though he's initially turned away by the thoroughly complicit Alan, Willis returns with sirens and—somewhat inexplicably—Camille's editor Frank Curry (). While searching the house for evidence of poison, the cops also find the pliers used to rip out the teeth of Anne Nash and Natalie Keene. Adora is arrested for all crimes. In the end, we learn all of two things in part one of the Sharp Objects finale: John Keene (Taylor John Smith) definitely did not murder his sister and Camille is actually capable of selflessness. It's in the final 12 minutes when things really fester. While Adora awaits trial, Amma goes to live with Camille in St. Louis and all seems to have worked out for the best. After what must be a few months, Camille looks healthy for the first time and Amma seems to be thriving away from her toxic environment, making an adorable new roller-skating buddy and taking up sewing between visits with her mother in prison. In what could easily be the "where are they now" portion of the episode, meant to properly close out a one-off miniseries, there is an undercurrent of malice. At a dinner with Curry and Amma's new friend, Camille almost misses a fresh wound on the little girl's hand. Every moment onward I found myself thinking get her out of there. Sure enough, at a later date, the girl's mother arrives at Camille's apartment looking for her child. While Camille assures her she's still out at the park with Amma, the tension is palpable. The reporter finds a dollhouse blanket in the trash and heads to Amma's room to replace it. Inside the dollhouse she discovers a room full of teeth and a rug made of human hair. Amma—having returned home, friendless—finds Camille there and says, "don't tell mamma." Who knew an 'Angel of Death' and a 'Woman in White' could reside in the same messed up household? No one in Wind Gap, that's for sure. HBO I leave Sharp Objects with only one thought: this doesn't feel like the end. How will Camille handle this chilling discovery? What will become of Adora, now that she’s been proven innocent of the crimes against Natalie Keene and Anne Nash? But what I find most intriguing, and what I would surely tune into season 2 for, is the potential fallout and subsequent evolution of the small Missouri town. While there is only one book and HBO has announced there are no plans for a season two, actors Chris Messina, Elizabeth Perkins (Jackie), and Taylor John Smith are not ruling it out so fast. Maybe we shouldn't either. This content is imported from {embed-name}. You may be able to find the same content in another format, or you may be able to find more information, at their web site. Emily Tannenbaum Entertainment Editor Emily is the entertainment editor at Cosmopolitan, which is a nice way of saying she watches way too much TV and constantly wants to tell you about it. This content is created and maintained by a third party, and imported onto this page to help users provide their email addresses. You may be able to find more information about this and similar content at piano.io<doc-sep>When Adora’s Munchausen came to light, last week, the suggestion was that Amma used the same tricks on her mom. What wasn’t necessarily obvious was that she wasn’t manipulating Adora in order to run wild with her friends; she was getting dangerously trashed and committing murder in order to keep a stranglehold on her mother’s care and attention. When Adora shifted her attention from her own compliant daughter to two incorrigible girls, Ann and then Natalie, Amma reinvented herself as both the perfect challenge and the perfect victim. That must have been what she meant when she told Camille, “I get funny ideas sometimes.” It’s certainly why she was so broken up when Adora got arrested, and so emotional while visiting her in jail. Toward the end of Gillian Flynn’s book, which draws out its final twist for a bit longer than the show does, Camille meditates further on Amma’s motives. “You can come up with 4000 other guesses, of course, as to why Amma did it,” she muses. “In the end, the fact remains: Amma enjoyed hurting. I like violence, she’d shrieked at me.” Finally, Camille concludes, “I blame my mother. A child weaned on poison considers harm a comfort.” But after hearing Adora’s story about the abuse she suffered at the hands of her own mother, it seems safe to conclude that the blame reaches high into the branches of that particular family tree. It’s always the family. And in this case, that family consists of a mother who can only show her love through causing pain, a daughter who succumbed to that fatal care and a daughter who learned to leverage her mom’s cruelty and her dead sister’s passivity into a sick, self-serving form of sadomasochism. Throw into that mix a father who, like the typical Wind Gap man, has convinced himself that child care is his wife’s domain, and you have the makings of a Gothic horror story — which is exactly what “Sharp Objects” becomes in the finale, when Camille narrowly avoids becoming the second daughter to die from Adora’s twisted ministrations. Camille’s sacrifice, to save Amma and to find out once and for all whether Adora is poisoning her children, is heroic. It’s also the ultimate expression of the particular illness she acquired growing up in the Crellin household — and in Wind Gap, a town whose violent, sadomasochistic tendencies were shaped by Adora’s ancestors, the Calhouns. Instead of playing her mother’s game, by cutting into her own skin, Camille became both the attacker and the victim, both Adora and Marian. Unlike Amma, however, she only ever took out her aggression on herself. Camille certainly has more in common with her mother and sisters than she would like, and while she may not share any of Alan’s DNA, she does seem to share some of his denial. Fighting for her life on Adora’s ivory floor, she has a strange vision that I believe is a flashback: There she is on that same floor with Marian, as a kid. It’s a room she would have only been allowed to enter while she was ill and being cared for by Adora. And just before the vision ends, young Camille’s eyes widen. In that moment, I think Camille is remembering something she had blocked out. On some level, hasn’t she always suspected that her mother caused Marian’s death?<doc-sep>
Sharp Objects went out with a bang — and if you were reeling as the credits began to roll, it’s understandable if you didn’t stick around to watch them. But if you stopped too soon, you likely missed the show’s final surprise: a shocking mid-credits scene that revealed much more about the show’s central mystery than you might have suspected. Not only does the scene go into detail about how Natalie and Ann were killed, it undoes a few layers of mystery about how those murders were committed — and who actually did it. Turns out that if you thought everyone in Wind Gap was harboring some sort of secret, you were more right than you knew. Want to know more? Read on for details, but beware — spoilers abound, including screencaps from the credits scenes that may be disturbing to some, especially if you’re just checking out the show for the first time (it gets violent!). As anyone who’s watched all of Sharp Objects will understand, the town of Wind Gap is full of killers — or at least a few killers and a whole lot of people in the know. The season finale, “Milk,” positions two of them as the two main suspects in the murders at the center of the show — Camille’s mother Adora, who poisoned Camille’s younger sister years ago, and Camille’s half-sister Amma, who’s revealed in the final scene to have killed her former two best friends, Ann and Natalie — and who has very probably just killed again. As the finale concludes, Adora has been convicted for the two murders her daughter committed. We don’t know if Adora suspected her daughter and thus took the rap, but one thing we know about Amma is that she’s incredibly manipulative. Over the course of the series, we’ve seen how easily she manipulates Adora and Camille, as well as her fellow students at Wind Gap’s high school. Related Sharp Objects shows its teeth in a killer season finale But we don’t fully understand just how manipulative she is until the finale’s rolling credits abruptly shiver into a chilling montage. In a last nod to the show’s psychedelic editing, we get a brutally quick sequence of Amma murdering Ann, Natalie, and one other woman — her new friend Mae. But that’s not all. If you look close, you’ll see that Amma wasn’t working alone; she had help the whole time. It takes a village to murder a child Right from this first shot of Amma’s new friend Mae, we know that this poor girl’s in trouble. Look at those painted nails. Remember: John Keene, Natalie’s brother, told Camille that when Natalie was found dead, her nails had been painted — something she would never do herself. But we know who would. The next couple of cuts show Ann, who we know was found dead in a local Wind Gap pond, being strangled by a gleeful Amma as other hands hold her down. A couple of other shots let us see who her assistants are: Yep — it’s Amma’s two enigmatic rollerblading buddies, Kelsey and Jodes (played by real-life sisters Violet and April Brinson). They’ve been a constant background presence throughout the show, but though they’re slightly creepy in their own way, they’ve never stood out as particularly suspicious compared to Amma. There’s no doubt who our ringleader is. The next few shots intercut images of Ann and Natalie — including this straight-out-of-a-horror-film shot of Natalie being murdered on the floor of the Wheeler’s carriage house. (Remember, the Wheelers are closely linked to the murders: older sister Ashley is Natalie’s brother John’s girlfriend; younger sister Kelsey is Amma’s accomplice.) Significantly, though it’s clear Amma must have needed help to drag Natalie’s body all the way from the carriage house to the alley in the middle of town where Natalie was found — especially since she apparently left no blood trail — we don’t see whether Amma needed anyone else to help her commit the actual murder. Given that we know she’s most likely going solo when she kills Mae, it’s not a stretch to imagine her murdering Natalie by herself and then engaging her friends to help her clean up after the fact.