Directed by Chris Fisher
Written by Erica Shelton
After finding a station wagon containing her bones in the lake, the team investigate the 1999 disappearance of Marlene Bradford, a single mother of two daughters who were left homeless after her husband died from cancer.
Tropes:
- Birth-Death Juxtaposition: Marlene uses her lottery winnings to buy a cake for her daughter's birthday. Hopper destroys it while searching for the money he thinks she's hiding and shoots her when he refuses to believe that she isn't.
- Cassandra Truth: Marlene's killer shot her because he didn't believe she won only $25 instead of a whole million from the lottery ticket he'd given her.
- Chekhov's Gun: The gun that Marlene is given for protection is what Hopper uses to kill her.
- Crazy Homeless Person: Vincent Hopper, who has lost track of time since becoming homeless and thinks his son is still in his pre-teens. He dives off the deep end when he thinks Marlene is cheating him and shoots her out of desperation to get the half a million dollars he thinks she is hoarding.
- Deliberately Monochrome: The flashbacks to 1999 are in black-and-white. Though unlike most instances on the show, when Marlene's ghost appears at the end of the episode, she is shown in full color, like in the present day.
- Disappeared Dad: Abby and Natalie’s dad died of cancer.
- Fallen-on-Hard-Times Job: Marlene's former boss Anil used to own his own grocery store until he was shut down for hiring illegal immigrants. He now works at a restaurant called Zinger's. His uniform gets mocked by the police.
- Little "No": Isaac Keller delivers a shocked and desperate one when Jeffries confronts him in the knowledge that he killed his wife and is about to take revenge.
- Lives in a Van: What happened to Marlene and her daughters after her husband dies and they lose their house.
- Missing White Woman Syndrome: Played With. Marlene’s disappearance went un-investigated for over seven years, and many assumed she just took off. Then again, she was homeless at the time.
- No Good Deed Goes Unpunished: Marlene splits the winnings from the lottery ticket Hopper gave her because it's the right thing to do. Unfortunately, Hopper flies into a rage because he refuses to believe that she didn't win a million and is hiding his rightful share of $500,000, prompting him to kill her in a rage.
- Pet the Dog: Save for the slimy tow truck manager, various people in the episode sympathize with the Bradford family's plight. Even her boss, who threatened to fire her for parking her car in the customer's parking lot, not only backs off from giving her a hard time when realizing she's homeless, but gives her a gun for protection and is later seen helping another homeless family.
- Riches to Rags:
- Marlene and her daughters, Abby and Natalie, were once in a middle-class family in Suburbia, but a combination of the loss of financial stability due to the patriarch of the family, who was the sole breadwinner at the time, suffering and dying of cancer, and the immense cost for cancer treatments, wiped out the family's savings and left the surviving members homeless.
- Downplayed with Marlene's former boss at the convenience store. While he doesn't live hand-to-mouth like she and her family did, he's now living paycheck to paycheck working at a sandwich shop, as his store was ran out of business by a similar chain store.
- Trauma Conga Line: Marlene and her children wind up homeless due to her husband— the sole breadwinner—becoming struck with cancer and eventually dying, with their savings being wiped out by his medical bills. Her being a lifelong Housewife (and not being completely grounded in reality) has left them in their dire state and forced her into humbling, even humiliating situations, including working in a convenience store, washing her children in a public restroom and, most disturbingly, implied to have had sex with a sleazy tow truck manager to get their car back.
- Vigilante Execution: Averted; an angry and vengeful Jeffries corners Isaac Keller and is about to kill him, but reveals in his conversation with Stillman that he ended up stopping himself and forgiving him.
- You Should Have Died Instead: In an argument, Natalie says she wishes Marlene died instead of her dad, prompting Marlene to slap her.
