Sometimes you just have to grin and bear it.
I saw the corpse's smile, and knew she'd done the same.
I saw the corpse's smile, and knew she'd done the same.
Anika, an aspiring writer, works as a painter as a part-time gig to pay her rent. As she writes hardboiled, detective novels, she is an intensely paranoid woman, which does not help her case when her latest client acts suspiciously around her.
Tropes featured in this episode:
- Action Girl: Anika proves herself capable with mace and a hammer she secretly brought to defend herself. It comes in handy when Patrick attempts to murder her, which she stops lethally.
- Ambiguously Brown: Anika is a woman of color, though her ethnicity is not stated. She was played by Canadian actress Sunita Prasad, who's of Indian ancestry.
- Black Comedy: Anika's projection of Holly reenacting the various methods Patrick might have used to kill her qualify, since it is Played for Laughs.
- Damsel out of Distress: In the end, Anika's forced to rescue herself when the police (who proved no help) leave and Patrick attacks her. She kills him with a hidden weapon.
- Failed a Spot Check: Neither the police nor Anika notice the photos of Patrick's previous victims that fall out of the framed picture which she tears down. He has to point them out to her later on the floor.
- Imaginary Friend: Anika's subconscious manifests as Patrick's late wife, Holly.
- Killing in Self-Defense: Anika uses a hidden weapon fatally on Patrick at the end when he tries to murder her.
- The Lost Lenore: Holly is ostensibly this for Patrick, since he still keeps the syringes used for her medication in the closet. Of course, it is revealed that he actually killed her, planting the syringes to cover up her murder.
- Mr. Imagination: Anika, justified since she is a fiction writer.
- Police Are Useless: The police are called to Patrick's apartment on a domestic disturbance, but they don't believe Anika's accusations that he's a murderer since there's no evidence and it looks like she attacked him unprovoked, which Patrick helps through gaslighting her. Once they leave, Patrick attempts to murder Anika, though she defends herself fatally.
- Properly Paranoid: Anika is suspicious of everything, at one point even imagining a random man murdering a woman in cold blood. When she gets to paint Patrick's apartment, she suspects that his wife did not die of cancer, but was murdered by him, and he is planning to get her too. Despite various false alarms, it turns out she's right. Patrick even says Anika really should have trusted her instincts (of course, he'd gaslighted her about it, which didn't help).
- Serial Killer: Patrick is revealed to have murdered not only his wife but at least five other women before. He tries to murder Anika too, but she defends herself lethally.
- Stalker with a Crush: Since Patrick turns out to be a killer after all, it means that he had indeed stalked Anika's social media profiles to know things that she never said to him (e.g., her being a vegetarian and teetotaler).
- Worthy Opponent: Patrick congratulates Anika for realizing his true homicidal nature and guessing he'd hidden evidence of his past murders in a picture (victim photos), calling her clever and that he likes women with this trait.
