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Why Women Kill

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  • Alternate Character Interpretation: The show leaves it ambiguous whether Rita is out for vengeance or justice when she goes to confront Alma in the season 2 finale. By this point she has pulled a Heel–Face Turn, but the look on her face when Grace clues her in about Alma benefitting the most from her arrest definitely reeks of old, vengeful Rita. While she's ostensibly out for answers about Carlo's death and she's clearly distraught when Alma lets it slip that she killed Isabel too, Rita goes about exposing Alma the old, theatrical way, leaving it ambiguous whether her goal was to get real justice for Carlos' murder and clear Isabel's name, get revenge on Alma for ruining her life by exposing her in front of the garden club, or a combination of both. This in turn paints her death in a different light, either backsliding into her old Fatal Flaw and getting killed because of that, or a case of Redemption Equals Death while trying to do the right thing.
  • Crosses the Line Twice: Simone's comments as she calls an ambulance to save her suicidal husband.
    Simone: You think you can get out of this by dying?! Fuck you! I want to see you suffer in a one-bedroom apartment next to the airport, and you will not deny me that pleasure!
  • Crossover Ship: Following the release of the second season, a lot of fans took to shipping Rita with either Emma Swan or Robin Hood from Once Upon a Time due to Lana Parrilla's (who plays Rita) character there, Regina, being shipped with the two a lot, in fanon and canon respectively.
  • Easily Forgiven: April is infuriated when she realizes that her new friend "Sheila" was in fact the wife of the married man she's been having an affair with. However, she gets over it very quickly when she reads the love confession letter Mary wrote to bait her abusive husband into killing Rob, as it demonstrates Rob's serial infidelity. In the epilogue April and Beth Ann live together and raise April's daughter.
  • Heartwarming in Hindsight: The subplot around Joan and Grace's affair in season 2 has one when you realise that while Alma is fully ready to threaten her Only Friend Grace's loved ones to improve her life just a tiny bit, while Rita has known about this since at least episode 5 and never used it against either of them, even when she came to ask Joan for help and was denied while in desperate straits.
  • Jerkass Woobie:
    • In season 1, April teeters as she is willfully in a relationship with a married man. But she has her own aspirations outside of her affair, Hidden Depths and is ignorant of how awful Rob actually is.
    • By the end of season 2, Rita is this. Even the Jerkass part becomes a question since she's obviously taking steps to make amends and refrain from selfish acts from which she would have benefited.
  • Moment of Awesome: In Episode 3 of Season Two, Rita Castillo and her paramour Scooter are in a restaurant when Dee Fillcott, Scooter's secret lover, accidentally walks in on them:
    Rita: You cheated on me with that?!
    Dee: That's right. He screwed a fat girl. But unlike you, I didn't have to pay his rent to get his motor running!
  • Moral Event Horizon:
    • In Season 1, Rob Stanton had somewhat been in limbo of this territory throughout the season by having an affair with April, being sexist to Beth Ann, and doing pot but he fully enters this by gaslighting Beth Ann into believing she was responsible for their daughter's death when it was his secretary's fault, which he knew about.. The second Beth Ann learns this, she buys a gun and hatches a plot to kill him.
    • In Season 2, Alma Fillcot has already murdered masterminded the murder of Carlo, Isabella, and capitalized off Mrs Yost's death to get into a Garden Club. But she crosses it for definite when she plots to murder her (black) son-in-law, Vern, and frame Scooter, the biological father of Dee's baby, destroying Dee's life and happiness despite her pregnancy and her loyalty to her family.

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