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Gavin and Olivia lure Jane and Henry farther into their web of fancy real estate and eeeeeeevil, first with super-expensive bottles of wine and then with inside info about city approvals for real estate, because as the doomed love affair of Leslie Knope and Mark Brendanawicz has taught us, there is no greater intrigue than the inner workings of the city planner's office.
The rickety Drake elevators didn't manage to polish off Louise Leonard, so she's recovering in the hospital, and whingeing sensibly about how expensive all their medical bills are going to be, because if there's one thing this show will be realistic about, it's not where the Drake might actually be located, but what kind of health insurance a freelance photographer and an unemployed playwright might have (answer: shitty!).
We meet a new resident of the Drake: seventh-floor spinster Danielle. She has some trouble meeting nice gentlemen who might be available for dinner, dancing and casual shagging, and Gavin obliges by introducing her to one of the blood-spatter guys from Law & Order: SVU. Unfortunately, he's married, and she stabs him to death, and it turns out Gavin has been using her as a one-woman hit squad for like sixty years, but she doesn't remember any of it. Ooooooooh. Creepy.
And Nona and Tony continue to be weird and antisocial. Who has money on those two being ghosts? Or poltergeists? That would explain what Dr. Dave has been up to since ER ended.
Want more? The full recap starts right below!on 666 Park Avenue: Henry and Jane arrived at the Drake, the residents of which seem to have really bad luck: Louise Leonard got assaulted by the elevator and John Barlow got sucked into his bedroom wall. And surely the devilish owner, Gavin Doran, has nothing to do with all the eerie goings-on!
We open with a Patsy Cline's rendition of "You Belong to Me," which is gorgeous but somehow menacing when it accompanies Terry O'Quinn glowering around the lobby of the Drake. Patsy Cline died in a plane crash, which I'm sure Gavin Doran was somehow responsible for. Gavin watches as Henry enters the building.
Upstairs, Tony is showing Jane an apartment whose tenant has abruptly moved out. She wonders why she wasn't told. Tony continues his passive-aggressive jerkery toward Jane, saying she's been there a week, so why would anyone tell her anything? Uh, because it's her job to know shit about the building? They enter apartment 8F, which is the apartment formerly known as John Barlow's, because he got sucked into the wall! Tony says all the boxes are being shipped to Las Vegas. Jane starts listing repairs that need doing and Tony excuses himself to meet a party planner downstairs. He leaves and Jane explores the Barlows' haunted bedroom. She hears something behind the wall and rips a bit at the amazingly ugly wallpaper, which nevertheless seems like a poor idea, JANE, and then eleventy bajillion birds come pouring out of the wall at her. DUDE, GROSS. The birds break a window and come pouring out of the apartment in a huge, pestilent cloud. From the penthouse, Gavin observes, creepily.
Jane comes down to Tony's desk and tells him about the birds in the wall of the Barlows' apartment. He's shouting at someone on the phone about the elevators. He gives her the name of the exterminator, still being all pissy and childish about how she's the new manager and he's not. Jane sees Nona and mentions the thief in the building, as well as her missing necklace. She says it's her grandmother's and irreplaceable. Nona says she'll keep an eye out for it, and tells her not to mess with the birds. I'm beginning to think Nona is an angry ghost, since no one ever seems to talk to her except Jane.
Hospital. Louise seems to be recovering from her elevator accident just fine. Brian says she can probably go home in a few days. She bitches about the bills that are stacking up because of her collapsed lung and concussion, which seems pretty logical considering she's a freelance photographer and Brian is an unemployed playwright. Just as Alexis, Louise's sexy new assistant (although how can she afford an assistant when she doesn't have any work?) shows up, Louise asks Brian to go find a nurse and get her some more Vicodin. Alexis hands Louise a bag of stuff from home, which makes Brian uncomfortable that she was in their apartment. He's obviously afraid she turned on his computer and found the unencrypted folder on the desktop labeled "Sneaky Perv Pictures of Alexis."
Jane and Henry's place. Henry comes home late and tells Jane about how the guy at the wine shop tried to sell him an $800 bottle of wine, but that he bought a $20 bottle of merlot instead. Which is what normal people do. Jane tells Henry about the birds, and correctly references Tippi Hedren (did you know she almost got Melanie Griffith eaten by a lion? Yes! She did!). You can stay, Jane.
Jane and Henry get all fancied up for a Doran penthouse party. Olivia is wearing eight billion sparkles and looks like an award you get for setting a charity fund-raising record. Henry hands her the $20 merlot. She manages not to vomit while politely thanking him. Jane sends Henry off to the bar for vodka and waves at Gavin. Drink in hand, she introduces Henry to Danielle, who also assumes Jane and Henry are married. I can't quite figure out why they aren't. Is it just so everyone can make sideways remarks about what a catch Henry is? Because obviously Jane is just an illiterate cow who's lucky to have snagged him.
Henry gets sidetracked by a scale model of a building. Gavin explains it's a fancy-ass development on the West Side Highway that's in financial trouble, so Gavin can pick it up for a song: $100 million. He asks Henry to keep that little detail between them. Henry agrees and goes out on the gorgeous terrace to meet Jane. She asks him if he can believe the view. Henry says he could get used to it, because he's becoming corrupted by Gavin's eeeeevil. Jane, still mostly on the side of good, tells him to enjoy it now, because they turn back into poor, poverty-stricken pumpkins at midnight.
As Jane and Henry make out on the terrace, Danielle watches from inside. Gavin sidles up and asks Danielle if she's there with a date, but no, she's single and bitter. Although she does have a date tomorrow, so obviously she's going to sell her soul for a man. Gavin mentions a restaurant in the Flatiron she should go to, and says he'll call the maitre d' to set her up. "Never hurts to stack the deck," he says. They clink glasses and drink.
Jane and Henry's place. There's a trail of clothes to the bed, because these two just cannot stop fucking. (Although I cannot blame them.) Jane says she thinks she left some clothes in the dryer and that there's a thief in the building (they keep saying it exactly that way, over and over, like they're trying to speak it into existence. It's weird), so she goes down to the laundry room in her undercrackers. That doesn't seem smart, Jane. She sees a door where there wasn't a door just a day ago. DUDE. RUN AWAY. Instead she opens the door and walks into an apartment. She walks farther into the apartment, which is decorated in mid-century Mad Men chic, while "I Only Have Eyes for You," by the Flamingos, plays on the record player. And someone is dead on the floor in the bedroom. Abruptly, the corpse's head snaps up, looking straight at her, and Jane wakes up in her bed to Henry. But the clothes she went downstairs for are in the laundry basket to the bed.
The morning, Henry wakes up late. He's rushing around with his toothbrush in his mouth, looking for his black socks. He tells Jane he invited the Dorans to dinner the night, because it's not like they can afford to take them out. She's all freaked out about cooking for billionaires, which seems reasonable, because that calls for more than a stroganoff in the Crock-Pot, no? (Although the America's Test Kitchen recipe for beef stroganoff in the slow cooker is amazing and I highly recommend it. I would totally serve it to billionaires. Well... Midwestern ones, at least. Warren Buffett seems like he appreciates a good stroganoff.)
At the front desk, Tony is on the phone again with someone about the elevators. I guess people in fancy-ass buildings are more concerned about having to take the stairs than the possibility that the elevator will try to murder them. Jane asks Tony if he's heard about a murder taking place in the building. He's only heard of a few suicides and a bunch of accidents. That seems creepier, even in a ninety-year-old building with a couple hundred residents. The exterminator is here. He... looks like he works with bugs, all right. In the Barlows' apartment, Jane looks in the giant hole in the wall and finds more birds. The exterminator says it's the biggest nesting murmuration he's ever seen in a building. Apparently that's the collective noun for starlings. They're making my skin crawl. He patches the hole and says sure, he can kill them all.
Brian is typing away at his screenplay, spying on Alexis's apartment as he does. He pulls the curtains, resolving to be a good little nerd and someone knocks on his door. It's Jane and the exterminator. She asks if they can check his apartment for birds in the air shaft. She asks after Louise and he says she's feeling better, but bored. He notices the curtains he just closed are open again, so he can see Alexis parading around in her underthings and waving seductively at him. Jane and the exterminator leave and he snaps the curtains shut again.
Down in the laundry room, the exterminator is looking for access to the space in the walls where the starlings are nesting. Jane tells him that there was a door covered up and says she wants the exterminator to rip out the wall. That seems a notch above his pay grade, no?
Fancy restaurant. It looks like Danielle has been stood up and she's just paying the check when Gavin shows up. He asks to buy her a drink and she says she wants to go home. Gavin says his companion was hoping to meet Danielle. He points at him and he's a cute man without food on his face or an obvious predilection for making necklaces out of women's ears, so obviously Danielle will sell her soul to nab this guy. He asks her to join them for a drink and she says, "One drink." Ah, it is never one drink. Gavin smiles as Danielle and Frank make small talk and plans for their children's private school.
Basement. The exterminator is pickaxing a wall. Nona sneaks up on him and asks what he's doing. She startles him, because she's creepy, this one. She says he's going to make the birds upset. She leaves him to his work and he goes back to hacking at the wall. In the elevator, she looks at a rabbit's foot -- the exterminator's, which she just stole. In a black-and-white flash, she maybe sees his death? Okay, so Nona isn't a ghost. She's a precog with her grandmother's stuffed corpse in her apartment.
Jane visits Louise in the hospital and brings her sandwiches, because no one can recover without carbs. Jane says they had the elevators inspected and all the safety mechanisms seem to be working, so she plans to ask Gavin about them. Louise hands over a lawyer's card and Jane asks if she's planning to sue Gavin. She says she has a real case, that she's lost a lot of work because of the accident. Jane excuses herself, saying she needs to get to the store and cook dinner. Come on, honey. FreshDirect.
Jane runs into Olivia and Danielle in the elevator. Danielle is buzzing because of her date. Jane brings groceries up to her apartment, and thinks she sees Nona in the hallway. Or maybe Nona is Olivia's dead daughter? There's an envelope in Jane's entryway, containing a newspaper article from 1956 about the murder of the guy she saw in her dream.
Henry gets home and Jane tells him about her dream and the dead guy. Henry says she's clairvoyant and asks if she's foreseeing he'll get fired. He explains that he knows Gavin's potential $100 million property is on contaminated land. Perhaps it's bigger news that a lot at Forty-Third and the West Side Highway is a toxic wasteland of arsenic and chromium? Henry says if Gavin closes the deal, he'll be screwed, presumably because they can't put a residential tower on a toxic dump? Jane tells Henry to tell Gavin, but if he leaks this information (why wouldn't Gavin get his own assessment of the land before buying?), he'll get fired and he and Jane will have to move back to Indiana. I knew it! Henry is a much cuter and less dour incarnation of Mark Brendanawicz!
Gavin and Olivia show up for dinner and bring the $800 bottle of wine, because of course they do. They are definitely not beef stroganoff billionaires.
Out on the street (and so help me, from the signs for Broadway and 278 I still can't figure out where he is) the exterminator is being stalked by birds. Pestilential monsters. He's talking back to them, because he's either drunk or crazy or both. The birds swarm and chase him into the street, where he gets hit by a cab.
The Leonards' apartment. Brian is showering, and the bathroom is steamed up. He gets out, wrapping a towel around his waist and wipes the steam off the mirror. Alexis appears in the bathroom door. She says he closed the curtains and she wanted to see him. She made a duplicate of the keys she gave back to Louise earlier, apparently. She's all, I know you've been watching me. He tells her to leave. She kisses him. He does not seem all that opposed to the kissing.
Jane and Henry's apartment. Olivia and Gavin compliment her pot roast, which her grandmother taught her to make, thinking that cooking a proper roast would catch her a proper husband. Gavin says, "Would've worked on me." Maybe that's what Danielle should do rather than skulking around bars like a sad old spinster! Olivia asks what their plans are and Gavin asks how long they've been together. Henry says five years and Jane says they're not in any rush to get married. Olivia says Jane shouldn't wait too long, because men like Henry get snatched up pretty quickly in the city, apparently ignoring the fact that just because he's not married doesn't mean he's single. Damn, lady.
Danielle and her man are on their date on the Brooklyn Promenade, because that's appropriate for where she lives. They're talking about how lousy their waiter was. But he seems nice (he's also one of the evidence techs from Law & Order: SVU and I think on Oz he got murdered by the neo-Nazis). They kiss, and then they are having sex back at her place. I love these New York TV wormholes that allow people to travel great distances in negative time.
Henry pours after-dinner coffee and says Jane discovered a murder at the Drake that happened in 1956. Gavin asks where she got the paper, and says it looks like an original. She lies that she got it at the library. The murdered man lived in 7G... which is where Danielle Tyler lives. In Danielle's apartment, she kisses her man in bed, sits up and puts a robe on.
Henry and Jane are talking in bed. She says she thinks the building is trying to tell her something. Henry is full of pot roast and expensive wine and just wants to sleep.
Danielle's man is putting his clothes back on and says he needs to get home. She asks him to stay, and he says his wife will kill him if he doesn't come home. Uh oh -- his wife? He tells Danielle, "You knew what the deal was," and points out that he didn't take off his wedding ring. (Liar. He wasn't wearing one in the scene at the restaurant where he first met Danielle. It's unclear in the later scene of their date if he's wearing one. Thanks, DVR!) Danielle insists that she looked for a ring and he repeats that he has to go.
Jane is dreaming again. She's in the laundry room, walking through the door, into 7G. She sees the dead guy again. The woman who stabbed him to death appears in the door, ice pick still in her hand. It's Danielle, in a really gorgeous late-'50s dinner dress. She says to the man on the floor, "I loved you so much." Jane wakes up in bed to Henry.
Danielle has killed her gentleman caller, stabbed him to death in the front hall. Gavin walks in her door. She asks him for help. He says Frank Alpern got what he deserved, for trying to screw Gavin over and for cheating on his (Frank's) wife and misrepresenting himself to Danielle. Ah -- Alpern was the name of the development on the west side, the one on the toxic lot. Gavin says he doesn't blame Danielle for getting upset and Danielle says she didn't kill Frank. Gavin asks if she remembers Edward, her first love, the guy in 7G, who told her he loved another woman. There are flashes of Danielle killing Edward. Gavin mentions Carlos, who also betrayed Danielle. She shot him. Then there was Michael, whom she bludgeoned with a wine bottle. And Dominic, who also got stabbed. She says it's not true, then stands up and sees herself in the mirror and she's an old woman. Gavin embraces her as she cries and says he'll take care of the mess, that she'll feel like a brand-new woman in the morning. A sad, lonely, amnesiac woman who doesn't know why she can't find love and keeps getting her heart broken over and over again, but still young-looking, and that's what's important, obviously. So Gavin is using her (and Barlow before) as his hit squad to eliminate all his business rivals?
Y'ALL I AM SO EXCITED ABOUT NASHVILLE.
Gavin greets Tony in the lobby. Henry exits an elevator and Gavin tells him he's closed the deal on that building, although he doesn't know who'd want to live there, considering how toxic the ground is. Henry asks if Gavin is angry that Henry didn't tell him. Gavin says he's not and that he sold the property for a $20 million profit to a Chinese investor this morning. (So now that guy owns a toxic lot? I wonder what he'll do to the residents of his supernatural apartment building to get revenge on Gavin?) Olivia greets Gavin and observes that Henry passed his test, but that he's still a Boy Scout. Gavin insists Henry is going to be a hero.
Louise comes home and asks why all the curtains are drawn. Brian opens them, and of course Alexis is changing her bedsheets, in her underpants. Louise opens the mail, which is mostly bills, but also an apology from Gavin. And a $300,000 check from Gavin. I guess she won't be suing him, then.
At the front desk, Jane and Tony are looking for the exterminator, who has disappeared. Tony says he'll find another. Gavin tells them not to bother, but to block off the Barlows' apartment and let the birds be. That seems like a bad idea. He tells her to see to the mess in the basement. As she's heading down, Danielle gets off the elevator and Jane asks how her date was. Danielle says he canceled -- "His loss." She tells Jane to tell Henry she says hi. Jane's expression is all, I will not. Danielle says to Gavin that Jane is sweet, lucky to have found Henry. Gavin says finding love is worth the pain that comes before and Danielle says she thinks she's heard that before, because he told her at the restaurant the night she met Frank (or maybe at his penthouse party).
In the basement, Jane walks through the giant hole in the wall the exterminator had opened up. It's all bluish and ghostly. The door slams shut behind her and Jane screams in the dark.
time: Someone breaks into the Leonards' apartment while they're in bed. Henry and Gavin play racquetball, and Gavin asks Henry what he wants. Brian and Louise go clubbing with Alexis, which I anticipate ending in a very poorly thought-out three-way. And Jane is trapped in the basement with... something. Eek.
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