1x08 Down and Dirty

A few points in the story are really starting to come together and people are showing their true colours. The more I watch the show the more impressed I have become with Nathan and Benny's acting. Of the 3 of them it's hard to know who to sympathise with, if any. The power dynamic between them and other cast members is finely played, Asher's attempts to stand up for Whit, the bullying that was foreshadowed early in the series, and the tension of Whit and Cara constantly being at odds with each other and having objectives that see them talking past each other in the most duplicitous ways.

When Whitney and Nathan argue early in the episode, Whitney goes off the deep end and Asher finally gets a glimpse of her that he is clearly disturbed by. The stress of everything coupled with her diminishing opinion of him seems to have created a situation where she finally cracked enough and sees him as so powerless and irrelevant, that she could just let loose on him. Stone's performance was a-grade disturbing, this show has caused me to see her in a whole new light as an actor but Fielder's performance and the show as a whole is also well measured so that Whitney makes sense and is totally believable.

In Episode 06 Abshir (Barkhad Abdi) was seen at Whitney's chiropractor but we didn't see how that turned out and he wasn't seen until this episode. At the end of his treatment I couldn't tell if he was just really relaxed or dead/seriously injured and yet it wasn't referred to in ep 7 (Nala was and she didn't seem like a child whose father had just died). Abshir suddenly reappeared in ep 8 asking about smoke alarms and with no mention of his experience at the chiro . Was that all a red herring or maybe just a tonal thing that was meant to drive the underlying tension of the show.