J Paul Johnson
The following recap contains spoilers for Cape Fear Episode 9, “Scar” (written by Diana Pawell and Peter Blake and directed by Amanda Marsalis).
As last week’s Episode 8 of showrunnner Nick Antosca’s new Cape Fear series concluded, Anna Bowden (Amy Adams) was more determined than ever to find answers. Her ally Ray (Jamie Hector) was found dismembered in the family’s pool. Every member of her family—husband Tom (Patrick Wilson), daughter Natalie (Lily Collias), and son Zack (Joe Anders)—was in custody: Tom at Tarwater, having been arrested for Ray’s death; Natalie at the Savannah Regional Detention Center for having shot Max Cady (Javier Bardem); and Zack involuntarily committed at a local psychiatric institution for his worsening dissociative disorder. As Max’s plot to dismantle Anna’s family seems to have succeeded on almost every front, Anna’s sobriety has been at risk, and with no help from her associates, her family, or from the law, it’s up to her to put a stop to the man who’s been plaguing her family ever since his release from prison.
Unfortunately, Episode 9, “Scar,” is one of those episodes that will do little more than delay Cape Fear‘s ultimate confrontation between Max Cady and Anna Bowden. Before that can happen, there are, as there have been in other recent odd-numbered episodes, no shortage of side quests, subplots, and secondary characters to visit before Max and Anna face off. To its credit, “Scar” does indeed settle a few matters, answer a few questions, and at its end provide a few moments of intense drama, even if it has all the hallmarks of an overlong series’s penultimate episode, doing more to delay than deliver.
“Scar” begins where the prior episode left off, with Anna driving at night to the location of the Galilee at Bluff’s Point on the Cape Fear River in her circa-2006 Hyundai Santa Fe (a vehicle it seems odd such a prominent lawyer living in a multimillion-dollar home would drive). There’s a sweet callout to another of Bernard Herrmann’s famous scores: Jeff Russo’s music here subtly echoes what Herrmann composed for scene of Janet Leigh’s late-night drive to the Bates Motel in Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho, as does the cinematography and editing, sans the infamous internal voices that plagued Leigh’s Marion Crane.
When Anna arrives, though, the Galilee is missing. She continues her search, finding the Cady home Max and Natalie visited in Episode 7, where she spies the awkward young man Luke (Max Mattern) who tends the dogs in their cages and who escorts her inside to meet Robert Cady (Ron Perlman), Max’s father: there he and Anna have an uneasy standoff before she leaves. While it’s more than plausible a search like Anna’s will yield some dead ends before paying off, every visit to the place where Max Cady grew up feels like just that: a narrative dead end.
Continuing her search, Anna stops at a local roadhouse. The barkeep, perturbed by her questioning, asks if Anna is a paying customer, and so Anna buys a whiskey, despite her having been sober for the entirety of the 17 years or so Max Cady had been imprisoned. Last episode, she took a sip; this time, it’s a full glass, and the next thing Anna knows, she’s waking up on the Galilee with Crystal, the gun she’d taken with her now nowhere to be found. Anna’s sobriety is little more than a plot point, not a fully integrated character trait; other than it leading to her capture, Anna’s alcoholism—or for that matter, her daughter Natalie’s worrisome propensity to drink heavily—is something this Cape Fear takes about as seriously as it does Amy Adams’s come-and-go, hither-and-yon Southern accent.
Forging an uneasy alliance over a morning beer, Anna learns Crystal’s full name—“Crystal Delilah Cady,” as reads her mail—and her version of the Max Cady story. According to Crystal, she’d been following and photographing him for her own protection: Max can make people do anything he wants, she says, just like he made Amy Brancato confess to the murder of Max’s wife Melissa and to kill herself. Crystal and Anna drive to the Brancato house, hoping to meet with the dead woman’s mother; there they don’t find her, but the scene where Amy committed suicide—even after what must be months now—is still completely intact, with blood spattered across the newspapered walls.
There, Anna finds a photo of Amy and Crystal together, and another of Amy and Melissa with a child with a long scar along his left side. Anna realizes Crystal is the “Lila” (Delilah) Max spoke of having loved, then turned on, back in Episode 6. Crystal tells Anna there are recordings, on a USB stick back at the boat, of the conversations Max used to have with Amy. That’s convenient, but in keeping with the series’s obsession with recorded and shared media. No conversation, no moment, is private; anything, anywhere, can be recorded, manipulated, and shared.
While Anna continues her investigation into Cady’s past, her family members remain incarcerated or committed. Tom gets a call, a brief one, from Zack, who continues to see visions of Adam, Max’s unborn teen son; Zack, we’ll learn later, will escape from his involuntary psychiatric care. Tom also gets a surprise visit from Max Cady himself, apparently released from the hospital after having been shot by Natalie.
Taunting Tom, Max promises him a gift: “I’m giving you the possibility to become the man your family needs.” Later, Tom finds in his cell a bedsheet fashioned into a noose, and then, a burner phone, on which Max calls him, urging Tom to commit suicide: do it, he says, and your children will be safe. Tom doesn’t, at least not now, and uses the phone to make a few quick calls before its battery dies—to his lawyer, to Anna’s boss Noa, and to his wife, who doesn’t answer.
The Bowdens’ daughter, Natalie, meanwhile, has her own host of challenges while in custody at the SRDC: she’s bullied by another inmate before being saved from being shivved by Nevaeh, who boasts “she’s mine.” What Natalie doesn’t know, at least not yet, is that Nevaeh is in contact with Max, using a hidden phone to communicate with him, and that Max is urging Nevaeh to kill Natalie: “I want her to feel the pain of losing a child,” Max says, promising he will get Nevaeh out of prison once she does the deed. If for a time the series played coy with the exact tenor of the relationship between Max and Nevaeh, it’s now clear that the girl has been operating very much at Max’s behest all along.
Natalie, though, spying Nevaeh’s hidden phone, hatches a plan of her own, one that seems to come more out of the plot of Wild Things than any prior version of Cape Fear. She accosts her nemesis, but instead of beating her she uses her apparent super-kissing power to subdue Nevaeh, and the two make out passionately like they had back in Episode 4. In their post-coital reverie (what kind of detention center is this, anyway?), Nevaeh reveals that Max had her drug Zack—and made him bite off his own toe, in what is frankly a totally bizarre instruction—but says she will not go through with Max’s directions to kill Natalie. Still, Nevaeh says, “I’m not turning on him.” What Nevaeh doesn’t know is that Natalie, somehow having bonked Nevaeh into a deep stupor after sex, has found Nevaeh’s phone and set it to record her every word.
There is, by the way, still absolutely no mention of the murder of Nevaeh’s mother, Faith Valentine, that occurred in Episode 5 and consumed nearly that entire episode. Anna found the body and seemed to implicate herself by touching the apparent murder weapon, a weird totem her son had had in his possession earlier, then decided not to call the police. While Anna would seem the prime suspect to the police, either Nevaeh, Max, or a drugged-out Zack might have committed the crime. But for all the attention paid to the character and her death then, the narrative has become completely disinterested in its aftermath since.
This episode is, however, nonetheless more interested in multiple other secondary characters, essentially keeping the Bowdens and Max Cady from each other as a final confrontation awaits. So, Max visits Noa (CCH Pounder) to ask Anna’s whereabouts. Having grown a pair, she says no. Somehow, then, Noa gets Natalie released from the detention center, though there is no mention of how this occurred, unless it had to do with the recording Natalie made of Nevaeh’s confessions, though how the wheels of justice could turn so quickly or why those would absolve her of having shot an unarmed Max in his own home, I can’t imagine.
Back on the Galilee, Anna confronts Crystal, having pieced together more clues. She asks if Crystal killed Melissa, Max’s then-wife. “She didn’t deserve that life,” says Crystal, not exactly denying the accusation. Anna takes this as a confirmation that it was indeed not Max but Crystal who killed Melissa and calls Max to tell him so. Crystal had a son, she says, and he’s out there somewhere—and that it was not the Bowdens who had Max imprisoned. It was Crystal, and the Bowdens deserve to be left alone.
As if the episode had not already spent time with characters who matter very little to the series’s main narrative arc, on cue Robert Cady and Luke show up at the Galilee, disarming Anna and throwing her in the hold, where she (incredibly and conveniently quickly) finds the USB stick and some insect spray she then uses to overwhelm Luke and free herself. In a wild fracas, Crystal stabs Anna in the hand and, as the wildly dysfunctional Cadys argue amongst themselves—Luke savagely beating Robert—Anna sees Max approaching and dives into the Cape Fear River to escape. Before she does, she spots a crucial detail: Luke is bearing the same scar she saw on the child in the picture.
Is he—Luke—Max’s son? Could it be that the Adam Max has grieved for 17 years has been alive, somehow, all along, living on Robert Cady’s land, without Max ever learning or even questioning who the boy is? Luke bears the scar that suggests it may be so. For Anna, the boy being Max’s and being still alive just might be enough to convince Max of the Bowdens’ innocence in Max’s having served 17 years in prison.
This episode, like a few others in showrunner Nick Antosca’s series, may sometimes be more fascinated with the secondary characters in Max Cady’s orbit than with Cady himself, but with one episode to go, and now Max arriving at the scene of the Galilee, hot on Anna’s trail, at least Cape Fear seems finally poised to deliver what fans of earlier versions have expected all along: a climactic showdown between the Bowden family and their nemesis, one of cinema’s great villains, Max Cady.
What happens in “Scar” has little connection to anything in the source novel or either earlier film adaptation. Not that that’s a bad thing, necessarily, in and of itself—adaptation is often a matter more of invention than mere translation. But does anyone really care about a bunch of crazy Cady folk bickering on the Galilee? Their conflicts seem like little more than narrative clutter, flotsam to be dispensed with before the story’s big bad arrives on the scene. At least at the episode’s conclusion, Max Cady is once again on the loose and hot on his prey’s trail.
With any luck, Episode 10—“The Executioners,” named for the 1957 John D. MacDonald book that became Cape Fear—will deliver the final showdown it’s promised all along. Will it take place on the Cape Fear River, the site of both film versions’ climaxes? Or perhaps like in the novel at the Bowden family’s home, already presented here as a labyrinth of hidden hallways and half-constructed rooms? Or someplace new altogether? (Just maybe, like Robert De Niro had in Martin Scorsese’s version, Max will strap himself with a belt to the chassis of the Bowdens’ family car to follow them, but the eight-inch ground clearance of Anna’s Santa Fe isn’t going to allow it.)
In any case, the best one can hope for is that this series’s conclusion can dispense quickly with its secondary characters, side quests, and subplots and let Javier Bardem’s Max Cady finally wreak his imposing physical menace on the Bowdens once and for all.
Cape Fear concludes with its 10th and final episode, “The Executioners,” Friday, July 31, 2026.
