Murdaugh: Death In The Family Episode 2 starts by rewinding all the way back to March 1989. A young Alex Murdaugh (Christian Hopper) — dressed in Civil War-era gear (Confederate, of course), as are his three passengers — is driving drunk on the campus of the University of South Carolina. Alex asks his passengers how fast they think he can make it around the horseshoe. A police cruiser pulling up behind them just eggs him on: Alex screams around the horseshoe drive as everyone shrieks and lurches (do I even need to say there isn’t a fastened seatbelt in sight?), until he runs onto a lawn and tips partway down a ridge.
Smash cut to the re-enactors cuffed in the cruiser as the cop calls it in. Soon, the cop pulls Alex out. Alex seems to expect that the benefits of his connections are going to extend to his friends, but the cop only has instructions on Alex, who does have the option of standing “in solidarity with his countrymen.” But that’s not the Alex we already know: the car drives the other kids off to uncertain fates while Alex is left unscathed. Why might his son Paul, 30 years later, think he can escape any consequences of his actions? Because it’s a Murdaugh family tradition.
The timeline rolls forward to where we left off. Randolph and Alex are well into damage control, running through what favors they can call in and running interference between the kids and their parents. Randolph seems especially worried that the officer trying to take the kids’ statements is “Donnie Pritcher’s boy,” apparently not part of the Murdaughs’ web of friends.
While Alex is shaking off a hospital security guard to ignore a call and text from Maggie and pop more painkillers, Paul’s friend Morgan Doughty (Jessi Case) has had her lacerated hand bandaged and is giving her statement to Austin Pritcher (Karson Kern). She and Miley were huddled under a blanket in fear, so they didn’t see what was happening; Morgan can’t be sure whether Paul or Connor Cook (Nicholas Cirillo) was at the wheel when the boat hit the dock. She does recall Paul yelling that it was his boat, and “his fuckin’ river.” So far, so Murdaugh.
Before long, Alex and Randolph can assemble the kids and their parents to lay out the Murdaugh strategy. The kids all have their whole futures ahead of them, and they shouldn’t be ruined by one mistake; their parents sure made their share when they were young, “ain’t that right, Marty?” Alex pointedly adds to Anthony and Connor’s father (Jeff Benninghoffen). If the kids think they know who was driving the boat at the time of the crash, they had better be sure beyond a shadow of a doubt, because prison time could be on the table. When one dad volunteers to make up a story they can all stick to, Alex tells him they can just say nothing, and let Alex and Randoph handle everything.
By sunrise, Paul has been discharged to be fussed over by Maggie and Gloria. Alex announces that he’s going out to the site and ignores Maggie’s request that he get some rest. Once Maggie’s settled Paul in bed, she asks Randolph how bad this could be for the family. Randolph doesn’t bother sugarcoating it: Paul could be charged with possession of alcohol by a minor, boating under the influence causing bodily injury, “maybe worse.” Maggie realizes Paul could really go to prison.
Amid the high emotions at the scene is Mandy Matney (Brittany Snow), Breaking News editor at The Island Packet (and, eventually, creator of the Murdaugh Murders Podcast, from which this show was adapted). Mandy’s not a local — we soon find out she came to the area from Kansas — so while she doesn’t know Alex on sight, she can tell from his manner that he’s an important figure in this story.
Online comments on the earliest reports confirm this when Mandy gets back to her desk: multiple posters angrily suggest that reporters investigate the Murdaughs. Her editor later tells her that if she’s going to antagonize the Murdaughs, she’s going to need real sources.
Back home, Paul has to use his iPad to text Morgan, since he lost his phone in the crash. Soon he gets a message from Buster, asking if he went “full Timmy” the previous night: there’s a social media post with video of the trip to the island, and even though it was taken before he was really off his face, it doesn’t look great.
Alex has just finished talking an associate into spotting him some money to cover Alex’s six figures’ worth of death when his personal injury client, Mr. Alvarez, comes in with his wife. Alex hard-sells them on setting up a structured settlement for his award in the court case. From context clues, it seems like we’re supposed to think this Forge Consulting company is crooked and that Alex himself stands to benefit from the Alvarezes taking this route (which they do) over a lump sum, but that is evidently a real company that’s still operating? Do a little research if they’re managing your structured settlement, Hulu seems to advise!
After forbidding Paul from joining the search, Alex hears from Randolph that their friend Duffie, the solicitor, has recused himself from the investigation due to his ties to the family. This is a blow, since the Murdaughs were counting on him to “help” them on this. Will they find Mallory at all, Alex wonders? “A criminal case would be a lot harder to make if they don’t,” says Randolph.
Paul, whose truck won’t start and still has a branch in its wheel well, wheedles Gloria into lending him her car to go see Morgan, who won’t answer his texts. He quickly starts doing his own spin: he wanted to go to the search but his family wouldn’t let him. Morgan sarcastically comments on him actually listening to what people tell him to do all of a sudden. He doesn’t get it, so she tells him everyone was yelling at him to slow down — everything that’s happened was Paul’s fault. She orders Paul to leave her alone — for real this time…
…and then brings her father Bill (Anthony Reynolds) to meet Mandy in a coffee shop and show her the video Buster sent Paul earlier. When Mandy asks Morgan to share the video with her, Morgan is surprised that Mandy isn’t scared to run afoul of the Murdaughs. Mandy assumes they told Morgan not to talk to her, and she doesn’t want to cause Morgan more stress; she promises Morgan they won’t stop until they do right by Mallory. Bill stops the meeting there, warning Mandy that the Murdaughs are powerful and she should be careful.
Right now, the main Murdaugh is melting down because he can’t find his pills. Maggie walks in on him in a sour mood and decides she’s listened to him long enough, grabbing Paul to volunteer with the search…
…too late: Renee is already sobbing when they arrive, Mallory’s body having been found five miles out. Paul’s friends all turn on him as soon as they see him, and he rushes back to Maggie’s SUV, kicking the dash and punching himself in the head until she stops him.
Back home, Maggie confesses to Alex how grateful she was that Paul wasn’t the one who died. She feels awful, but not so awful that she wants the culprit in Mallory’s death to face justice, ordering Alex to make this go away: “My son cannot go to prison.” When Alex promises he won’t, Maggie says she doesn’t believe him, and finally confronts him about his pills. Alex’s knee flared up on him again, he claims, and he knew he should have gone to the doctor. Instead he put a gallon bag of pills under their bed, she shoots back, and claims when he asks that she flushed them. He panics, but the fight just glides on to his infidelity and what else he might be hiding from Maggie. After they yell at, over, and through each other, she disappears, returning with just two pills: “After we get through this, never again.” He swears he won’t, and she cries into his chest, asking HIM to forgive HER.
Apparently steadied from the pills, Alex goes to the Cook house. Connor can’t answer Alex when he addresses him, since Connor broke his jaw in the accident. When Connor’s father Martycomes out, Alex asks if Connor knows that, the day after Alex and Marty were on the state championship-winning football team, Marty got arrested for beating his ex’s new boyfriend badly enough to miss a whole semester of school. Marty sends Connor inside, and Alex says he was just reminding him how Alex and Randolph got Marty out of that trouble. Marty figures out Alex is talking around ordering Marty to make Connor take the fall for the crash. He knows he still owes Randolph, but begs Alex to spare his son. Alex is unmoved…
…and feeling himself enough the next day to go shooting wild turkey with Paul, telling him not to worry about what’s going to happen to Connor: “It was him or you, all right? Him. Or you.”
But his great mood is short-lived: when he returns to the house, Maggie and Randolph have to show him he’s front-page news on The Island Packet.
Television Without Pity, Fametracker, and Previously.TV co-founder Tara Ariano has had bylines in The New York Times Magazine, Vanity Fair, Vulture, Slate, Salon, Mel Magazine, Collider, and The Awl, among others. She co-hosts the podcasts Extra Hot Great, Again With This (a compulsively detailed episode-by-episode breakdown of Beverly Hills, 90210 and Melrose Place), Listen To Sassy, and The Sweet Smell Of Succession. She’s also the co-author, with Sarah D. Bunting, of A Very Special 90210 Book: 93 Absolutely Essential Episodes From TV’s Most Notorious Zip Code (Abrams 2020). She lives in Austin.